by Sandra Field
He sounded as off balance as she felt. “Yes,” she faltered, “that’s right. From before. In—in Toronto.”
Somewhere she’d read that if you were going to lie, it was best to stay as close to the truth as possible. “A couple of years ago,” she added.
“We’d rather you didn’t tell the rest of them,” Brant said.
“Much rather,” Rowan gulped. It was odd to feel herself allied with Brant, even temporarily like this. Very odd.
“Just so long as you behave yourself, young man,” May said severely. “I’ve been on six different trips with Rowan and she’s one of the best.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Brant said. He’d had a teacher in grade five of whom he’d been healthily in awe; May and Peg, separately and collectively, fostered in him much the same feeling.
“The best,” Peg corroborated.
“I’d better get my binoculars,” Brant said hastily, dropped the earrings into Rowan’s palm and fled.
Fight or flight? If it was Peg and May, he’d choose flight any day, he thought, unlocking the door to his room. But if it was Rowan?
Rowan was glad he was here because it was enabling her to free herself from him.
He didn’t like that one bit. In fact, he hated it with every fiber of his being. So what was he going to do about it? Fight? Or run away? The choice was his.
As he brushed his teeth, something else clicked into his brain. Normally, strategy was an integral part of his life. Before he left on any of his assignments, he researched the area exhaustively, planned his itinerary and tried to anticipate all the things that could go wrong. Quite often, his life had depended on this.
Ever since Gabrielle had shown him the brochure for this trip, he’d been acting like a stray bullet ricocheting between two cliffs. Fighting with Rowan at the Grenada airport. Forcing his way into her room. Searching her bag. Kissing her in a public dining room.
Only a couple of months ago a reviewer, referring to one of his articles, had spoken of his cool, multifaceted intelligence. Maybe it was time he tried to resurrect that intelligence.
Maybe his life depended on it.
Startled, Brant stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. Did it? Is that why he was here?
Then he caught sight of his watch. He was going to be late. Grabbing his haversack and binoculars from the bed, he left the room. But one thing was clear to him. He needed to kiss Rowan again. In privacy and taking his time. He had to know if she’d respond to him. Because if she did, she couldn’t very well move on to another man.
No, sirree.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE road to the St. Vincent rain forest grew narrower and narrower, winding along sharp drops without a trace of a guardrail, passing through little villages where goats and donkeys watched the van pass by, and uniformed schoolchildren waved at its occupants. Finally they reached a small parking lot, and everyone clambered out.
Rowan loved this particular nature reserve. The volcanic mountains, green-clad, reared themselves against the sky. Puffy white clouds were sailing along in the wind, which hissed through the sabered fronds of palms and rattled the broad leaves of the banana trees. Cows grazed at the boundary of the reserve, accompanied by white-plumed cattle egrets. She led the way up the slope, passing the picnic area where they’d eat lunch the next day. She had lots of time to find the birds and she felt much better for having told Brant a few home truths.
Freedom to get on with her life. Not until she’d put that into words had she realized the extent to which she’d been on hold the last two years. She’d been a walking zombie. A woman uninterested in other men, bored or repelled by her few attempts at dating, her sexuality buried as deeply as her emotions.
Time for a change, she thought blithely, and when Steve offered to carry the scope, accepted with a smile that was perhaps more friendly than was wise.
Brant saw that smile. He clenched his jaw, feeling a primitive upsurge of male possessiveness; he’d long ago concluded that civilization could be a very thin skin over instincts and urges that ran far more deeply and imperatively.
Which led to the one question he was very determinedly ignoring. The question of whether he still loved Rowan.
She brought the group to a halt in an open area, and within minutes they were rewarded by a pair of birds flapping rapidly across their field of vision. Brant would never have known them for parrots; they were too far away. But parrots they apparently were.
