Life's a Beach and Then... (The Liberty Sands Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

herself.
    Why can’t I accept that he left me because he didn’t love me
as much as I loved him? she thought. Why can’t I just let it go?
    It was barely light outside, but there was already some
activity in the hotel gardens. The ground staff were raking the sandy paths and
collecting fallen coconuts. The Italian restaurant to her right didn’t serve
breakfast so the shutters were firmly closed, but she could hear the sounds of
cutlery being laid on the tables of the main restaurant, even though the
breakfast service didn’t start for almost an hour.
    An hour, thought Holly, wondering how best to fill the time.
Shall I work or walk?
    Moments later the decision was made. She threw on a pair of
frayed denim shorts over a bikini, twisted her unruly dark curls under her red
Yankees baseball cap, slipped her feet into her Havaianas and headed for the
beach.
    It was deserted. No one had yet appeared to reserve their
sunbeds with brightly coloured beach towels and it was a bit too early for most
people to take a pre-breakfast stroll.
    Flip-flops in hand she stood at the water’s edge, with the
shallow rippling waves caressing her toes and looked out to the reef. The sound
of the waves crashing against it created a constant background roar which was
comforting and very different from the rumble of traffic she was used to at
home. She began to walk in the direction of Flic en Flac, carefully avoiding
the pieces of coral that had been carried in by the tide.
    Holly had always loved the feel of sand beneath her feet and
the smell of the ocean, which was quite odd as she had grown up in Clifton, a
suburb of Nottingham, one of the most inland cities in England. There hadn’t
been any exotic holidays throughout her childhood, not even a package holiday
to the Spanish costas, but she could still recall the thrill of racing her dad
down the long expanse of beach at Skegness into the chilly waters of the North
Sea. They weren’t joking on the sign that welcomed you to the little seaside
town that announced, ‘Skegness Is So Bracing’!
    That was one word for it, Holly thought, but at least she
had been able to enjoy a week’s holiday away from home each year at the caravan
park in Ingoldmells, something she hadn’t been able to provide for her own son,
Harry. He had made do with pitching a tent in their pocket handkerchief-sized
garden when the weather allowed.
    A different sound cut through the background rumble of the
waves on the reef. Holly couldn’t place it at first but it seemed to be getting
louder. She raised her chin to look up from under the peak of her baseball cap
but couldn’t see anything, other than the groundsmen from the various hotels
that fringed the beach raking up the needles that had fallen from the filaos
trees and burying them into the holes that they had dug.
    The sound, she now realised, was coming from behind her and
it was horse’s hooves approaching at a gallop. She turned to see a blond man,
stripped to the waist, astride a big black horse less than a hundred yards
away. He galloped past, and a vision of Brad Pitt in the movie Troy flashed into her mind. The expression on the man’s
face was totally focused, almost trance-like, and she doubted that he had even
noticed her as he passed by, but she had certainly noticed him, tanned and
handsome in a rugged way, and not dissimilar to Gareth. She felt flustered as
she stood watching the horse and rider retreating into the distance, realising
that she had almost called out ‘Gareth’, had the sound not been strangled in
her throat.
    Moments later horse and rider had rounded the headland and
if it wasn’t for the hoof marks carved into the sand Holly might have believed
him to be a mirage or a product of her imagination, the result of too much
alcohol and not enough sleep.
    It couldn’t be him, could it? she wondered, a tiny glimmer
of hope rising in her as it had done hundreds of times over the years, only to
be quashed by her sensible side.