Life's a Beach and Then... (The Liberty Sands Trilogy Book 1) by Julia Roberts

of his and his wife’s
romantic dinner for two, but in a way Holly was pleased as now she could sit
back, relax and enjoy her own dinner.
    A different noise attracted her attention. This time it was
the sound of the almost silent golf buggy steering along the path with another
room service dinner delivery. It stopped outside Robert and Rosemary’s room.
The waiter knocked on their door and moments later Robert appeared and took the
laden tray from the waiter, rather than letting him take it into their room.
    ‘Great minds think alike,’ Holly said to herself, with a
smile.

 
    Chapter 20
     
     
    It was Robert who had suggested dining in their room that
evening. His wife looked exhausted after they had spent the day in Port Louis,
the capital of Mauritius. Every trip they made to this island paradise they
always went to Port Louis at least once and had lunch or dinner in the small
restaurant where they had first met almost twenty years ago.
    Meeting Rosemary had been the most amazing piece of good
fortune. He had only returned to Mauritius to check on the progress of the
building work at the Plantation House hotel the day before they met. After the
initial construction period, he didn’t usually return to the site of a build
until the project was finished and required his final seal of approval, but
there had been a problem on site which the foreman feared could prevent them
from making the contracted completion date. It could have cost the company he
worked for several hundreds of thousands of pounds in fines so he was
immediately dispatched to sort it out.
    Fortunately it transpired that someone had missed off a zero
when writing down the calculations of a load-bearing wall, so there was no
problem to sort out after all. As a thank you for dropping everything on his
latest project in Hong Kong to fly to Mauritius, his company had told him to
take a few days’ holiday, all expenses paid. Not usually known for their
generosity, this was too good an opportunity to miss.
    He had walked into the Chez André restaurant intending only
to have a glass of fruity new season Beaujolais with the owner, a friend he had
made during the six months he had lived there. He was sitting at the bar
looking at his own image in the mirror behind the spirit optics when a
beautiful tall blonde woman appeared behind him in the reflection. She glanced
around as though she was looking for someone and, on finding the place almost
empty, seemed about to leave, when Robert did something completely out of
character.
    He swung round on his bar stool and said, ‘No one here but
me I’m afraid. Would you care to join me in a glass of red while you’re waiting
for your friends, or maybe it’s just a friend, to arrive?’ For a moment Robert
thought he’d blown it as the slender blonde hesitated, so he quickly added, ‘On
the house of course, the owner’s a friend of mine.’
    Even to Robert’s ears it had sounded crass so he was amazed
when a slow smile spread across her face and she said, ‘Just one then and if my
friends are still a no show I’m heading back to the ship.’
    That had been at 7 p.m. and it was midnight when Robert
finally said goodbye to Rosemary at the gangplank of the SS Venus ,
having shared two bottles of wine, an exceptionally tasty coq au vin and an
abridged version of each other’s life story.
    Robert knew he had met the woman he wanted to be with for
the rest of his life and he had the feeling that she felt the same way.
    During the course of the evening it emerged that their paths
had crossed some fifteen years earlier at an engagement party in Clapham, south
London. Robert had asked Rosemary what she did for a living and when she had
said she was a dancer he had commented that he only knew one other dancer, his
best friend’s sister, Melody.
    Rosemary had paused mid sip.
    ‘What’s her last name?’ she asked.
    ‘Well she’s been married for fourteen years so she’s Melody
Brown now, but she was Melody