The Love Island Bookshop by Kate Frost (ebook reader with internet browser .TXT) 📕

beige linen uniform. While she was done for the day, they were on their way to work. The solar lights surrounding the courtyard were on and the glossy green leaves of the ficus and cheese plants glowed in the light.

Footsteps padded behind her.

‘Hey, Freya,’ Aaron said, as he caught up with her. ‘You finished for the day?’

His hair was damp, and his T-shirt clung to his chest. She thought her job was great, and yet he spent his day scuba diving and exploring the house reef.

‘Yep, can pretty much choose my own hours at the moment. I haven’t quite got used to it getting dark so early yet.’

He matched her pace. ‘You will. I like it. I get to wind down for the day before dusk.’

‘I guess the flip side is early starts.’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘Not that much of a problem here. The rooms are hardly conducive to having a lie in.’

The courtyard was already buzzing with staff eating, some in uniform on a break, a couple of others having finished for the day.

Aaron turned to Freya. ‘Fancy joining me for dinner?’

‘Yeah, that’ll be nice.’

‘I’m just going to dive in the shower. Meet you back out here in ten?’

‘Okay, great.’

Freya went up to her room. No one else was back yet so it was good to have dinner with Aaron. She didn’t fancy eating on her own and introducing herself to new people felt a little stressful. She needed to make friends though – once the bookshop opened, even if she ended up working into the evening because of events, she’d have more free time here than back home. With no commute plus a big break in the middle of the day she had plenty of time to grab some lunch, relax, read or work on the laptop. The time was hers to manage. She was looking forward to reading purely for pleasure again. And there was the bookshop blog to keep up to date with, a twice-weekly post that she’d already decided would have one book focused, and the other one about the island and her working in a unique environment. She already knew that Zander wanted her to keep it personal. As he’d told her, she was the face of the bookshop and getting to know her as well as the shop itself, was important.

She met Aaron back outside and they sat at a table with two of the other dive instructors, another local and a guy from South Africa. She listened to them chat about their day – the South African had taken someone out for their first scuba diving lesson, while Aaron had been out with a couple who had been diving for years. Freya listened as Aaron described the reef, diving down and swimming just above the corals to spot butterflyfish, the colourful humphead wrasse, the large groupers that Freya wasn’t too sure she wanted to get that close to, sea turtles and rays.

Aaron turned to Freya. ‘Have you ever been scuba diving?’

‘No, not even when I went travelling after uni – I did go snorkelling in Thailand. I had a stopover on another island before coming here and snorkelled. Would love to do that again.’

‘Next day off, I’ll take you out on the bit of reef off the staff beach.’

‘Okay, that’s a deal.’

‘It’s the other side of the island that we take guests out on; every part of the lagoon is magical, but the reef just off the beach by the dive school is amazing. It goes out really far and then just drops off. It’s this coral cliff teeming with fish and colour and then nothing. Guests either love it or hate it, but it’s quite something looking out to just deep, dark ocean.’

‘Sounds terrifying.’

Aaron laughed. ‘It’s a bit of a rush. The bit off the staff beach is pretty tame, nice and shallow – you can see a lot, we’re really lucky we have that option here.’ He scooped rice on to his fork. Aaron’s two colleagues were talking together so Aaron’s attention was solely on her. ‘Apart from Thailand, you said you also went to New Zealand?’

‘Yes, to see my parents.’

‘That’s where they still live?’

‘Yep, they emigrated there when I went to university.’

‘So, what, they sold up and completely left?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And you were at university in the UK, right?’

Freya nodded. ‘Other people find it mad that they could leave me and move halfway across the world, but it didn’t come as a shock to me. They’d wanted to leave the UK for years, but felt quite strongly that it wouldn’t be fair to interrupt my life and education. We talked about it loads and I could have gone with them and gone to university in New Zealand, but I didn’t want to. By that time I was old enough to make my own decisions.’

‘Still, that’s quite something when you’re only eighteen. It’s just you, no brothers or sisters?’

‘I have a brother. He’s twelve years older so there’s quite a difference. I pretty much felt like an only child.’

‘Did you stay with him during holidays?’

‘Occasionally, usually at Christmas. He lives in France with his family so it wasn’t actually that easy to pop back that often.’

‘So where did you go?’

‘I stayed with my best friend. Her family are lovely; I was lucky to have them.’

‘So, they’re kind of like your second family.’

‘Yeah, something like that.’ She stabbed her fork into a potato. She found it strange talking about her life with someone she’d only just met. It had been a long time since she’d been in a position of getting to know someone new. ‘So, what do people do here in the evenings?’

‘Most people work, but if they’re lucky like us and get the majority of evenings off, then we sometimes take a drink down to the beach, sit and chat. There’s a fire pit down there. You can sit out here in the courtyard but it’s an unwritten rule for people to keep the noise down after ten – for all