With bad news? Bryony wondered, and once more glanced across at the Felicite riding the still heavy swell at her mooring. ‘The Bonne Chance, has she—?’
‘She come up in crique, maitresse. Not much broken,’ he added cheerfully, and Bryony knew he would never have looked so cheerful if anything had happened to her two-man crew. They were sensitive people and very fond of her young half-brother, as they were of her.
‘And the two men—What about my brother and Louis Ortega? Were they all right?’
‘Li’l bit hurt, not bad.’
It was assurance enough, and Bryony nodded her thanks, turning back without asking how much damage had been done to the quay and its buildings—property did not matter so much. She wanted to get back and see Tim; discover for herself how little or how much he had been hurt.
She had noticed Louis Ortega’s little house in darkness as she passed, so obviously he had been taken up to the house as well, so that Marie could take care of him, and since she had seen nothing of Marie either, she had probably returned with them in the jeep. Marie would not soon let her precious grandson out of her sight again, now that she had him back.
Returning through the towering jungle of banana plants. Bryony made her way cautiously, even though the wind had already started to dry out the ground. The path was still slippery and offered a very precarious footing in the almost dark, so that she began once more to wish she had taken the road instead.
Seeking a drier section, she choose to walk along the edges of the rows of plants, but found the large ragged leaves constantly across her path, and she muttered a mild curse when the scarf was snatched from her head. It hung suspended just out of reach, flung there by the spring-back of a branch, and it was pointless to try and recover it, so she went on, her hair tumbled by the still frisky wind.
Taking the path to the house once more, she noticed that the shutters had been opened again. Lighted windows beamed out across the wet gardens, striking splashes of colour on heavy-headed blossoms and glinting with swiftly gone flashes of diamond brightness on wet leaves. The ground smelled lush and cool, and she could almost hear the sound of the thirsty soil drawing in the fresh rainfall.
Jenny was in the hall when she walked in, apparently having just come downstairs, and Jules came out from the salon in the same instant. Looking at Bryony’s rumpled and untidy red head and the mud on her shoes, he grinned ruefully.
‘What happened to you, sweetheart? You look as if you’ve been through a hedge!’
‘I’ve been through the groves.’ She glanced from him to Jenny, seeking some clue to the way things were, then beyond him to the stairs. ‘How’s Tim? I was told he wasn’t badly hurt.’
Jules put an arm about his wife’s shoulders and smiled. ‘He’s got a couple of broken ribs and some hefty bruises, but he isn’t too bad; Marie’s strapped him up as well as she can until we can get the doctor over tomorrow.’ He looked at her curiously, a brow raised. ‘Is Dom putting the jeep away?’
Bryony frowned, suspicion niggling uneasily at the back of her mind. ‘Isn’t he here? I was told he drove back to the house with you.’
‘So he did,’ Jules agreed, ‘but when we got back and found you’d gone off somewhere on your own, he went out again to find you.’ He eyed her dishevelment and grinned. ‘If you came through the groves no wonder he missed you. He isn’t going to be very pleased, Bryony, he told you to stay put, didn’t he?’
‘He can hardly tell me to do anything, Jules—I’m old enough to act on my own initiative!’
Jules regarded her for a second, one brow slightly raised and a deep and speculative look in his eyes. ‘I’m not sure that Dom shares your view, sweetheart, and he was pretty wild when he went out again.’
‘Oh.’
She could sense that curiously apprehensive manner of Jenny’s, and guessed that she was thinking along the same lines. If Dominic had gone back for her he was not going to be very pleased, as Jules said, but she could not have guessed he would go looking for her. Shrugging carelessly, she threw off any vague feeling of uneasiness she felt.
‘Oh well, he’ll realise I’m not on the road before he gets very far.’
There was more bravado than carelessness behind it, and Jules realised it, cocking a brow at her he pulled a face. ‘You were told to sit tight with Jenny, I understand. The fact that you went plodding around in the mud instead isn’t going to make you the most popular girl in town, darling, and you know it isn’t just because you didn’t do as you were told. You could have got yourself into a pretty tricky situation if that wind had got up again while you were out in the groves.’
