Falling Again For Her Island Fling
Ellie Darkins
Her head doesn’t remember him …but her heart does! Marine Biologist Meena isn’t prepared for the jolt of recognition when she meets tycoon Guy Williams. An accident stole Meena’s memories and she’s been searching for answers ever since. Could Guy be the missing piece to her past…and her future…
Her head doesn’t remember him...
...but her heart does!
Marine biologist Meena isn’t prepared for the jolt of recognition when she meets tycoon Guy Williams while working on development plans for his luxury island resort. Years ago they had a whirlwind fling, but afterward an accident stole Meena’s memories—and much more. She’s been searching for answers ever since. Could Guy be the missing piece to her past and her future—if she’s willing to risk her heart again?
ELLIE DARKINS spent her formative years devouring romance novels and, after completing her English degree, decided to make a living from her love of books. As a writer and editor, she finds her work now entails dreaming up romantic proposals, hot dates with alpha males and trips to the past with dashing heroes. When she’s not working she can usually be found running around after her toddler, volunteering at her local library or escaping all of the above with a good book and a vanilla latte.
Also by Ellie Darkins (#uef0f6499-50e1-5d97-be6f-3ad55e540b21)
Frozen Heart, Melting Kiss
Bound by a Baby Bump
Newborn on Her Doorstep
Holiday with the Mystery Italian
Falling for the Rebel Princess
Conveniently Engaged to the Boss
Surprise Baby for the Heir
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).
Falling Again for Her Island Fling
Ellie Darkins
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-09167-1
FALLING AGAIN FOR HER ISLAND FLING
© 2019 Ellie Darkins
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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Note to Readers (#uef0f6499-50e1-5d97-be6f-3ad55e540b21)
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For my girls
Contents
Cover (#u8a6e73a6-4c9c-5785-a733-55c2a67ceee6)
Back Cover Text (#u042fef99-1031-530b-a56f-d9e36adf72a5)
About the Author (#u28e9d510-33f6-5a14-96a1-868d3252adb3)
Booklist (#u5f61ff22-862e-5571-8365-524840bd54af)
Title Page (#udc01b37d-3136-5bdc-a524-13294409c933)
Copyright (#u86e567d8-a347-5974-b1b9-d36c0ba6bfc2)
Note to Readers
Dedication (#u8a3fc16f-438c-531b-9c34-b33a64b0d9f9)
CHAPTER ONE (#u12ac9eee-c599-5668-b3fc-eec9517e4d75)
CHAPTER TWO (#u7d9dbc77-4126-5a50-a75e-72df7bb2ae1b)
CHAPTER THREE (#u88186d10-6d09-584d-8f43-17f287085672)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#uef0f6499-50e1-5d97-be6f-3ad55e540b21)
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.
CHAPTER TWO (#uef0f6499-50e1-5d97-be6f-3ad55e540b21)
‘COME IN.’
Guy glanced at the schedule on the computer monitor; he wasn’t expecting a meeting and the knock on the door had taken him by surprise. In fact, he hadn’t been expecting still to be on the island at all, but the search for a replacement project manager was proving to be more difficult than he had hoped. He’d already delayed his departure from the island by a fortnight, and the replacement that he’d hired couldn’t fly out for another week at the earliest. Guy was going to have to get the environmental permissions he needed before he could get back to Sydney. Whoever was at the door had better be quick. He had three days’ worth of work to do that evening. The last thing he needed was an unscheduled five o’clock meeting.
In the promotional brochures he’d had mocked up, he’d billed his island as paradise. But most of what he’d seen of the country in the last two weeks was the inside of its government buildings and his air-conditioned office. He could have been in the offices of any of his corporate buildings for all he’d seen of the local environment.
The door opened and he glanced up; his body registered her presence before his brain did. Before her name formed on his lips, his heart was beating wildly in his chest and there was a tightness, low in his belly, that seemed a response unique to being close to her.
‘Meena, what are you doing here?’
Way to play it cool, he chastised himself, angry that she still had that hold over him, the ability to make him say what he was thinking without any regard for whether it was a good idea. When they’d been younger, it had felt like a blessing: their mutual honesty helping them past the barrier of dive instructor and pupil. Past the social conventions of a conservative culture and into the realms of something much more personal.
‘Your environmental reports,’ she replied, her brow furrowed into a curious expression. ‘I emailed them over to Dev and he told me you’d want me to come and talk through my findings in person.’
