Falling Again for Her Island Fling Read online

  It had kick-started a career that had fallen by the wayside since her accident. After that had happened, she had needed to keep things simple. And sanding and oiling the board of this boat had brought her hours of pleasure. It had always been the plan to go back to Australia to work, to continue her research, which would have a far wider effect than saving a coral reef or two here on the islands. But after her accident she’d lost the drive to return. Had stayed home, and safe, instead.

  A luxury yacht cruised into the marina and, though she could only see crew on board, she had no doubt that it was Guy’s boat. It didn’t have the company branding—it was clearly for pleasure, rather than business—but it had an unmistakable air of Guy Williams class.

  She looked down at her humble, though no longer leaky, little boat. She couldn’t summon any jealousy for the larger craft. Sure, luxury must be nice. She had heard, anyway. But she liked her own hands on the tiller, setting her own course. Liked being able to navigate around the coral and into the smallest lagoons. She wouldn’t swap the freedom of taking out her own boat alone, on her own whim, for the convenience of a couple of luxury cabins and a well-stocked bar. Well, not for more than an afternoon or so, anyway.

  She watched the yacht slow to a standstill, and then launch a speedboat from the aft deck. Of course. She smiled. Of course.

  As Guy drew closer she waved from her own mooring and saw the change in his posture when he spotted her. Creasing her eyes against the glare of the sun, she wished she could read him better. She sensed there was more to him than just the brusque businessman he presented to the world. Certainly, in her dreams there was a lot more to him.

  It was just fantasy, she reminded herself. However real those dreams felt. However often she was having them—and she was having them a lot—they weren’t real. She didn’t know him better because she had dreamed of his hands on her body and his whispers in her hair. And she would do very well to remember that.

  He tied his boat to the dock, jumped up onto the worn wooden planks of the walkway and headed over to her.

  She straightened her shoulders, resisting the urge to lift a hand to her hair, which was being caught and played by the ocean breeze, the only respite against the heat of the summer day.

  ‘Guy.’ She pasted on a neutral smile. ‘Hi. I’m glad you could make it.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. That one syllable was maddeningly vague. Yes, he was glad he was here too? Yes, he knew she was glad he was here? She was starting to see that Guy Williams was pretty opaque, impossible to read, even without her amnesia in the mix making her second-guess every man that she met, looking for clues to a shared past.

  ‘Good,’ Meena said, attempting to be equally enigmatic. ‘Let me just grab my gear and we can head off.’ She started lugging air tanks and the bags containing her dive gear from the small cabin, but froze at the feel of Guy’s hand on her shoulder.

  It shouldn’t do that to her, she reasoned. It shouldn’t make her stop like that, as if the rest of the world had ceased to matter and there was just him, her and touch. She should be able to breathe normally, even when he was standing so close. Her skin should feel like just skin, rather than a tissue-thin, failing barrier between her and pure sensation, fireworks, lightning strikes and every cliché she could think of, all from the innocent touch of a hand on a shoulder. She was starting to see, being around Guy, how she must have got it so wrong last time. How easily her body could be led astray by a man she desired, whoever that man in her past had been. How he had made her forget what was important to her.

  Well, this time, she was prepared. She knew the consequences of oohing and aahing over those fireworks. Of looking to find where those sensations led. She wasn’t going to make the mistake with Guy that she had made in the past. He was leaving the island in two weeks anyway. As if she needed another reason why she couldn’t act on her feelings.

  At least she didn’t have to try to convince herself that following these feelings she had for Guy would be an equally colossal mistake. She was well aware of the fact. Every rational, sensible part of her brain—at least, all of those that she could readily access—was signalling to her on high alert that he was dangerous. Dangerous to the status quo. To her way of moving through the world, which was largely based on avoiding entanglements with the opposite sex.

  ‘You can leave it, if you want,’ Guy said. ‘I have some on the yacht you can borrow.’

  If she hadn’t already seen his snorkelling equipment, she might have hesitated. But she knew that his scuba gear would be top of the range too. If you were stocking a luxury yacht for a dive, you were hardly going to cut corners. And if it would save her having to lift and carry her air tanks, she would say yes to anything. She threw her dive watch, underwater camera and dive plan into her backpack, though—those were non-negotiable—and accepted Guy’s offer.

  ‘Okay, sure, thanks,’ she said, locking the strong box and stepping up on to the walkway.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ Guy asked as they jumped down onto his speedboat and left the sleepy Saturday afternoon capital behind them.

  ‘Deeper water,’ Meena said with a smile. ‘There’s a few reefs on the ocean side of the island that have coped better than most over the last few years. We collected coral fragments from them after a storm and grew them out in the lab. Then we transplanted them on to the reefs that were suffering the worst from bleaching. We’re checking them both out today.’

  ‘Does it harm the healthy reef, taking the fragments?’ Guy asked.

  Meena pulled a face. ‘It’s not a perfect solution, because those fragments would normally fall and grow on the reefs nearby. But I don’t want to go breaking handfuls of coral off a healthy reef. So...it’s the best we have. It’s a risk. And if it doesn’t take on the other reef—it’s heartbreaking,’ she admitted.

