The Woman Who Dared to Dare

William Coles

Description

To woo a beautiful woman, you must first pretend she doesn’t exist.

Kim is a rookie reporter in the heart of the Cotswolds – learning his trade and desperate for love. But there’s only one woman he wants: the beautiful, ethereal, unobtainable Sasha.

Men throw themselves at Sasha. Every week, they’re buying her flowers and offering her Champagne – and if Kim would win her heart, then he must do something completely different.

After a year of cool courtship, and after the pair have nearly drowned, Kim makes his move, and they fall helplessly, hopelessly in love. Kim’s got everything he wants; Sasha has too.

For this love-struck couple, life doesn’t get any better. They’ve got everything going for them. And they’ve got everything to lose.

Sujets

• Contemporary romance

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783081943
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE WOMAN WHO DARED TO DARE
THE WOMAN WHO DARED TO DARE
William Coles
The Woman Who Dared To Dare
THAMES RIVER PRESS An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC) Another imprint of WPC is Anthem Press ( www.anthempress.com ) First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by THAMES RIVER PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road London SE1 8HA
www.thamesriverpress.com
© William Coles 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78308-206-3
This title is also available as an eBook .
To richard martin, my splendid friend on the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard – who egged me on to ever greater excesses until I’d finally notched up my first front-page apology.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like Kim, I also started my journalistic career as a trainee reporter on the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard in Cirencester; most of the events in this book actually happened.
I would very much like to thank you all those executives and reporters on the Wilts and Glos who took me in hand in the late 1980s. They include the various mad-masters who had the hellish task of dealing with not just me but my excruciating copy: my editor Anne Hayes, as well as Bill Charlton, Gerry Stribling, Katie Jarvis, Alison Fawcett, Ros Jess and Mick Gruenbeck. And then there were the reporters, forever spurring me on to some new devilment: Richard Martin, Jo Kearney, Sarah Singleton, Sarah Billington, Yvonne Goide, Yves Wray, Tom Flint and Tom Fremantle – and not forgetting the sports editor who happily scribbled away in the corner, John Renowden.
I should also mention my two friends who are still at the Wilts and Glos , Mike Weaver and the absolutely lovely Lyn Gillett. The paper is still hanging on in there in Dyer Street, Cirencester, and I am assured that – thankfully – it has not changed one little bit.
CHAPTER 1