‘But it had dropped by the time—’
‘And it could have got up again just as quickly, Bryony, and you know it.’
It wasn’t like Jules to scold her, and she felt very chastened as she offered her explanation. ‘I couldn’t just sit and wait when I didn’t know what had happened to Tim; Dom must have realised that.’
She spun round quickly when she heard the jeep pulling up on the drive outside, and it was both instinctive and unconscious when the tip of her tongue flicked briefly across her lips when she heard the door slam shut. Dominic came up the front steps in one stride, his whole bearing driving away the black mood he was in as well as the dark brows drawn together and the stony hardness in his grey eyes.
He came straight across to where the three of them stood grouped near the foot of the stairs but it was Bryony who had his attention. ‘Where the devil did you get to?’ he demanded. ‘I tracked you through that damned mud and found this on one of the plants!’ He thrust her head-scarf into her hands and she took it automatically. ‘Damn it, Bryony, why don’t you do as you’re told just for once—why didn’t you stay home with Jenny?’
‘Because I went to see what had happened to Tim, of course!’
Her response was hasty and slightly breathless, and there was a flush in her cheeks aroused by the same emotion that made her eyes so huge and brightly blue. She heard Jenny’s sharply indrawn breath and vaguely registered irritation, but her eyes were fixed on Dominic. He looked dark and stormy and dangerously near to losing his temper, and she really didn’t want that to happen; especially when she recognised the grey tinge of tiredness below his tan.
‘I’ve spent quite enough time tonight chasing around after you two!’ He waved a large hand in a curiously violent gesture. ‘For two people who claim to be adult, you both behave with incredible stupidity and I’ve a good mind to wash my hands of the pair of you!’
‘I wish you would, then we’d both be able to live our lives our way!’
The words were cut off sharply when she gasped in surprise at the stinging slap to her cheek, and she once more registered Jenny’s swiftly drawn breath. One hand to her face, she stared after Dom’s angrily striding figure as he started upstairs, taking the wide steps two at a time and each step thudding hard with fury on the wooden stairs.
She stepped back quickly when Jules reached out and took her hand, his face showing regret rather than sympathy, so that she could not help feeling he did not blame Dominic for what he did.
‘Don’t think too badly of him, Bryony.’ She turned and looked at him with blankly empty eyes for a moment, then shook her head slowly. ‘He’s had a pretty hard time tonight, and finding you gone was the last straw. You know how explosive he gets when his emotions are involved.’
‘His—his emotions?’ She looked at Jules, the blankness in her eyes becoming increasingly curious. ‘Are you saying that Dom—’
‘I’m saying it’s time Dom got married and found himself a wife to occupy his time.’ He pulled Jenny close to him and kissed her forehead, smiling down into her eyes. ‘It works wonders at putting business worries into perspective—Dom doesn’t allow his emotions enough rein, and I’ll be glad if he would! If ever he finds himself worrying about one of us, and you in particular, being his ward in a manner of speaking, he can’t cope with the havoc it plays with his cool practicality.’ H
e kissed Jenny on her mouth and laughed. ‘I’ll have to see if I can’t find him someone like Tim’s schoolteacher, eh, darling?’
He turned and drew Jenny with him towards the stairs, looking back over his shoulder at Bryony. ‘I’m coming in a minute,’ she said, and he nodded.
The wind had dropped and there was only the familiar soft noises that every night brought to the old house, but Bryony was restless, too restless to think of going back to sleep, and she wandered back into the salon. Standing by the windows, she locked out into the garden for a moment or two, then walked over and switched off the lights, to give the thin sliver of moon a chance to show itself in long threads of silver across the floor.
Tim would be asleep, lulled by one of Marie’s secret recipes for healing sleep and Marie would probably be alert to the slightest sound from her precious grandson. She thought of Tim and his schoolteacher, of Jules and Jenny, happy and wrapped up in each other’s company—in love.
