Someone Like You by Cathy Kelly

lifted from her. Before, she’d avoided eye contact like the plague. Now, she looked around, spotted Leonie and gave a half-smile that seemed almost apologetic.
    Leonie, naturally friendly, smiled back and immediately regretted it. What if the woman and her awful family decided to sit with her and Hannah during dinner? Or attach themselves to them for the entire cruise? What a terrifying thought. Hannah was mad to think about it.
    Wishing she didn’t feel such a bitch, Leonie wiped the smile from her face just as abruptly and went back to studying the Nile as if she was about to sit an exam on What Sort of Objects You Might Find Floating By on a Summer’s Evening.
    ‘You look as if someone just pinched your bottom,’
    remarked Hannah, sitting in the chair opposite and placing a glass of orange juice on the table. ‘Or is it because they haven’t pinched your bottom you look so glum?’ In loose white drawstring trousers and a simple caramel fitted T-shirt, she looked classy and comfortable at the same time.
    Leonie immediately felt overdressed in her floating pink silk.
    ‘I’m avoiding looking at yer woman in case Ma and Pa Walton decide to join us,’ Leonie explained in a whisper.
    ‘She smiled at me when she came in and I’m terrified of starting up a friendship I won’t be able to shake off. I can’t stand people like her father. I never lose my temper except with people like him and then I’m like a bomb, I just explode.’
    ‘I’d love to see you explode at him. Anyway, the poor girl’s lonely,’ Hannah insisted.
    ‘I collect enough lame dogs at home without collecting a few rabid ones abroad,’ Leonie groaned, knowing that Hannah was right. The poor girl was lonely and it wasn’t fair to ostracize her just because of the people she was travelling with.
    They both sneaked casual glances at the woman, who had positioned herself at a table just outside the bar and was trying to take something from her handbag without anyone noticing. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, Hannah decided, and she looked thoroughly miserable, like a cat that had been locked out in the rain. The girl had a long face, Leonie was right about that. But having long straight hair trailing down her face didn’t help. Hannah suspected that some unkind person had once told her that wearing your fringe low detracted from a large nose. Probably that obnoxious father of hers. Hannah bet that if the girl smiled or if she wore something less colourless than that hideously old-fashioned cream thing, she’d be pretty in an understated way.
    ‘Let’s ask her over for a drink,’ she said now. ‘We’re asking her, not Ma and Pa as well,’ she added. After all, she thought silently, if she was befriending one lonely soul on this holiday where she’d planned for total solitude, she may as well befriend another. ‘I promise you, Leonie, if her father wants to sit with us and they drive us mad, I’ll get rid of them!’
    Leonie laughed. ‘If he annoys me, don’t worry, I’ll do the honours.’
    Hannah walked gracefully over to the other girl’s table, Leonie watching her new friend enviously. Hannah was so slim and God! so sexy. Leonie would have given five years of her life to look like Hannah for just one night.
    ‘Hello, I’m Hannah Campbell. Since you’re on your own, would you like to have a drink with us?’
    The girl’s face creased into a pleased smile.
    Hannah loved being right: the girl was pretty when she smiled. She had a sweet, shy smile and her eyes were a lovely smoky blue colour fringed with fair lashes. If only she’d do something with that hair.
    ‘I’d love to,’ Emma said in her hesitant, throaty voice.
    ‘I always feel so self-conscious sitting on my own with a drink. I’m Emma, by the way. Emma Sheridan.’
    Carrying her drink, she followed Hannah over to the table and held her hand out to Leonie.
    ‘Emma Sheridan,’ she said formally.
    Leonie grinned. ‘Leonie Delaney,’ she