There are two types of swimmer: those who live to follow the black lines in the pool, up and down and they go, length after mindnumbing length; and the wild swimmers who live for the sea and for the rivers, who thrive on the cold and the scrapes and the bruises.
And this, also, is how lovers are divided. Are you a creature of comfort who looks for love in the snug of your bedroom, between satin sheets and behind locked doors? Or are you a lover of all things wild and airy, with the stars high overhead as the wind stings at your skin?
I am a wild swimmer. And as for my love-making - well, we will come to that shortly. Though doubtless even now you can hazard what sort of lover it is that I am.
I had learned my swimming stroke in the outdoor pool at Cirencester, but I honed my swimming in the rivers of Gloucestershire, and in one river in particular: the Thames.
In Lechlade, near where the Thames rises, it is nothing but a small country river, but then, it swells and it grows until London where it is this wide, dirty brown streak.
I had swum the Thames many times in and around Gloucestershire – and, almost always, I had swum it with Sasha.
This time, on a whim, as a dare, we were swimming the Thames in London, and that is much, much more dangerous. It is not the distance that is the killer. We could swim 400 yards, easy. But there are tides in the Thames in London, and there are potholes, and around the bridges there are rippling down-surges, which can suck you to your death before you are even aware that they exist.
And there are other ways that the Thames in London can kill you; and those, also, we shall come to.
But the Thames is nevertheless the Thames, the most famous river in the British Isles, and so for all us wild swimmers, it is a challenge that has to be swum.
The gauntlet had only been thrown down that afternoon. It was spring 1990, a Saturday, and Sasha and I had been swimming in Lechlade. In those days, we didn’t even bother with wet-suits. I’d been watching her from the bank. In the water, swimming above the reeds, Sasha was like a sea-otter, lithe and supple. Like all the best swimmers, she was very slippery in the water. Some swimmers are thrashers, but Sasha was fluid; she hardly made a splash. Her body seemed to meld itself to the river, her long dark hair flowing free behind her.
“When are we going to swim the Thames properly?” I called down to her. I’d already got out because it was cold.
Sasha looked up out of the water, her wet head bobbing black beneath the bridge. She laughed and she smiled, her teeth this quite brilliant white against her black hair.
“Why not today?” she said. “I dare you.”
“Well, if it’s a dare.”
“It might be.”
And that is the beauty of being in your 20s, carefree, commitmentfree: you can do just about whatever you want.
She got out of the water. There were some tourists walking over Halfpenny Bridge, cameras bumping on their fat stomachs. They watched her. I watched her. Her hair fell long and sleek down the back of her neck. She patted it with a white towel. She was wearing a black swimsuit, a swimmer’s swimsuit. A swimsuit to show off her legs. They were very long, olive-skinned; she was half-British, half-Argentinean.
I had known her for a year. I found her very beautiful.
But I had yet to lay even a finger on her.
She towelled herself down. I admired her legs and her swimmer’s shoulders. She pulled on her white towelling robe, and then very discreetly and efficiently pulled on some khaki shorts. She then turned her back to me and pulled on a white T-shirt.
Putting her wet things into a bag, she slipped on some flipflops - and just like that, we were ready to go.
We decided to catch the train down to London. I drove us straight to Kemble station just outside Cirencester. In those days, I was driving a grey Mercedes. It was an old automatic with peppery white plastic seats.
Sasha sat next to me in the front. She eased her seat back as far as it would go, and then she reclined it even further. She kicked off her flip-flops and rested her bare feet on the glove compartment, so that her toes touched the windscreen.
I looked again at her legs. How could I not look at her legs? They were only a few inches from my face. I have always been the world’s most complete sucker for long legs. I would have liked to have kissed her legs. I would have liked to pull over into a layby, snatch a rug from the boot, and then lead her by the hand to the adjacent field, where, initially at least, I would have started to kiss her legs, my tongue trailing down the inside of her thigh and then just lingering behind her knee. That is a much under-rated erogenous zone, but a wonderful one for all that. Most of these hearty lovers, they go straight in for the kill, going, I don’t know, for those erogenous zones that we know so well. But if you have the time and the patience, then…
I digress.
For of course I did not kiss Sasha’s legs and nor did I even touch her.
That was not part of the plan.
For if you aspire to date a very beautiful woman, then you are going to have to do things very differently from all the other scores of swains who will be yapping at her bedroom door.
So while all the other young Turks were buying her flowers and champagne and whatever else it was that they thought might take her fancy, I was playing a quite different game.
I was in it for the long-haul.
And that meant that I would never - even once - touch her.
Or compliment her.
Or flirt with her.
The plan - and I had stuck to it rigidly - was that I would be the absolute antithesis of every other young buck in Cirencester; and there were quite a few of them, too. Rich young South Americans come over for the summer to play polo in the park; rich peers come to join Prince Charles’ various royal parties at nearby Highgrove; and, above all else, the rich young landowners come to Cirencester to learn their trade at Britain’s pre-eminent seat of all things agricultural, the Royal Agricultural College, or RAC as it was known.
Over the previous year, I had seen many young men making their plays for Sasha, and, meanwhile, I was like that placid bull in the field. I chewed the cud; I bided my time. I watched and I waited.
I did not know what I was waiting for. But I hoped that when the time came, I would recognise it. And that I would seize it.
As we drove to Kemble station then, I was trying to have a perfectly normal conversation with Sasha, as if she were just a good, wholesome mate with whom I could drink and laugh and swim, and whose looks had not even registered on my mind.
“Can you get your dirty bloody feet off my dashboard?” I said.
“My dirty bloody feet off your dashboard? Well, I might get my dirty bloody feet of the dashboard,” she said. “If you ever bothered to clean up your dirty bloody car in the first place.”
She opened a can of Coke. She drank and passed me the can and I drank too. I’ve never much liked the taste, but if you’re a wild swimmer then Coke is good for killing the bugs that you’ve swallowed in the swim.
“Are you saying my car’s dirty?” I said. We were on a long