Dominic should have married before now. He must surely have met women who would have been willing enough to become his wife and share his small kingdom with him, but he had never, so far as she knew, found the one he was looking for. If he did—She moved away from the window and made her way back to the hall and the stairs. If he did she didn’t think she could go on living on Petitnue—it would not be the same, and she hated to think of it changing. Tomorrow he would say he was sorry—she knew Dom.
CHAPTER THREE
Bryony had thought she would be too restless to go back to sleep after the events of the night, but no sooner had she put her head on the pillow than she was asleep, and it was well past her usual time when she woke. Her room was bright with morning light when she opened her eyes and the perfume of the frangipani drifted in from the gardens, enhanced by last night’s rain.
She stretched lazily, taking a few minutes to remember exactly what had happened last night that had stunned her with its unexpectedness, and almost unconsciously a hand strayed to her left cheek. There was nothing to show it this morning, but she could still recall the shock of realising that Dominic had actually struck her.
All the time she was bathing and dressing she mused on what he was going to say to her this morning, for she had no doubt at all that he would apologise. What she found curious was how unwilling she was to think of him asking her forgiveness. Apologising never came easily to him, and in her own case she felt herself oddly in sympathy with his impulsive violence.
She must see Tim this morning too, as soon as she was dressed, and find out for herself how much he was hurt. He would be anxious, she thought, to know that she was on his side, and she wished she felt more in sympathy with him and less with Dominic. It had been simply defiance that made him do as he did, almost certainly, but she wished he hadn’t involved Louis as well.
At some time during the last century the original house had been extended and a whole new wing built in a T-shape across the old one, and it was in the old part of the house that Marie had her room, the rest of the rooms being kept for the very occasional visitor. It was when Bryony was passing across the landing going towards Tim’s room that she saw Louis Ortega coming from one of the spare rooms, and she stopped, looking along at him while he closed the bedroom door.
He had a piece of strapping across the top of one arm and a dark bruise down one side of his face, and when he looked up and saw her he hesitated. Perhaps it was the unexpectedness of seeing her that confused him, for he had no shirt on and the light slacks he wore were torn and crumpled, his once white plimsolls stained with sea-water. He was never anything other than neat and clean and his present dishevelment obviously made him self-conscious for a moment.
‘Good morning, Louis, how are you?’
The fact that she stood waiting for him gave him little option but to join her, but he came along the corridor with such an air of discomfiture that Bryony was tempted to find it amusing. It was difficult to believe sometimes that he and Jules were the same age, for Louis Ortega had an air of maturity about him, even in his present situation, that Jules lacked.
He was bigger than Jules too, not so much taller as much broader and, thanks to his unknown father, he was darker than Marie’s light gold colour, with a skin like brown satin. Bryony’s first sight of him had been when he lifted her out of the boat that had brought her to Petitnue when she was ten years old. She had been half asleep then and he had seemed strange and foreign and rather terrifying as he carried her ashore, and she had been frightened to death of him.
Since then he had become a good friend, acting as a kind of unofficial bodyguard to both her and Tim, as well as teaching Bryony the names of all the strange and exotic plants around her new home, and showing her the weird and beautiful things that grew beneath the deep blue waters of the Caribbean. How to swim and dive, and how to avoid the few unpleasant creatures that shared their island paradise. There was little he would not do for her or Tim, and she could guess that was how he had become involved with Tim in last night’s affair, so that she smiled at him as he came to join her.
‘Good morning, maitresse. I’m sorry for the way I look, but I lose my shirt in the crique las’ night when we go aground.’
Taking note of the strapping on his arm and the bruises, she looked sympathetic. ‘Should you be around—are you all right?’
A wry smile suggested that her concern had not been shared by others, and she wondered whether it was Marie or Dom he feared most. ‘Grand’mere don’ believe in stayin’ in bed when you ain’t bad hurt!’ He pulled a face and put a hand to his bruised cheek. ‘I ain’t hurt bad, maitresse, on’y a cut an’ some bruises, but I hurt some.’
