Falling Again for Her Island Fling
Autore
Ellie Darkins
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CHAPTER ONE
MEENA LAY ON her back, the sand hot beneath her, the sun reaching her face through the leaves of the coconut trees, and breathed deeply, grateful for the shade even this early in the morning. By lunchtime the heat would be fierce, and she would be forced indoors, so she really should be making the most of her time here on the island of Le Bijou before she had to get back to the St Antoine mainland. But lying on the beach, alone in the sunlight, was still something of a dream. Especially here. Something that she had imagined for so long. Had started to fear would never happen again. It was something she could never take for granted.
She took another breath, long and slow, relaxing her body from the tips of her fingers down to her toes. It was still a marvel that she could make it follow her commands so easily, after the years that she had spent relearning how to use it. It had taken more strength than she’d known she had to get her body working again after the accident, and still more for her to be able to face the world and reintegrate herself into real life.
From the outside now one would never guess what had happened to her. Her thick dark hair, worn in its natural curls, did a perfect job of hiding the scars on her head. Her standard-issue Environmental Agency polo shirt or a wetsuit over a one-piece swimsuit took care of the rest.
But the scars were still there. She could feel them on her scalp and her body. Feel them in her mind, every time that she tried to recall the months before the accident and found them blank. And then there were the looks and the whispers that she knew followed her around the island. She was the girl who had been hit by a car and lost her mind.
The dappled light grew darker behind her eyelids and she blinked them open, uneasy. She sat up quickly as she realised she was right to be concerned. A man was standing over her, casting a shadow where she had been lying in the sand. With the sun behind him, she couldn’t make out his features, and she scrambled to her feet, heart tripping a little faster, glancing around her to see if there was anyone about who might hear her if she had to call out for help.
‘Meena?’ the man asked, sounding as if he was choking on her name.
‘Do I know you?’ she replied in English, picking up on his Australian accent even in that one word. Like most residents of St Antoine, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, she was fluent in the French the islanders used every day as well as English, the official language of government business, and of course the colourful creole that the islanders used amongst themselves. But she’d lived in Australia for a year while she’d been at university and the accent never failed to tug at her heart.
She narrowed her eyes, looking at him closely. Was there something familiar about him? She felt as if his name and the memory of who he was were right on the verge of making it into a functional part of her brain. But her brain didn’t make the leap, so she launched into her well-rehearsed spiel, the words that she’d carefully formulated over the years to smooth this very social awkwardness.
‘I’m sorry if we’ve met before,’ she said, scrambling to her feet while she went through the speech. ‘I suffered a head injury and lost some memories.’
She didn’t even feel embarrassed any more, she realised, about giving her usual excuse when she didn’t recognise someone but got the sense that she probably should. It happened rarely these days. Most of the people whom she’d met and forgotten that summer either knew about her accident already or had just been holidaying on the island and she need never worry about seeing them again. She had spent almost her whole life on St Antoine, the beautiful magnet for tourists and the developers who followed them. But most of the people who stayed here were on once-in-a-lifetime trips and would never know that she had completely forgotten meeting them. It had been a few months, at least, since she had had to make her slightly unorthodox introduction.
The man held out his hand to shake hers, still watching her with trepidation. Probably worried that she was going to fall into a fit or something, she told herself. She’d waited out the five-year danger period after her accident, desperate to get back to diving, her career and her life on hold until she could get back into the water; wondering every day whether this would be the one when a seizure struck. But it had never happened, and she had got herself recertified to dive and back to her conservation work on the island.
‘Guy Williams,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’m—’
‘The owner of the development company.’ She’d received an email telling her that she should expect him tomorrow, yet here he was, interrupting her relaxation practice a day early.
‘You’ve lost your memories?’ he said, still looking at her strangely. Meena rolled her eyes; she used to get this a lot.
‘Yes, just like in a movie. Should I remember something about you?’
He shook his head. He was taking this even worse than most people she told. Generally, people just looked puzzled but, even though Guy Williams was a stranger, she could tell from his expression that he was struggling to accept what she’d just revealed. Maybe he didn’t believe her.
‘Then this is a fresh start,’ Meena said, eager to move the conversation along. ‘I expect you want to know about the environmental impact assessment. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow but I was just about to get started.’ She glanced around, looking for her clipboard, sure that she had brought it out with her. Oh, way to make a good impression, she thought. Introduce herself with a side note about a brain injury and then look around the beach as if you have no idea what you’re doing there.