Unimpressed, he brought up the rear as they entered the dense shadows of the rain forest. A stream ran alongside the trail; tree ferns waved their delicate fronds above his head, and bamboos whispered gently in the breeze; the vertical strands of lianas dropped from the heights of balsa trees to the ground, like the bars of a cage. He’d spent a lot of time in rain forests over the years, in the golden triangle of Thailand, in Myanmar and Borneo and Papua New Guinea. He trudged along, answering Natalie’s attempts at conversation with minimal politeness.
The first flurry of excitement was a cocoa thrush; they hadn’t sighted one in Grenada, so St. Vincent was their last chance. It was a chubby brown bird of no particular distinction, in Brant’s opinion nothing to get excited about. The same was true of the next sighting, a whistling warbler endemic to St. Vincent. He caught a glimpse high in the canopy of a black and white bird, and in the scope saw the dark band across its chest that the bird book depicted. Rowan, Peg and May were beaming; although she couldn’t get a photo of the warbler, even Natalie temporarily forgot him in its favor.
The pace was excruciatingly slow. He dropped back for a while, not wanting to talk to anyone, watching the small patches of sunlight waver through the trees, noticing how everything green struggled toward that light. Every other time he’d been in rain forests, his nerves had been stretched tight, alert for dangers that ranged from drug gangs to rebel guerrillas. There was no danger today. No reason why he shouldn’t stop to admire a fern’s single-minded climb up the trunk of a waterwood tree, or listen to the innocent burble of the stream in its mossy bed. He began to pick out individual birdcalls; he watched a black and scarlet ant lug a scrap of leaf across the path.
A flicker of movement in the trees caught his attention. When he raised his binoculars, he saw a most peculiar brown and white bird that was fluttering its wings continually, a big, smooth-feathered bird with a predatory bill. A trembler, he thought, remembering his reading on the plane, and flicked through the bird book until he found it. Feeling very pleased with himself for actually having identified something, he caught up with the rest of them.
“You missed the brown trembler,” Natalie chided.
“No, I didn’t,” he said, and grinned at Rowan.
“Have you seen the tanager?” she asked, pointing to the scope. “Lesser Antillean tanager, St. Vincent race.”
Brant gazed into the eyepiece. Into his field of vision leaped a bird with jade wings, a bronze cap and a rich, golden back, all its feathers gleaming as though they had been polished especially for him. He raised his head, looked straight at Rowan and said huskily, “It’s very beautiful. Its head’s the same color as your hair.”
She blushed fierily. Steve pushed him aside, growling, “Let me have a look.”
That remark hadn’t been part of Brant’s strategy. But it had worked. If she was ready to move on to someone else, why should a compliment from him so evidently discompose her?
The next bird they sighted was a solitaire, a handsome bird with gray, white and rufous plumage, whose clear, chiming call sounded as ethereal as a boys’ choir in a cathedral. Rowan then located a ruddy quail dove, followed by a purple-throated Carib. The Carib, so Brant discovered, was a hummingbird. At first he wasn’t overly impressed by this small, dark bird. But then it darted into a patch of sunlight; its feathers flashed like amethysts and emeralds, brilliantly iridescent, fleetingly and gloriously beautiful.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Rowan said casually.
“Exquisite,” he said, making no attempt to ma
sk his delight.
Rowan frowned at him. The Brant of old would no more have spent time watching a hummingbird than he would have canceled one of his own trips for her sake. He looked relaxed, she thought. As though he were enjoying himself. And that, too, was new.
Feeling uneasy and on edge, she folded the scope. Five minutes further along the trail she found another Carib, this time perched on a tiny, cup-shaped nest in the shade. “Is it a male or a female?” Natalie asked, focusing her camera.
“Female.” Rowan looked right at Brant. “The pair bond lasts two or three seconds and then the male’s gone.”
Her chin was tilted. We went to bed together that last night, she was saying. But then you left, didn’t you? You left me alone for eight months.