‘And why is that?’ he asked, wondering why his assistant had thought that another meeting would be the way to cap off today. ‘Never mind. Just give me the highlights.’ He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. The last thing this project needed was more delays.
‘Well, the headline is, I’m not giving the approval for your permits.’
Guy sighed, leaned forward again, rested his elbows on his desk and gestured towards the chair opposite, inviting her to take a seat.
‘Why not? What’s the problem?’
She crossed to his desk and laid out the paperwork in front of him. ‘The main problem right now is that the reef won’t withstand an increase in boat traffic or sedimentation from the building work. There’s been extensive bleaching and it needs to be stabilised and then an ongoing regeneration plan put in place.’
He gritted his teeth. Ongoing. ‘Ongoing’ wasn’t a word he wanted to hear in the context of this development, and not from Meena of all people.
‘Anything else?’
‘There’s still no sign of hatchlings from the possible turtle nesting site. We need to wait out the incubation period and see what we’re dealing with before I could give the go-ahead.’
‘How much time are we looking at?’
‘A couple more wee—’
‘Unacceptable,’ he interrupted. ‘This needs to be wrapped up within a week maximum, Miss Bappoo. I can’t leave the island until they’re done, and I need to get back to Sydney.’
‘With all due respect, that isn’t for you to say,’ she replied, crossing her arms. ‘This will take as long as it takes. It’s not something you hurry. It’s not something you can hurry. This is my call.’
He looked at her, assessing. Was she doing this on purpose? he wondered. Because of their past? And then he had to remind himself that she didn’t even remember their past. She wasn’t angry with him. She didn’t feel anything for him. He envied her ignorance. He wished that he could see this as she undoubtedly did: a simple business matter with no personal feelings involved.
‘That’s not good enough,’ he stated, leaning back in his chair.
She mirrored him, implacable. He remembered that look and he knew that it meant that there was no changing her mind. ‘Unfortunately for you, your feelings on the matter aren’t a criterion in my report.’
He shook his head. A standoff wasn’t going to get them anywhere fast. Cooperation was the only way that he was going to get this project moving again. ‘Tell me what I can do to make this happen faster.’
He saw his more relaxed demeanour soften her. ‘You can stop asking questions like that for a start,’ Meena said. ‘Faster isn’t the aim here; environmental conservation is. I’m not letting this island come to harm because you want to throw your hotel up faster.’
‘I’m not throwing anything,’ he retorted. ‘And you say that like you think I want to cause harm. I don’t; that’s why you’re here.’
‘Good to know. I’ll note it in the report.’
He paused. ‘Meena, I...’
She was doing all this to protect the island. Their island. The tiny speck of sand and rock in the Indian Ocean. Could it be that she remembered it? That that was why she was being so fiercely protective of it? The thought warmed him somewhere deep but he shook off the feeling. That wasn’t what this was about. She didn’t remember him. She didn’t remember anything about who they had been to each other.
‘Look,’ Guy said. ‘I want this application to go through and I have no interest in doing any harm to Le Bijou,’ he lied. ‘Tell me what I need to do to make that happen.’
She narrowed her eyes as she looked at him. ‘You really want to do this right?’
He nodded. ‘I really do.’
‘Then you need a marine biologist on your team once building starts. Someone to ensure you are considering environmental impacts at every stage. You need short-term and long-term sustainability plans, and someone to hold you to account.’
He gave an ironic smile. ‘You seem to be doing a pretty good job of that.’
‘For now.’ She smiled back. ‘But my job’s done when the reports are completed. This island needs a permanent guardian.’
‘You’re right. And you’re perfect for the job.’
As he said the words he knew that it was true. Much as he hated to admit it, she would be the perfect person to make sure that the island was protected through the building of the resort, and after. And once his new project manager started he would be gone and he wouldn’t have to see her again. If this was what it took to get the permits approved, he would do it. He could see from her face that she was surprised by the offer nonetheless.
‘I have a job,’ she said abruptly.
‘True.’ He shrugged. ‘But here’s the offer of another. Because you’re right. An in-house marine biologist should always have been a part of the plan. I think this offer shows how serious I am about getting these permits. Your report proves you know what you’re doing. And you love the island.’ He knew what love looked like on her. He had seen it before. He remembered lying on that beach, seeing her look at him and knowing—knowing—that she loved him. He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve it then. He knew that he didn’t deserve it now.
