and stayed there while he carefully removed his jacket, folded it, and placed it on the wooden seat behind him. Adam wouldn’t have done that. Adam would have shrugged out of his jacket in a jiffy and thrown it into a crumpled ball, leaving it wherever it fell. For some reason the neatly folded pale linen bothered me.
I became aware of other voices around us and looked round to see all three of the other rowing boats in our vicinity. Typical. Just as Nicholas started to roll up his sleeves, as well. How was I supposed to get my tingle going now, with all these onlookers?
‘Ahoy, there!’ Marcus yelled as his boat lurched in our direction.
I couldn’t see his face, as his back was to us, but Louisa was looking very beady-eyed indeed down at her end of the boat. It didn’t take much guessing to work out whose idea it had been to take a gentle row under the willows.
‘Watch out, Marcus!’
Adam, who was maybe twenty feet away in his boat, had stopped rowing and yelled out. It was too late, though. People like Marcus ought to have rear-view mirrors on their dinghies. He didn’t bother looking over his shoulder to see who was in his way; he just kept on rowing until he hit something.
And that something happened to be us. Our boat rocked and I had to grab onto the sides to stop myself from going head first into the murky green water. ‘Oi!’ I shouted, and then instantly regretted my obviously low-class outburst. I clapped my hand over my mouth.
Marcus was conveniently deaf to any criticism, though. ‘Listen here, Nick,’ he said, grabbing the edge of our boat with his puffy fingers. ‘My iffy shoulder is playing me up, and Louisa here is refusing to take the oars.’
I wasn’t surprised. Marcus’s rugby days were obviously over. What might have once been lean, hard bulk was now looking a bit flabby and squidgy. He must have weighed a ton.
‘We’ll have to give up on this rowing nonsense,’ he added, looking none too crestfallen.
Izzi and Adam’s boat had drifted closer now, and she must have heard his dissent. ‘Rubbish, Marcus. Surely you can keep going?’
Marcus shook his head, then rubbed his right shoulder and moved his elbow backwards and forwards, as if that was supposed to prove a point of some kind. ‘We’ll have to swap around.’
‘But that means one of the girls will have to row, and that’s not really on, is it?’ Nicholas said.
We all sat and looked at each other, our three boats haphazardly parked about twenty feet from the shore.
‘I don’t know how,’ Louisa said, and did a good job of hiding a smile.
Nicholas looked across at his sister. ‘You do, Izz.’
Izzi let out a hard laugh. ‘In this get up?’ she said, indicating the stiff black dress. ‘It’d rip in a second.’
She was right, as well. As Lady Southerby’s clothes were supposed to be old-fashioned even for the thirties, that particular piece had to be about ninety years old, made of crêpe de chine, and wouldn’t take much stress on its seams.
‘That’s okay,’ Adam piped up. ‘Coreen’s excellent at rowing. I’ve seen her myself. Strong as an ox.’
I very nearly stood up in the boat to call Adam out on that one! Apart from the fact he’d just compared me to a rather unattractive, hefty-looking farm animal in public, he knew I wanted to spend time with Nicholas. What on earth was he playing at?
I glared at him, but he just gave me that annoyingly serene smile he’d adopted in return.
Just then he was pretty lucky he was a couple of boat lengths away, because I would have wrung his neck if it hadn’t meant immersing myself in a freezing cold lake.
Then I became aware that no one was talking, and five pairs of eyes were on me. Nicholas was regarding me carefully.
‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,’ he said, just as carefully.
I knew he was waiting for me to make a decision; I just didn’t know which way he wanted me to choose. I looked round at the other faces—Louisa’s triumphant smile, Izzi’s pleading eyes, Adam’s warm, brown gaze.
I shrugged and looked over at Marcus and Louisa’s boat. ‘All right, then. I’ll swap.’ If I swapped with Marcus I might not be with Nicholas, but I could make sure Louisa and I rowed to the other side of the lake and kept right out of his way.
Marcus and Nicholas worked to bring the boats side-by-side, but before I could argue Louisa nimbly stepped across from one boat to the other. ‘You’re such a star,’ she said thinly. ‘I don’t think any of us wanted to go back indoors just yet. It’s such a beautiful day.’ And then she bestowed a glowing smile on Nicholas, who, as luck would have it, didn’t smile back—he was looking at me instead.
‘Sure about this, Coreen?’
‘Yes,’ I said, spurred on by something I saw in his expression. I don’t know how, but I knew that he was impressed with me.
He gave me a brief nod, his expression warming further. ‘Hold the boat steady, then, Marcus.’
I stood up, for once stupidly glad about Constance’s sensible lace-ups, and prepared to plant one foot and then the other in Marcus’s boat. Slow and steady was the plan. When the first part was done, and I was straddling both boats as elegantly as I could, I took a few moments to steady myself, aware of the growing silence as they all watched me. Even Adam and Izzi, who had drifted closer, weren’t moving.
However, just as I lifted the second foot, and was balancing one-legged in the other boat, Marcus decided to ease his shoulder with another set of arm rotations. He missed me, but hit one of the oars, the end of which made jarring contact with Nicholas’s boat. It also acted as a lever, pushing the sterns of both boats away from each other in a swinging arc.
The jolt from the oar and the sideways motion of the boat meant only one thing—I went from having one foot planted securely in each boat to not having any feet planted anywhere at all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 7—As much as I hate to admit it, there is a time for fantasy and there is a time for looking facts (especially the numbers on the bathroom scales) in the face.
THE water that had seemed so perfect and tranquil? Well, it was cold and smelly and far from perfect. As the murky green water closed over my head I panicked. I’m not proud about that, but it was surprisingly cold, given the glorious summer we’d been having, and then something slimy touched my leg.
I hadn’t had time to think about closing my mouth before I’d fallen in, and lake water filled my mouth and nose. It was the same three-shades-dirtier-than-olive colour as the suit I was wearing and, believe me, the water tasted as good as the suit looked.
I flailed around, desperately