She was not usually so distracted by a pretty face—even one as pretty as this. High forehead, golden tan, long, straight nose, full lips, a hint of a cleft in his chin. The body wasn’t half bad either—she supposed, if she were absolutely pressed to give her opinion on the subject—from what she could see of it, anyway.
He was dressed for business in a conservative shirt and navy suit. But his collar was open, showing just a hint of his throat and making her want to lean closer, to let her fingers drift into that notch, feel the heat of his skin, the throb of his pulse beneath her fingers.
She shook her head. Where had that thought come from? She took a step away from him. She should not be thinking that way. She did not want a man in her life. She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly feeling cold despite the growing heat of the day. She’d proved to herself a long time ago that she wasn’t capable of making good decisions about men. About sex. It was safer to deny herself either rather than risk repeating her mistakes.
‘Are you okay?’ Guy asked.
‘I’m fine, thank you. I was just about to begin.’
Ah, there. She spotted the clipboard from the corner of her eye and scooped it up in a single, easy movement that belied the many months of physio she’d endured after her accident to enable her to take even a single step.
She caught him looking at her from the corner of her eye and momentarily stopped. ‘Are you sure we didn’t meet...before?’ she asked, hating the black hole in her memory that made the question necessary. She shouldn’t have to look at every man she met and ask herself, Was it you? Was it your baby I was carrying?
He gave her a look so bland that she knew it couldn’t possibly have been him. It was as if he barely saw her at all. As if she were barely there at all. Well, she supposed that answered her question well enough.
‘I’m sure,’ he said with firm politeness. Another one to strike off the list, she thought, trying not to cringe at this internal game of ‘who’s the daddy?’ that she had been forced to play for the last seven years.
She could let it rest, of course. There was no baby. Not now. When she had eventually woken from the coma, the doctors in the clinic had broken it to her gently that it hadn’t just been her memories that she’d lost. She didn’t even know if she’d known before the accident that she’d been pregnant. Given the conservative attitude to premarital sex across almost every culture on St Antoine, she was sure that an unplanned pregnancy would have been more cause for anxiety than celebrations.
She still remembered the whispers that had followed a school friend who had fallen pregnant in her late teens, and who had hastily been married before the baby arrived six months later. Was that why Meena’s lover had disappeared? Had he feared he would be forced into a shotgun wedding? Tied to a woman he didn’t love?
Her parents were hardly traditional, though. They had raised eyebrows with their own marriage—Meena’s French-Mauritian mother and Hindu father had married at a time when such relationships had been even more unusual than they were now—but that didn’t mean that people wouldn’t talk. They always talked.
She had been unusual too in living away from her parents: it had taken every ounce of determination she’d had to move out when she’d been sufficiently recovered from her accident.
But if her family knew about any boyfriend she’d had they had never said anything. So she had no choice but to assume that the relationship had been a secret. How could she have been serious enough about someone to have slept with him but not serious enough to introduce him to her parents?
Her mind had spent many hours tying itself in knots trying to work it out. She hadn’t been far along and what worried her the most was that she had no idea who the father could have been. She was only missing a few months of memory, and there had been no sign of a boyfriend in her life, so where had this baby come from—and what had happened to the father? Where had he been when she’d been trapped under that car, her memories and their baby leaving her body?
Leaving her broken.
Guy turned to look back up the beach to the scrubland where the hotel complex would be built. Where it could be built, Meena corrected herself, as long as the environmental studies were clear and planning permission was granted by the relevant government department. If she couldn’t find something to hold up the development... She took a deep breath. She would find something—she had to—because there was something about this tiny jewel of an island on which she wasn’t going to give up.
For seven years it had felt like her secret. In all the trauma and recovery of that time, she had spent more time here, at this secluded beach, than just about anywhere else. It was the only place where she felt still. At peace. Where her mind rested and her heart didn’t hurt. So when she had heard about the upcoming development she had made sure that she was on the environmental impact team. If there was any way of stopping the resort from being built, then she was going to be the one to find it.