Which was why it was such a spectacularly bad idea to offer her the job. He should be putting as much distance between them as he could right now. Not creating yet another bond.
It was fine, he reminded himself. As soon as he had a replacement project manager in place, he would be leaving this island and not coming back. In his headquarters in Sydney, he would have no more contact with Meena than with thousands of his other employees and contractors. She wouldn’t be his problem any more. Wouldn’t be in his life any more.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she replied slowly, as if looking for the catch in his offer.
She could do a lot for Le Bijou as the resident marine biologist, Meena acknowledged, turning Guy’s job offer over in her mind. She had done a lot of good when she had worked at another resort before her accident, she reminded herself, educating holidaymakers and divers about the local area and how to dive without impacting the coral reefs. She had even started a programme of coral regeneration with newlyweds, planting out coral, something that would carry on growing long after the honeymoon was over.
She could do the same at Le Bijou, she thought, if she took up Guy’s job offer. She could stay on the island. Do her best for it. Protect it as best she could once the works were completed and the worst of the damage had been done.
Perhaps damage limitation was all she could do. Guy owned Le Bijou, and it was going to change. Her sanctuary. It just wouldn’t exist any more. Not in the way that she wanted—needed—it to.
But something made her hesitate before telling Guy that she wanted the job. Working with Guy, specifically, made her hesitate.
She’d thought a lot about men the last few years. A lot about specifically what sort of man would make her fall for him. She knew she wouldn’t have slept with someone she didn’t love. Last she remembered, she had been a virgin planning to wait until she was married, as was expected of her. And then she was waking from a coma, finding out that she had been pregnant, and the only clues she had to her mystery boyfriend were notes she’d found months after she had finally left the clinic, scribbled in French on the back of a dive planner.
I love you. I can’t wait to see you again. Meet me at our beach.
She had wondered ever since then who he could have been. Who her type was. What sort of man she had fallen in love with.
And now here was Guy and the strange sense of déjà vu she felt around him. It was probably just his accent, she thought. The twang of his Australian vowels that was so familiar from her scholarship year studying there. That was what was giving her this strange feeling, she decided. There was no way that Guy was her mystery boyfriend. The way that he looked at her was so cold, so impersonal, it couldn’t possibly be him.
Which made the dreams she had been having about him all the stranger. They felt so vivid, so real. She had touched him. Smelled him. Tasted him. In her sleep last night she had run her fingertips over every part of his body and then followed them with her tongue. He had spanned her waist with his hands, cupped the curve of her hip and her buttock, teased her with his lips.
All of which was making this meeting extremely awkward.
She risked another glance up at him, but his eyes were still fixed on his computer screen.
‘I want to know what working with you will mean.’
‘I’m glad you’re considering it.’ He didn’t look as if he thought it was great. Considering he’d made the offer in the first place, he looked as if he didn’t want her there at all. Well, it was too late. She’d been thinking about Le Bijou. What it would mean to stand guard over it. However awkward things got with Guy.
‘Are you sure we haven’t met before?’
She wasn’t really aware of thinking the question before it popped out of her mouth. He was just so...unsettling. He unnerved her. And she couldn’t help thinking that there must be a reason he had this effect on her. Must be a reason why her body reacted to him every time that he was close. A reason her heart was racing and her palms were sweating.
Was it you? Her mind jumped to the familiar question. Did you love me? Did I carry your baby? Lose your baby?
He sighed, looked up and made eye contact with her for the first time since she had walked into the room.
‘What period of time are you missing memories from?’ he asked. ‘I’ve only visited St Antoine once before.’
She told him the date of her accident, and that she didn’t remember the three months before, wondering at the change in his demeanour.
‘I was here then,’ he said. ‘My parents own the Williams resort on the mainland. I was staying there for the summer.’
‘But I worked there!’ Meena exclaimed. ‘I was working at the dive school before my accident. It was the summer after I got back from Australia,’ she added, realising she’d never mentioned to him that connection. Was this the reason for his strangeness? For the strange familiarity she felt around him? Would she have mentioned that if she’d bumped into an Australian guest? Would she have struck up a conversation about that common link?
‘So maybe I have seen you before, or maybe we spoke back then? I’m sorry,’ she added, realising she was speaking out loud. ‘It’s just, it’s hard, having this gap in my memories. It makes me question myself. Question what I know, you know?’