Bryony shivered in sympathy, remembering the fury of last night’s storm. ‘I can imagine—I wonder you weren’t both killed!’
Only in the past few months had he started to address her as mistress instead of using just her Christian name as he had always done before, and Bryony suspected that it was Dominic’s doing. She was growing up, and Dom was not the kind of man to take chances on familiarity breeding, if not contempt, at least too much familiarity. Occasionally Louis forgot and when he did she never commented, any more than Louis had commented on the reason for the change, but simply made it a habit.
She started along the landing once more and Louis fell into step beside her. ‘Is Tim as lucky as you? Or did he get the worst of it?’
Louis’s smile showed white in his dark face and he looked as if he anticipated her response without being unduly troubled by it. ‘Oh, Tim got the worst! When we brought up in the crique I landed on top him an’ broke he ribs!’
‘Oh, Louis!’ Reproach mingled with laughter in her eyes, for she could imagine Tim’s language when he found himself pinned down by Louis’s not inconsiderable weight, and he would never have found it amusing if Tim had not come off fairly lightly. Outside Tim’s bedroom door she turned and looked at him. ‘I doubt if Tim is finding it very funny; are you coming in to see him?’
A thumb scratched thoughtfully at Louis’s black hair as he tried to judge what she wanted his answer to be.
‘You think I be allowed?’ he asked, and Bryony’s eyes challenged him.
‘Why not? Are you scared of what he’ll do to you for falling on top of him?’
‘I’m thinkin’ of Monsieur Laminaire,’ Louis returned swiftly.
‘Dom will be having his breakfast by now, or he might even have already gone out, it’s pretty late.’ She tapped on Tim’s door and waited for the familiar voice to invite her in, looking at Louis over her shoulder. ‘Come in and see him, Louis—he’ll be glad to know you’re not too badly hurt.’
The smile she wore as she opened the door trembled away when she saw Tim, and she stopped so short in the doorway that Louis almost collided with her as he followed her in. She was not quite sure what she expected, but certainly not the pale face and dark-circled eyes that looked across at her, and she hurried over to him after her initial hesitation, and stood beside the bed, a strange chokey feeling i
n her throat suddenly. She had never seen Tim laid low before, and she found it alarmingly affecting.
‘Oh, Tim!’ Impulsively she crouched down beside him and took the hand nearest to her in both hers. ‘I didn’t realise how bad you were!’
Tim’s head rolled side to side on the pillow and he was smiling, even though it had a slightly rueful look to it. ‘Actually I don’t feel too bad now, thanks to some foul-tasting voodoo juice that Marie’s been dosing me with.’
‘Same as I got!’ Louis’s voice was round with laughter, and Bryony looked up at him standing just behind her. ‘But it good stuff, Tim, an’ it Grand’mere’s secret dose!’
‘You deserve it!’ Tim was more cheerful than she expected in the circumstances, although something told Bryony that quite a lot of this bonhomie, was bravado. ‘Did that great lump tell you that he knocked me flying when we went aground, and then fell on top of me?’
‘He told me,’ Bryony said. ‘He says you’ve got broken ribs, Tim.’
‘That’s right, I came home last night in the jeep tied up in strips of Louis’s shirt. I’m lucky it wasn’t worse after the fall I took, and now I’m lying here in agony while he gets off with a few bruises!’
‘Well, it’s probably a judgment on you for giving us all such a worrying time last night—we were all worried sick about you, Tim.’ It was the nearest she meant to get to reproaching him, but somehow she kept remembering Dominic’s face last night; grey with anxiety and fatigue, and she did blame him. ‘We didn’t even know for sure where you were.’
‘Couldn’t you guess?’ The edge of defensiveness on his voice betrayed the nervousness he felt beneath the determinedly bright exterior. ‘Surely Dom knew, or guessed, where I’d gone, didn’t he?’
Neither she nor Louis answered him, but Bryony changed the subject. ‘It was very short-lasting, that’s one blessing,’ she said. ‘Dom said it wasn’t going to be a bad one, and it wasn’t.’
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