  A huge part of her job was weighing up benefits and risks like this, and it felt as though the stakes couldn’t be higher. And so much of the time it didn’t work. The damage that had been done was irreversible.

  ‘But sometimes, like the reef we’re going to see today, the transplant takes, the coral grows, the fish and all the other marine life come back and it’s...’ She smiled and gestured with her hands as she searched for the right word. ‘It’s...glorieux,’ she said at last. It’s glorious.

  * * *

  She was glorious, Guy thought as the gentle breeze off the water teased her hair into soft tangles and her passion for the reef brought a glow to her face that he recognised from a younger Meena. She invested so much in these reefs. It was obvious from the look on her face when she spoke about them how personally she took each success and failure.

  Had that been there before? he asked himself, trying to remember. Back then, he was pretty sure that he’d been only interested in her passion for him. That wasn’t fair, he corrected himself. It hadn’t just been about lust, or the thrill of the chase. It hadn’t been a physical thing. Or just a physical thing. Though, while they were talking about glorious...

  The connection between them had gone deeper than that. They’d cared for one another. Cared for one another’s passions as well. It seemed important to him now that he was the only keeper of those memories that he got them right.

  He’d come here wanting to forget, to pour concrete over his memories. To stop them seeping into his consciousness, making it impossible to move on. But once he’d found out about her amnesia that hadn’t seemed fair any more. He couldn’t tell her about what had happened between them that summer. Not without hurting her. But if he wiped those memories from his own mind too then they were truly gone. He was the backup copy. And Meena had lost so much already that he didn’t want to take that from her as well.

  After they had swum together alone the other day, he had known that spending more time together—just the two of them—was a bad idea, but here they were. It would be too easy to slip back into old ways of t
hinking. Old ways of feeling. He had to remember that things were different now. That he was different now. That the things that he’d had to offer her back then were no longer his to give. He had wanted to love her. To protect her. To be her partner. But he’d failed her back then, and failed the woman he had replaced her with, and he knew that it would happen again. And he wouldn’t hurt her like that again. She had spent seven years moving on from what they had shared, and lost, and he wouldn’t drag her back.

  ‘What do you hope to see?’ he asked, keeping their focus on the dive.

  ‘I want to check the transplant sites first; make sure that the new coral is still growing well. We used a couple of different attachment methods, so it’ll be interesting to see whether there’s any difference in how they are faring. I’ll need to survey the marine life, as well, to see if there are any new arrivals since I checked it last month.’

  He nodded; that all seemed reasonable. ‘I’ll show you to where you can get changed,’ Guy said as they both looked up to the full height of the yacht. The little speedboat had brought them to the lower deck and the white of the cabin towered, blindingly bright, above them.

  He could let a steward show her to the guest cabin that he’d put aside for her use. That would be the sensible thing to do. But it was inhospitable, he justified to himself. She was his guest on the yacht, so it was his responsibility as host to make sure she was comfortable.

  That was a lie. He wanted to spend time with her. He was excited by her presence in his life and he wanted to make the most of it. There was no point denying the way that he was drawn to her. But that didn’t mean that he was going to be stupid about it. He knew that he was bad news for her. Knew that he was walking on glass, trying to keep their shared history from her even if he genuinely believed that knowing the truth could only hurt her.

  As they climbed the steps to the upper deck of the yacht, he wondered what she would make of it. The Meena that he had known so many years ago wouldn’t have been impressed by it. She loved the boat that she had rescued from a junk yard before university and had lovingly restored. He had felt a pang in his gut when he had seen it earlier, remembering all the times they had taken that boat out to Le Bijou. It had been their escape, somewhere they could relax without the fear of being spotted by someone from the resort, without risking Meena’s job.

  He watched her as they moved along the yacht. Her eyes had widened as they had entered the main cabin, but he could see the slight rise of her eyebrows that showed that she was amused rather than impressed by the luxury.

  He had bought this yacht, as he had done almost everything else in the last few years, because it was the furthest thing that he could imagine from how they’d travelled around the islands when he had been on St Antoine before. He hadn’t wanted to remember her boat. Hadn’t been able to think about going out on it with her. That was why he had taken the speedboat to meet her on Le Bijou. It was only when he’d seen that she had that unfamiliar glass-bottomed boat that he had finally decided that he would go out on the water with her.

  They arrived at the cabin and he hesitated at the door. Crossing the threshold of her private cabin was a line both literal and metaphorical that he wasn’t prepared to cross.

  ‘You can change in here,’ he told her. ‘The stewards will get you anything you need.’

  He turned to go, but the sound of Meena’s voice pulled him back.

  ‘This yacht is very impressive, Guy.’

  Of course it was. It was all part of the image. He owned a string of luxury resorts. His billionaire customers expected to see the owner playing the part. More important, they expected to be wined and dined by him occasionally, and the yacht was a part of the deal. It was all for show. So why did it bother him that she saw that? That she saw through the image that he had constructed?

  Why did that ironic crook of her eyebrow unsettle him?