Of course he didn’t know. How could he? How could anyone know what it felt like to live in a body and a mind that didn’t fully belong to them?
‘Maybe we did meet.’ Guy shuffled some papers on his desk, not looking at her. ‘I went to the dive school when I was here before. Maybe we crossed paths.’
‘But you don’t remember? You don’t remember me?’ It was clear from the way that he had turned back to his work that he was ready for this meeting to be over. But it had been so long since she had had any new information about that time that she couldn’t let this drop, no matter how annoying Guy seemed to be finding her.
Just once in her life, she wanted a straightforward answer. No, scratch that. Once in her life she wanted to know the answer to questions about her life herself, without relying on near strangers to fill in the gaps. But as that didn’t seem to be an option, no matter what she or her medical team had tried, she would have to settle for getting answers from someone else. For trusting other people to paint this picture of who she had been.
‘I don’t remember you,’ Guy said, looking back at his screen. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be sorry.’ Meena shrugged, tried to cover her disappointment. No answers, again. No reason for why she felt this strange familiarity around Guy. For him and for Le Bijou.
‘Get in touch with Dev about the details of the new job, if you want to consider it. And keep him updated with your progress on the environmental reports. If there’s nothing else...’
It was clear she was being dismissed.
‘Okay, great.’ She forced professionalism back into her voice. ‘Well, I’m going to go have another look at the reef tomorrow. To see if there is any way that its decline can be reversed, or at least halted. If you want to come and see for yourself, you would be welcome.’
Guy glanced up at her, meeting her gaze again. Maybe this was why he avoided it, Meena thought, as she felt her cheeks warm under his scrutiny. Maybe he could see the effect he had on her when he turned his full attention on her like that. No wonder he didn’t want to encourage it.
‘I’ll see what I can do. But I have a very full week.’
Did he remember her? Only every night in his dreams, in waking moments when his mind wandered, and for a moment he was back there, the sun and her lips on his body once again. He remembered everything.
And it broke him, almost daily now.
Because whatever, wherever they were now, they were never going to get that back. What they had had back then had been beautiful. It had been pure. It had been innocent. And then the darkness in his heart when he’d thought that she had abandoned him had sullied it. And that simply couldn’t be undone.
He must have been broken before he had even met her, for that rot to have set in and cause the damage that it had.
If he told her what they had shared, what would she think of that? What could she take from it? Worst-case scenario, she would want to try to turn back time. To see what had brought them together then. To see if it still existed.
She had lost all the time that they had been together. He had spent three months on this island, ostensibly getting to know his family’s resort on the St Antoine mainland as preparation for a formal role in the company. But in truth he had spent most of it getting to know Meena. His parents hadn’t even been disappointed when they’d realised how little work he’d done that summer. As if they’d been expecting his failure all along. It was so easy to disappoint them, he realised, when they had such low expectations of him.
Meena thought that she wanted to know him, but she was wrong. The only possible outcome was her getting hurt, and he could spare her that at least.
Of course, his heart had hurt when he’d seen how lost she was without those memories. And he could fix that, he knew. He could tell her everything, and she wouldn’t have to worry and guess at what had happened in those months.
But would that help her, really? To know that she had been in love with a man who didn’t exist any more? No, it was kinder to say nothing, he told himself. Kinder—and safer—that she never knew what they had once had, and what they had both lost.
CHAPTER THREE (#uef0f6499-50e1-5d97-be6f-3ad55e540b21)
WHY HAD SHE invited him? Meena asked herself for the millionth time that day. It had been a stupid idea at the time, and felt even stupider now that she was sitting in her boat, in a rash-guard swimsuit and shorts, wondering if he was going to show up.
Of course he wasn’t. He had been awkward and uncomfortable for the entirety of their short acquaintance, so he was hardly going to be signing up for extracurriculars. And no wonder, considering the way that she had quizzed him the last time that they had met, making a near stranger uncomfortable by trying to use his memories to patch together her defective one. And it had all been for nothing anyway. He hadn’t known her then and didn’t care now.