Meena Bappoo. Flat-backed on the beach, just as he’d left her. Eyes closed to the sun, as if it had been minutes since he had last seen her here rather than years. He’d nearly turned and walked away when he’d seen the Environmental Agency logo on her shirt and realised she was the agency marine biologist he was meant to be meeting. The notes that he’d received from his project manager’s schedule hadn’t mentioned her by name, only her job title and the time and location of the meeting, though it turned out that he had mixed up the date.
And then her lids had snapped open, he’d seen those warm golden-brown eyes again and he’d known he was too entranced to walk away.
Did he believe her story? Her memory loss seemed far-fetched. But she hadn’t really given him a choice: he had to believe her. The way she’d looked at him was so completely blank. Surely she couldn’t have been so unmoved if she’d remembered even a moment of those few months that they’d spent together?
Because he remembered. He remembered everything. The way that she spoke, her island creole accent that he knew could slip so quickly into perfect French or her slightly American-sounding English. The way that she smelled—of salt, sand and the coconut oil that she rubbed into her skin. The way that she had looked at him after they had made love for the first time, as if they had just created the stars in the sky.
The way that he had waited for her as they’d agreed, after he had returned to Australia, and she had never shown up.
Had it been the accident? he wondered now. That would make sense, answer the questions he had been carrying around in the years since they had been together. It hit him like a blow to the chest, the thought that perhaps he had been wrong. That she had wanted to come as desperately as he had wanted it. But it didn’t hurt any less when she looked at him and didn’t see him.
He’d thought of her over the years. Thought of them. Thought of the days and the nights that they had spent on this beach. Thought of the night, years later, that he’d made the decision to buy the tiny uninhabited island of Le Bijou and build his resort. Thought of the pain that he had felt when he had been left alone, wanting her, wondering what had gone wrong. Thought of all the ways that he had tried to numb that pain, and the consequences that had spiralled out of control.
And then he couldn’t think about it any more, because the loss and grief from that time of his life was still too painful, too raw even to glance at, never mind examine more closely.
He’d come here to get over her. To face their past, bury it, landscape over the evidence and then move on. But then he’d seen her lying there, looking exactly as she had the day that he’d left her, and known immediately that it was a mistake.
But maybe the fact she didn’t remember him was a saving grace. She had no idea what they’d once shared and he had every intention of keeping things that way. He could never let her know what they had been to one another. What he had felt for her. He’d spent years trying to get over her. To shake the pain that her rejection had caused him. And he couldn’t bear to reopen those old wounds. Not now.
They were over. They had been over for a long time. She didn’t even remember that they had ever been together and, as far as he could see, that was a good thing. He wouldn’t take that away from her and replace it with the anger and bile that had built up and then been fought down over the years. If she knew what he had done—who he had become—after the last time he had left this island she could only be relieved that she had escaped him.
It was kinder to lie, he told himself, convincing himself of its truth. He had to live with what they had lost and he wouldn’t wish that on her too. Not now, when he knew that he could never again be that person he had been when they’d been together. Even though they were here on Le Bijou, they could never go back and be who they had been before.
He couldn’t risk being in a relationship again. The only time he had tried it since Meena had ended in the worst possible way, and it was something for which he would never forgive himself. There was no way that he could ever let Meena get involved with him again. She was better off without him. Better off not knowing him.
Meena turned and looked at him, and he knew he’d been caught staring. He couldn’t let that happen, he chastised himself. Couldn’t let her see what he felt for her—what he had felt for her, he corrected—those long years ago. Before she’d failed to turn up as she’d promised and confirmed what he’d always known about himself—what his parents had made clear for as long as he could remember—that he just wasn’t worth it.
She’d never let him become part of her life here on the island. Or vice versa. He’d agreed to it at the time because, more than anything, he’d just wanted her in his life and the sneaking around had felt fun at first. But he had realised, later, that she had done it on purpose, had kept their relationship separate from the rest of her life, so that when it was over she could move on.
He wouldn’t let it happen again because they were done. She had no idea they’d ever started anything in the first place and that was a blessing.
‘So I’m going to make a start on the detailed environmental impact study tomorrow,’ Meena said eventually. ‘You should have already received the initial report; this one will go into greater detail on the areas that were raised as a concern. I’ll keep you updated with the results as I progress.’
