Finding Home by Kate Field (read book .txt) 📗

stripped off the top half of his wet suit so that it dangled from his waist, and started drying himself. He was clearly a regular swimmer, as he had the typical physique of muscular shoulders and arms. Not that she was studying his physique. Not much. She turned away and met Dickens’s sceptical gaze.

‘I’m starving,’ Corin said, when they were both as dry as they could be, and Mim was snugly cocooned inside his coat. ‘How about lunch? My treat, before you become angsty about the cost.’

Angsty? Mim turned to object to that but was confronted by his bare chest and the words died on her tongue.

‘I don’t think we’re dressed for it,’ she said instead. Or dressed at all, in his case. She hoped he was going to put his shirt back on soon. She might have no interest in a relationship but she wasn’t blind. Who knew that all this had been hiding under the woolly jumpers?

‘Never mind that.’ At last he pulled on a T-shirt. ‘I know the perfect place.’

He set off along the promenade, then ducked left up a narrow street. There was a fish and chip takeaway on the corner, with a small queue outside. Mim’s mouth watered at the delicious smell wafting out of the door.

‘The best fish and chips in town,’ Corin said. ‘Will this do?’

She nodded and he left her with Dickens and their bags as he joined the queue. A couple of women near the front gave him an appreciative glance as he passed. Mim studied him curiously. How did she reconcile this half-dressed man queuing at the chippy with the dinner-suited version drinking Champagne and rubbing shoulders with the well-to-do at the Valentine dinner? This man here could pass as part of her world; the other one was miles outside it. She had no idea who the real Corin Howard was at all.

They took their steaming parcels of food back to the sea front and sat on the edge of the promenade, dangling their feet towards the beach. Corin hadn’t exaggerated about the food. Fish and chips had never tasted so good.

‘The caravan trial seems to have gone well this weekend,’ he said, when they had satisfied the initial pangs of hunger. ‘Everything ran like clockwork as far as I can tell. I’ve never seen Lia apply so much effort. I suspect that’s partly down to you.’

‘Hardly at all. You shouldn’t underestimate her. Anyway, we’ll find out the verdict later. I left a feedback form in the caravan.’

Corin waved at someone down on the beach.

‘How come you were treated with such delight when you turned up this morning?’ Mim asked. ‘You’ve lived away for a while, haven’t you? How long were you gone for?’

‘Almost nine years,’ he said, spearing a chip with his plastic fork.

‘Nine years? Wow.’ She hadn’t expected that. ‘That was quite a holiday.’

‘I wasn’t on holiday.’ He looked puzzled. ‘It was my job. I spent a few years working for conservation charities in Peru and Ecuador, and then moved to Africa to work on humanitarian projects. Who said it was a holiday?’

No one had, Mim realised, thinking back. She’d assumed it, because he was rich and had a posh accent and presumably didn’t need to work for a living like normal people. She really must stop making these assumptions. She hated it when people judged her for her background, so how could she justify doing it to him?

‘But to be away for nine years?’ Mim said. ‘I don’t know how you could bear to be away from your family for so long.’

‘Really?’ He smiled. ‘You have met them, haven’t you? The talkative, interfering bunch that live in the big house?’

‘That’s not fair. I know you must have done amazing things in Africa, but if I had a family like yours – a loving, supportive family – I can’t imagine anything would be powerful enough to make me leave them.’

Corin balled up his empty food wrapper and stared out to sea.

‘Perhaps you can have too much of a good thing,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve had it hanging over me for my whole life that I’m Bill and Bea’s son – the number one – the son and heir. I studied the subject I loved but when I finished my PhD, I was expected to start work in the family business. I was twenty-six and my whole future was mapped out, from taking over the business from Dad to passing it to my own child one day. I wasn’t ready.’ He rubbed Dickens’s head. ‘On an impulse, I took three months out to volunteer on a sustainable farming project in the Amazon rainforest. It changed everything. I could make a difference. I didn’t come home after the three months because out there I could achieve something on my own merits, and not have it handed to me on a plate.’

Mim put down her chip wrapper and picked up the cup of tea that Corin had also bought. It was lukewarm now but she still gulped it down. She didn’t know how to react to what he’d told her. He hadn’t opened up like this before, and it touched her that he’d chosen to do it now. It was a step forward in their friendship and that meant a lot. But she could never understand his frustration. Family would always have come first for her, whatever her own wishes.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said eventually. ‘Most people would be glad to have a solid future handed to them on a plate. You wouldn’t find someone with my background complaining about it.’

‘Even if that future isn’t the one you want?’ he asked softly.

‘Only the obscenely rich think they’re entitled to get what they want. The rest of us make do with whatever we’re given.’

‘Do you disapprove of me so much?’ There was no trace of Corin’s smile now. The breeze teased the hair round his face as it dried and he frowned as he looked at Mim. ‘None of us choose our