He had. She’d begged him not to go to Colombia that last time and he’d paid her no attention. She was using female intuition, so he’d told her, as a ploy to try and get her own way. Three weeks into his stay he’d been abducted, along with Gabrielle; ironically, both he and Gabrielle had been hired as negotiators to obtain the release of some oil company engineers who’d been kidnapped by the same group of rebels.
His eyes fell from the blatant challenge in Rowan’s gaze, his fragile sense of peace shattered. In the four years of their marriage, had he ever changed his plans for her? As he sought through his memories, he could only conclude that he hadn’t. His job was much too important for that. He earned five times her salary; his articles helped mold opinion in high places around the globe, and exposed atrocities that dictators the world over didn’t want to appear in print. Whereas all she did was find birds.
Birds that had made his soul exult with their beauty.
More confused than he’d ever been in his life, Brant saw Rowan check her watch. They turned back, wending their way to the van and then driving to the hotel. Dinner remained a blur in his mind; he listened as Rowan outlmed the plans for tomorrow, and escaped as soon as he could. In his room he thumbed through the bird book for a while and read a couple of chapters in the very badly written espionage novel he’d picked up in Toronto’s Terminal Two. Although the room felt too small to contain him, he had no desire to head for the nearest bar. In Grenada all that had gotten him was a hangover the next day.
He’d go for a swim. If he didn’t soon burn off some energy, he’d go nuts.
The moon was three-quarters full and the lights from the hotel glimmered on the water. The repetitive slosh of waves on the sand sounded very soothing. He strode past the bar, where Steve was chatting up one of the other female guests and Natalie was sitting with Sheldon and Karen, drinking rum punch and looking thoroughly bored. Quickly he dropped his towel on the sand and ran into the water, heading straight out in a fast crawl.
Away from the lot of them. But mostly away from his own thoughts.
There were powerboats and yachts anchored offshore. Brant swam around them, glad to be out of sight of the hotel; then he set off for the rocky point to the south of the hotel, swimming more easily now, enjoying the splashing in his ears and the pull of his muscles against the water’s resistance. The moonlight that dipped and swayed on the swell was a cold, luminous white. Rowan had been cold toward him, cold and distant. Wasn’t it up to him to ignite her to the fire and heat of the sun? All alone like this, feeling oddly peaceful, that didn’t seem so impossible a task.
He pulled himself up on the rocks and sat for a while, until he started to get cold. Needing to get his blood moving, he set off at a jog back down the beach toward the hotel.
Halfway along the sand, a figure stepped out of the bushes that edged the hotel grounds. A woman. For a wild moment Brant was sure it was Rowan; in crushing disappointment he realized it was Natalie. She flung herself at him, winding her arms around his waist and leaning all her weight on him. He staggered, put his own arms around her to keep his balance and said flatly, “Natalie, I don’t need this.”
She smelled strongly of rum. She said blearily, “Sure you do...I’ll give you a good time, I’ve wanted to go to bed with you ever since I saw you at breakfast that first day, you’re just the kind of guy who turns me on.”
She rather spoiled this speech by ending it with a hiccup. Brant set her firmly on her feet and moved back two paces. She was wearing a minidress that left little to the imagination and she was smiling at him, running her tongue over her full lips. “Steve is the one who turns you on,” he said, wondering if it was true. “You’re only doing this to make him jealous.”
She reached out one hand and ran it down his body from breastbone to navel. “Don’t make me laugh. You’ve got a great body.”
Her caress left him as cold as the moonlight. “I’m not available.”
She sidled closer. “Oh, yes, you are...although you do take the cake for being uptight. Wound up tighter than a drum, what’s your problem?”
He wouldn’t have expected her to be so perceptive. “If I’ve got a problem,” he said wryly, “it’s not your job to solve it Make up with Steve...that’s what you really want to do.”
Her lip quivered. She sagged against him, wailing, “I asked him to marry me a week ago and he says he’s not ready to settle down, and look at him at the bar sucking up to that blonde, I hate him, I hate his guts...”
