Lily Bennett's Bucket List by Katherine Dyson

Author:Katherine Dyson [Dyson, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008531980
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Chapter Nineteen

The following morning was no less hot, and Lydia was sweating in a variety of places she hadn’t even realised she had places as they climbed out of the baking heat of Jake’s car.

She’d been delighted when he first mentioned he’d bought a car, as she’d been the designated driver for as long as she’d known him. But her joy had turned to horror in an instant when Jake had pulled the damn thing up outside Aga’s house at 8.30am that morning.

Honestly, Lydia had not even been aware it was possible to buy cars that old. And yet apparently it was, and Jake was planning to drive them all the way to Saltburn-by-the-Sea in it.

He’d completely failed to mention until around fifteen minutes into their two-hour journey that the car’s blowers were permanently jammed on hot, right around the time that Lydia felt such an intense rush of heat in her chest that for a moment she feared she was prematurely menopausal.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he’d said, casually pushing his sunglasses up his nose. ‘I haven’t got round to having that fixed yet. Just keep a window open.’

‘Can’t you turn them off?’ she’d asked, wiping beads of sweat from the base of her neck.

‘You can,’ he’d replied, apologetic, ‘but once I do anything above 30mph, the hot air gets forced through anyway.’

Lydia had huffed. ‘Glad there’s not a heatwave or anything,’ she’d said, shooting him a look even though she didn’t actually think he was looking at her. It was difficult to tell behind those huge, ridiculous glasses. He looked like an extra from an 80s motorsports film.

Still, she had survived the journey, and once she’d peeled herself off the tacky faux-leather car seat and tumbled out onto the concrete, she was delighted to discover a fresh sea breeze taking the edge off the relentless burn of the summer sun. And then when she turned away from the car and walked out towards the cliff edge overlooking the bay below, the view just about took her breath away.

Emerald-green cliffs dropped sharply to a neat strip of sand, the green-blue expanse of sea beyond it broken up by a narrow pier that stretched out five hundred feet or more into the waves. The sky was as blue as she had ever seen it, with barely a scrap of cloud in the sky, and all of it came together at once to make Lydia’s heart swell.

‘Good, isn’t it,’ Jake said, appearing next to her in those ludicrous sunglasses. ‘Wait until you see the cliff lift.’ And then he handed over her rucksack as he shouldered his own, nodding towards the path he wanted her to take, straight along the road towards a quaint-looking red and white wooden shack in the near distance.

She watched him as they walked, subtly, from behind her own entirely reasonable sunglasses. There was something different about him today, a lightness, even more so than his usually sunny demeanour. The oven-like conditions in the car had made his sandy hair

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