‘Do that,’ Guy replied shortly, wanting this meeting at an end. ‘I need those permissions in place as soon as possible if I’m going to keep to my schedule.’ And he would be keeping to his schedule and leaving as quickly as possible. If his usual project manager hadn’t broken his thigh bone in a nasty jet-ski accident, Guy wouldn’t have had to take this meeting. He would have been on the island and off again within a couple of days, leaving everything in the capable hands of his team. It was the only way that he had been able to contemplate being back here at all, to minimise the risk of accidentally bumping into Meena. Now he was faced with the prospect of managing this himself, for the foreseeable future at least, and that meant managing Meena. Or trying to. He couldn’t think that he had ever been successful at it before.
‘Well, don’t think I will rush it,’ Meena said right on cue, confirming his fears of how this working relationship was going to proceed. ‘There are reefs on this side of the island and the coral is very vulnerable. It’s my responsibility to make sure that the environment isn’t harmed by your building developments here, and I’m not going to cut corners. If you want to build here, you have to take care of the island first.’
He gritted his teeth, knowing that his tension was probably showing on his face. But why hide it? She didn’t care what he was thinking. He was nothing to her. A stranger.
‘I understand that—I think my plans have made reasonable provisions for the environment, so there should be no hold-ups. I will be following your work closely.’
She bristled at that, crossing her arms and fixing him with a glare. Good. He could handle her like this. He could handle angry. Angry was nothing like what he remembered between them. Angry didn’t bring back memories that still—somehow—had the power to hurt him. Well, not for much longer. Once his plans were under way, this island would no longer be recognisable. Would no longer call to him. Would no longer be the yardstick by which he unconsciously measured his experiences and his relationships. Of course, no real woman could live up to an island fantasy, a summer romance with a beautiful girl while he’d been on holiday, barely into his twenties.
‘Where are you going to start with your report?’ he asked, trying to read her notes upside down. But her notes were in French. A language he had started to learn once—with scribbled love notes—here, with her—but had fallen out of using. Another very good reason he had hired a capable project manager to oversee this development. As soon as he got off this tiny island and back to the capital, he would be instructing his assistant, Dev, to find a temporary replacement for his injured project manager.
‘I need to inspect the reef,’ Meena said, checking her list. ‘Many of the ones nearby have suffered from coral bleaching or damage from boats, and my initial look showed that these reefs appeared to be suffering similarly. At the very least we would need to do any remedial work before building is approved and make a plan for how it can be protected from further human damage. My other main concern is the turtle population. I saw tracks on the beach that indicate there may be a nesting site. We need to wait out the incubation period to see what, if anything, hatches, and to ensure that increased use of the beach won’t impact on breeding or migratory patterns.’
He nodded, wondering how much time this was all going to take. But these were details, and he was no longer the details guy. He was the money and he was the vision. One of the joys of being the boss of your own multi-billion-dollar resort business was letting someone else worry about the bloody turtles.
‘I’m sure your report will be fine, Miss Bappoo. Just submit your findings to my office and someone will be in touch.’
He turned away from her but then stopped, his feet halting in the sand. Was this it? Was it all finally going to end with a glib remark about turtles? With Meena having no idea that they had met before today? He turned back and looked at her. Really looked. He saw pink rise in her cheeks at his unmasked appraisal of her.
Seven years. That was how long it had been since he had seen her. And yet he couldn’t see any sign of it on her face. Her cheeks, rosy beneath the warm bronze-brown of her skin, were still the smooth apples that he remembered. Her eyes were as golden and as full of challenge as they had been then.
What would she think of him, he wondered, if she remembered the man—boy—he had been? Would she find him much changed? His body was no softer—he had worked hard to ensure that. His heart, however, was harder—she was responsible for that. He shook his head. That wasn’t fair. He couldn’t entirely blame her for the way he had behaved after they had broken up. He had to carry that alone.
He held her gaze for a moment longer. He needed to know that she had seen him—really seen him. To give her one last chance to recognise him. To remember.
The blush faded from her cheeks as he refused to look away and her expression changed. He didn’t know her well enough any more to guess what she was thinking. But in that moment it wasn’t indifference. Curiosity, maybe. Desire. Did he want that? Would this feel better if she wanted him? If he was the one to walk away this time? Probably not, he conceded.
Anyway, those wounds had healed a long time ago, he told himself. He didn’t need them to be reopened. ‘So, goodbye, then,’ he said, and turned from her, walking back towards his speedboat, knowing this would be the last time that he saw her. It had to be.