  ‘I’ll meet you on the lower deck. The equipment is all down there, but there are wetsuits in the wardrobe here. Choose whichever you prefer.’ He turned away so that she couldn’t read his face. He hadn’t expected her still to be able to read him. He’d assumed that that had been lost along with her memories. But he had the uncomfortable feeling that there was still something there, some understanding of who he was.

  He headed to his own cabin and changed into his swim shorts before he headed down to the deck where the dive gear was kept to change into his wetsuit and wait for Meena to arrive. As he pulled the neoprene over his legs, working the tight fabric up his body, he steeled himself for the sight of Meena in hers. He had seen her in a rash suit just a few days ago and, though he had averted his eyes as much as possible, the sight of her body in that skintight material had brought back more memories than he could comfortably handle.

  He heard bare feet padding up behind him and turned to see Meena walking along the side deck towards him. It was good that he had prepared himself because, even with trying to keep his eyes locked somewhere over her shoulder, his peripheral vision couldn’t miss the fact that the wetsuit emphasised the sumptuous curves of breasts, waist and hips.

  Once, his hands had known those curves as well as they had known his own body. Over the course of that summer, they had explored her body together until he hadn’t known where he had ended and she’d begun. He would lie with her in his arms, her limbs entwined with his, feeling the rise and fall of her breath as if it had been his own.

  As one of the stewards showed Meena where the various masks, fins, air tanks and other equipment were stored, Guy kept his gaze fixed firmly out on the water, aware that he was being rude. But that was infinitely better than the alternative, which was turning to look and talk to her, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to keep his feelings under control. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

  He pulled on fins and his gas tanks, feeling their protection like a charm. It was impossible to find someone anything other than funny in full scuba equipment, and he was counting on that to see them through today. He concentrated on the dive plan as she talked him through it, impressed by her attention to detail. Though he had no reason to be surprised. She had taught him to dive, after all. He knew how good she was. He checked his watch and with a final nod at Meena tipped himself backwards from the side of the boat.

  As the water engulfed him, he took a second to orient himself in the whiteout of bubbles and then surfaced to look and see that Meena had followed him into the water.

  He gave her the okay sign as the water settled around her as the ocean adjusted to their presence.

  The reef started just a few metres away, and he put his face under the water, marvelling as he always did at that line between the above and the below—the reflective mirror of the surface that hid the wealth of life underneath the surface. As he watched, schools of neon fish darted past in flashes of yellow and blue, and as he relaxed below the surface, his breaths slowing into the familiar huff of the regulator, he began to take in more—anemones swishing in the current, the slow crawl of a hermit crab down on the sand.

  He looked over at Meena, who signed that they should dive deeper, and he gave her another okay sign. It was a long time since he’d dived, and he’d forgotten the otherworldly feeling of being beneath the water, his soundscape reduced to the slow, steady rhythms of his own breath and heartbeat, light restricted to those rays that struggled through the body of the ocean, growing fewer and dimmer the deeper that they dived.

  He followed Meena’s fins through the water, looking when she turned and pointed out something on the reef that he hadn’t noticed. A tiny crab, a sea snake, a lion fish guarding its territory, spines erect and fearsome. They skirted away from that last one, giving it plenty of room, not wanting the underwater emergency of a nasty sting even through the neoprene of their wetsuits.

  The yacht was a dark shadow on the surface of the water, growing more distant as they rounded another side of the reef. Meena stopped again and
pointed her index and middle fingers in a V at her mask, divers’ sign language for ‘look’, and then pointed into a dark nook of the reef. He didn’t want to risk damaging the coral with his fins by getting too close, so he stayed as still as he could, calling to mind everything he had learned about buoyancy in order to be completely immobile above the reef. Mask below fins, breathing slowly and steadily, he didn’t even need to adjust his buoyancy control to keep him in position.

  He followed where Meena was pointing to what seemed like a stony piece of coral. But as he watched longer, buffeted only slightly by a gentle current, he realised that he was looking at a stone fish. Something he never would have noticed if he hadn’t been with Meena. Something he would have swum straight past if he hadn’t been with someone who knew these reefs like they were a part of her. He looked up, the regulator in his mouth making it impossible to smile, but from the expression on Meena’s face his excitement must have been showing in his eyes.

  He slowly swam up from the reef until he could gently kick his fins without risking touching the coral. As they continued on around the reef, Meena taking photos and pointing out where new pieces of coral had been cemented or tied into place, he lost count of the number of species that he saw. The contrast with the reef at Le Bijou, where they had snorkelled together, was astonishing. And he knew that he would do anything that he could to restore the reefs there. Seeing that it could be done, that it had been done here, was more moving than he could have expected.

  Through perseverance, stubbornness and her meticulous research, Meena had found a way to turn the clock back here. To undo the damage wreaked by careless tourists and the inexorable warming of the seas; to bring life back to this barren reef. He could have watched it all day. Watched the fish darting and the anemones swaying, and Meena click, click, clicking away with her camera. Always looking for more information, more ideas, more ways to help return this ecosystem to its former glory.