She checked over her equipment one more time, including the battery and memory card on her underwater camera. Ideally she needed some close-up shots of the unstable areas of the reef so that she could make a more thorough assessment of whether the damage could be reversed. She was hoping that transplanting in new corals would stabilise it. But if the damage had already gone too far and the reef was starting to crumble she would have to rethink her options. The best way to decide was to get down there for another look. But if Guy didn’t show she would have to make do with photographing from the glass-bottomed boat. Even seven years after her accident, when the chance of having a seizure was minimal, she wouldn’t risk being out in the water alone.
She needed to choose the best sites for transplanting in the coral pieces she’d retrieved after a storm a few months before, and had been growing out in the lab ever since. If Guy turned up and she had a buddy, then she could get her fins wet and take a closer look.
She looked along the beach, wondering how long she should wait for him, then shook her head; it was time to get to work. She steered her boat over to the reef, anchored carefully in the white sand, taking care not to damage the reef, and pulled out her clipboard and her camera, ready to make her observations.
As she took her first shot, she heard the steady buzz of motor. She looked up, shielding her eyes from the fierce morning sun, and spotted the company-branded speedboat rounding the far side of the island. Guy. She took a moment to calm her nerves and gather herself before he stopped on the beach. He didn’t know that she was still dreaming about him, and he definitely didn’t know about the X-rated images her brain was now happy to summon at will. The light, golden tan of his skin beaded with sweat. His eyes creased with intensity as he moved above her. His body a collection of hard planes that her hands had explored and come to know so well.
In her sleep.
It wasn’t real life. And he would never, ever find out about those dreams.
The speedboat pulled up to the jetty and she watched Guy climb down the couple of steps to the sand and then look around. He spotted her and gave a brisk wave as she pulled up the anchor and steered back to the shore. Guy came over and helped her to tie the boat to the small wooden jetty. He was dressed more casually than she had seen him before, in cargo shorts and a polo shirt, and she tried to keep her eyes on his face, well away from the extra skin that he was showing.
The last thing her brain needed was new material. It had done quite a good job of conjuring up a naked Guy from just the skin of his hands and his face, and that triangle of his throat where he left his shirt open at the collar. But it turned out her peripheral vision was doing a more than okay job of measuring him up: the golden-blond hair on his forearms that caught the morning sunlight. The strong lines of his calves above his beach shoes. Even his feet seemed familiar. Her brain had been remarkably thorough. And accurate. She had to give herself credit for that.
She must be retrofitting, that was all, she told herself. Her brain was seeing the real thing now and simply slotting the new images into her memories of her fantasies.
Of all the people to be unsurprised by what the human brain could remember and forget, it should be her. Her brain had forgotten everything: who she was, how to walk, how to feed herself. And then it had relearned or remembered almost all of it again. Even with the whole ‘missing summer’ issues, she couldn’t deny being impressed by what she and her brain had achieved between them. Summoning a perfect, naked Guy from just the glimpses she had seen so far proved that various important parts of her were functioning just fine.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge those thoughts before Guy could guess what she was thinking.
‘You made it,’ she said, offering him her hand to shake, trying to remember to be professional. She simply refused to be affected by the touch of his skin on hers. Nor to remember anything about her dreams inspired by the spark of electricity she felt. She was going to be working with him in her role at the Environmental Agency even if she didn’t take up his job offer.
Although, with Guy due to be far away at his Sydney office in a couple of weeks, she barely needed to know that he existed at all in order to do her job. That was for the best, she told herself. Being distracted by a man was in no way a part of her plan for her life. She was here to work, to protect as much of the islands that made up St Antoine as possible, and nothing else.
‘Do you have snorkel gear?’ she asked Guy, setting a professional tone. ‘I have some spares in the lockbox,’ she went on, trying to avoid meeting his eye, instead busying herself with equipment and checklists. ‘You can stay on the boat if you prefer; see the reef through the glass floor. It’s not a bad view from there, and then I can do the underwater stuff.’
‘I have my equipment in the boat,’ he said shortly.
‘Great.’ She kept her voice neutral, refusing to react to his brusque tone. There was no reason he should be anything but cold and short with her. They were business colleagues and nothing more, she reminded herself. ‘I always prefer to have a buddy in the water, even if I’m only snorkelling.’
‘I only have an hour.’
She tried not to bristle again at his tone. She had no reason to court his approval. She didn’t want to be his friend. In fact, the more brusque he was with her, the better. The last thing she needed was to think about getting close to this man. Any man, in fact.