She was sobbing now, luxuriantly prolonged sobs that Brant was sure everyone at the hotel could hear. “Natalie,” he said with all the force of his personality, “shove it! It’s the rum that’s crying, not you, and maybe you should sit down somewhere all by yourself and think about what you really want out of life.” Advice it wouldn’t hurt him to take himself, he thought ruefully.
“I want y-you,” she snuffled.
“I’m not your type any more than you’re mine.”
Her head reared up. “Right,” she said venomously, “I’ve watched you, you’ve only got eyes for Rowan. Well, you can have her, the stuck-up bitch—I’m going back to the bar.”
She set off unsteadily across the sand. Brant ran his fingers through his wet hair. He’d tried.
Much good had it done him.
He’d give her five minutes and then he’d get his towel and go to bed. Did every other member of the group think he only had eyes for Rowan?
Peg and May sure did.
Hell, thought Brant Hell and damnation.
A voice wafted across the water, a voice full of mockery. “You missed your chance there, Brant.”
The hair rose on the back of his neck. He looked out to sea, and saw a dark head, dark as a seal’s, swimming toward the shore. Rowan.
Great. So she’d been a witness to that little fiasco. He said nastily, “This whole trip is rapidly turning into farce—remember that play we saw in London, the one where people kept bursting through all those doors? All we need now is Steve to blunder his way down the beach.”
“Oh, no,” Rowan said, “you’ve got it wrong. All we need now is Gabrielle.”
She was standing up in thigh-deep water, moonlight glinting on her wet skin and on a one-piece swimsuit that clung to her body. His heart was jouncing in his chest as though he were seventeen, not thirty-seven. Bluntly he stated the obvious. “I sure don’t need Gabrielle here.”
The air was cool on Rowan’s skin; but she scarcely noticed. In an effort to settle her jangled nerves before bed, she’d swum out behind the nearest moored powerboats, and it was from there that she’d heard Natalie’s proposition, and her subsequent sobs and wails. Infuriated that everyone in the group now seemed to be aware of the tension between her and Brant, she’d then made the mistake of alerting Brant to her presence.
So much for keeping her cool.
Distantly aware that the water was to her knees now, wavelets rippling on the shore, Rowan said with icy clarity, “Oh? So you’ve dumped Gabrielle, too? She only lasted three years to my four? Dear me.”
Brant’s jaw tightened, his throat muscles corded like rope. “How about a little reality check here? You can’t dump someone you’ve never had.”
“Oh, for God’s s
ake!” Rowan exploded. “Why don’t you give up this fiction that you and Gabrielle weren’t lovers? I hate it when you lie to me.”
“I’ve never lied to you about Gabrielle!”
All the pain and rage of the last two years seized Rowan in their fangs. “I saw you, Brant,” she seethed. “The day I went to the hospital, the same day I got back from Greenland.”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“I stood in the doorway of your room and watched you for a full five seconds that felt as long as a lifetime. You had your arms around each other, you and Gabrielle, and your cheek was resting on her hair. You were whispering something to her, heaven knows what...but do you know what was the worst? The expression on your face.” In spite of herself, Rowan heard her voice break. “You looked so—so tender. So loving. I thought I was the only woman who called that up in you. I was your wife, after all. But that was the day I realized I’d been supplanted.” She scrubbed at her cheeks, where tears were mingling with drops of salt water. “So I left. And I never came back.”
Feeling as though someone had hit him with a two-byfour, Brant said helplessly, “My God, Rowan...” and all the while he was searching his memory for the details of the scene that must have, he realized with a sick lurch of his gut, cost him his marriage. “I didn’t even see you...”
“Of course you didn’t, you only had eyes for her. That’s the whole point,” Rowan said bitterly.
By now she was standing a couple of feet away from him. She was crying. But some deep intuition warned Brant against reaching out for her, even though he craved to do so. “For the last two years I’ve thought you didn’t care enough about me to come to the hospital,” he said. “That you’d condemned me for infidelity without even giving me a chance to defend myself.”
