Read Online A Child in Need by Marion Lennox - Free Book Online Page B

disturbed. As if she was probing where he didn’t want to be probed.
    â€˜It’s very simple,’ she said at last, falling in again beside them, but still with that disturbed look on her face. They’d left the single line of shops in the main street behind and were walking down the hill to where the boats were tied up in the harbour below. ‘One, Two, Three, Jump requires two adults and one child. We have all the prerequisites right here. Nick, take Harry’s hand.’
    â€˜But…’
    â€˜You quibble, we can’t play,’ she said direfully. ‘No quibbling. Take Harry’s hand.’
    There was nothing for it. Nick put his hand down and took Harry’s fingers in his. Harry looked high up into his face, and then stared intently at their linking—his tiny hand in Nick’s large one. Then, very slowly, Harry smiled. He turned and headed on down the hill between his two anchors, stumping gamely on his cast, heading into the wind. As if he’d just had a win of gargantuan proportions.
    â€˜Now we’re ready,’ Shanni announced, and if Nick thought he saw a glimmer of a tear on her eyelashes then surely he was imagining it. She swung Harry’s arm. ‘One…two…three…!’ And before he realised what he wasdoing, Nick was swinging Harry’s little body out before him.
    â€˜Jump!’
    The tiny boy flew high, held safely between them and, when Harry landed, the look on his face of absolute incredulity that anything like this could be happening to him made Nick falter.
    Damn, he might be sure there were tears on Shanni’s eyelashes, but what the heck was the lump doing in his throat?
    There was nothing for it now but to do it all over again. They One, Two, Three, Jumped all the way to the fish shop, and then Nick held the fish-and-chip parcel in one hand and Shanni carried the drinks in another so they could keep on One, Two, Three, Jumping all the way to the beach.
    And finally Nick found himself sitting on the sand by the sea, fish and chips spread out before him, and he had absolutely no idea in the world how he’d come to be there.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T O HIS surprise, they ate in silence.
    Nick was no longer sure what he expected of this girl, but silence surely wasn’t it. She’d chatted and laughed all the way to the beach, but now, sitting on the sand with Harry on her knee and a spread of fish and chips beside her, she had subsided into a silence that Nick found almost disconcerting.
    Not that he didn’t welcome it. He needed time to get his breath back.
    So he ate the fillets of fish that must surely have only been caught that morning, and he crunched on the golden chips and he absorbed the silence. It was peaceful. It was right, but it was…strange.
    As were the sensations. The sand was sun-warmed and soft, and the wind was blowing gently in across the rolling waves. The beach was pristine. There were no footsteps for miles—no one had been on this beach since high tide. The town was clustered round a horseshoe bay—the Bay Beach the town was named after—but Shanni had led them down the track to the back beach, which was the beach the tourists didn’t use. Miles wide, with golden sand stretching away into the distance, there were ancient Norfolk pines at its higher reaches casting sentinels of shade across the sand-hills. There was nothing else.
    They might as well be the first man and first woman and first child ever to sit on this beach, and, with the silence, it was weird.
    When had he last sat on a deserted beach like this?
    Never, he thought, and the knowledge was suddenlybleak. He was a child of the city, who’d never had parents to take him anywhere.
    He was like Harry.
    No!
    He wasn’t going to think like that, he decided harshly, because that was the way of attachment. That was what this girl wanted, he knew. This outing was planned with one thing in mind—to establish a