She had already proved that she couldn’t trust herself to manage her own desires sensibly. In the space of a summer she had met, slept with and then lost her only sexual partner. A man who, it seemed, had been happy to take her to bed but less keen on sticking around after her accident, for her miscarriage or her rehab. If that was the kind of man that she chose for herself, she was better off single. Or even giving in and allowing her aunties to arrange an introduction to someone that fit the older generation’s idea of a ‘nice young man’.
But that didn’t exactly appeal either.
And what nice young man would want her, if they knew? A woman with a brain injury, with the scars of the accident still clear on her body and in her mind. Who had carried and lost a baby without even knowing who the father was.
She didn’t need to worry about that with Guy, at least. He looked at her with disdain, spoke with impatience and was in a hurry to leave the country. He hardly needed warning off. He clearly didn’t share the fantasies playing through her mind.
She checked over the equipment that he fetched from the boat. Guy might be experienced, but if he was accompanying her then she would be responsible for his safety, even if it was just a shallow snorkel for the most part. The equipment was top of the range, of course. Far superior to her own snorkel, mask and fins.
She glanced over at him as they both sat on the edge of the boat, steering the way over to where she had anchored by the reef before, and felt a stab of déjà vu. It wasn’t an unusual feeling for her; with an injury like hers she was constantly unsure of whether a memory was real or imagined. Before the accident, she would have just shrugged it off. But Guy had piqued her curiosity, telling her that he had attended the dive school when she had been teaching. Could they be sure that they hadn’t dived together before? There had to be some reason why she was feeling this way around him.
‘What?’ Guy asked when he turned and caught her staring at him.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said, creasing her brow, still getting that feeling of déjà vu. Trying to unpack whether there was any truth to the feeling that they had sat like this, on the side of a boat, before.
‘Just that...this feels familiar. Us, on a boat like this. It feels like a memory. I’m sorry. It’s hard to explain.’
Guy frowned, his forehead lining in what she knew must be a mirror image of her own.
‘You remember something?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not a memory, just a weird feeling. I’m sure it’s nothing.’ She shrugged, trying to rid herself of the weird sensation. She almost gasped in shock when his hand landed on hers.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must be difficult.’ She hadn’t been expecting to see empathy in his expression, but there it was. With most people who knew about her amnesia she saw pity. Or gratitude that it had happened to her and not them. But she could see her own pain reflected in Guy’s eyes—real understanding—and she didn’t know what to make of it.
‘It’s fine, mostly,’ she lied. He didn’t need to know the nights she lay awake, trying to force those memories back. Trying to remember who she had been with that summer. And then, maybe, to try to understand who she had been that summer. The person who had taken risks. Who had snuck around with a secret lover none of her friends or family knew about. Who’d been stupid enough to fall pregnant with a man who hadn’t cared enough to stick around when she’d been hurt.
Guy squeezed her hand and let go, rubbing at the stubble just starting to shadow his jawline. Looking away, she reached over the side of the boat to dip her mask in the water, then slid the strap behind her head and tightened it. It was impossible to be serious with a person wearing a snorkel, and she was counting on that to break the atmosphere that seemed to have grown and thickened between them in the last few moments.
She glanced over and smiled at the sight of Guy in his mask. She was right; not even Guy—as sexy as he was, as vividly sensual as her dreams had been—could carry off that look. He grinned at her in return, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Ready?’ she asked, and then slipped off the side of the boat and entered the water with a splash. She looked around to make sure Guy had followed her in. He was right behind her, and her body bumped his as she turned. She moved away, dipping under the water, exhaling through her snorkel, leaving a trail of bubbles behind her. His skin on hers was too distracting; she needed to put a sensible amount of space between them. She swam over to the reef, her camera on a tether clipped to her top, and waited for Guy to catch her up. She pointed out the areas where the coral bleaching was at its worst, and then over to the other side of the reef where there was a large unstable section and some damage that looked as if it had been caused by a boat anchor.
This was where she could do the most good. If the bleaching had gone on for so long that the coral had died, that couldn’t be reversed, and even if she transplanted new coral into those areas it might suffer the same fate. But over on this side of the reef she had a chance to repair the damage. If she could secure the unstable sections of coral by transplanting in new colonies from other parts of the islands, then it stood a chance of growing back as healthy and vibrant an ecosystem as it had been in the past.
But there were no guarantees. She’d been part of several transplantation efforts over the two years that she’d been back at the Environmental Agency. Some of them had flourished; some of them she’d watched as they’d faded and died, despite every intervention that she could think of to try.
She signed to Guy to let him know what she was doing and dived a little deeper, holding her breath as the end of her snorkel dipped below the water. She took some more photographs, going as deep as she could within the reef without touching the coral and adding to the problems it was facing. She tried to decide if underneath the unstable sections it could support a transplanted colony, and the evidence that she would have to present to the Environmental Agency and to Guy if her plan was going to be approved.
She looked up towards Guy and kicked her legs to come up to the surface. He had stayed near the top of the reef, watching her rather than looking at the coral. There wasn’t much of interest on this part of the reef to look at, she acknowledged. With most of the coral dead or dying, the rest of the marine life had followed suit.
When she’d first dived at this reef, back before her accident, before she’d even gone to Australia, it had been a vibrant landscape of marine life. Brightly coloured fish had swum in and out of the coral, and anemones had waved gently in the light current. She had known where to watch out for well-camouflaged stone fish, and where to give a wide berth to avoid getting too close to a lion fish. But global warming and other human interventions had worked fast, turning it into an underwater wasteland.
She tried not to despair. She was here; Guy was here. They were going to try to fix this. If she thought too much about what the reef had lost, she’d never be able to concentrate on what she needed to do to bring it back to life.
When she had all the pictures she needed she signed to Guy that they should head back to the boat, and then she bobbed up above the surface, checking that Guy was alongside her. She climbed back onto the deck of the boat, pulling off her mask and fins and squeezing salt water from her hair.
She was aware of Guy sitting next to her, taking off his equipment, but it wasn’t until he spoke that she turned to look at him and saw the expression on his face.
‘My God, what happened to it?’ he asked, his face pale.
She narrowed her eyes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, the last time I saw it, it was teeming with life. We could barely move for fish.’
We? She didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know with whom he’d been here before.
‘You’ve swum here before?’ she asked, surprised that he’d not mentioned it yet.
He nodded. ‘Last time I visited St Antoine.’
The shock was evident on his features, and she softened towards him a little. It was clear that he did care about the environment of the island, despite his impatience to move on the building project.
‘What happened to it?’ he asked again.
She explained about coral bleaching, the effects of rising sea temperatures and the impact of tourism and watched his face as the information sank in. She would have to wait and see whether that carried through to the decisions that he made as the project progressed. It was easy to be shocked by environmental issues when you were sitting on the water with the evidence right in front of you. In her experience, developers started caring a lot less about the coral when they were back in their offices, staring at a spreadsheet and a schedule.
Well, that was why she was here, she reminded herself—so that Guy wouldn’t forget. She smirked to herself at the irony of the amnesiac being the one responsible for reminding someone of anything. She softened towards him, though. He clearly was very shocked by what he had seen.
‘I know it’s hard to see,’ she said. She knew that all too well. It broke her heart, seeing what had become of what had once been a lively, vibrant reef. ‘But this is why we’re here. You’re doing the right thing, putting this right before the building work starts. Not everyone would.’
Guy shook his head. ‘Looks like we were too late.’
‘Maybe not. I’ve seen other reefs recover.’ Not many. Not often. But she had fresh young coral growing in the lab, waiting to be transplanted out. ‘The situation’s bad, but not hopeless,’ she said as she steered them around the coral, back towards the little dock on Le Bijou. ‘We have to try.’
Seven years hadn’t seemed so long until he went down under the surface of the water and saw for himself the evidence of how much time had passed. How different the world was now compared to the last time that he had been here. How something that had once been beautiful had been so completely destroyed. Meena had said that maybe the reef could be saved, that they at least had to try. But he could see for himself that it was a lost cause.
When Meena had denied his applications for the permits he needed, he’d not been able to see it as anything but an inconvenience—and an expensive, time-consuming one at that. But now he could see why she was so concerned.
He looked around the island after he had waved her off in her boat and tried to imagine how it would look when the resort was finished. He had artists’ renderings and a three-dimensional model, but they couldn’t tell him how it would feel to lie on the beach with the resort behind him and the sea creeping towards his toes.
Could he lie on the sand, imagining what was happening to the crumbling coral below the sparkling water? That was why he was going to hire Meena, he reasoned. It would be her job to worry about that. Not his. And, now that he had seen her out here, he was satisfied that she knew what she was doing and he shouldn’t have to worry about it any more.
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