‘Oh,’ said Lisa, her ferocity dying. ‘I didn’t think of that. Poor things.’
Kit grinned. ‘They’re demoralised. They’ve got a bunch of economists who told them to stop the music at dinner so they could talk.’
Lisa appreciated that. She gave her old naughty smile. ‘World Bank, I bet.’
Encouraged, Kit said, ‘And there’s some big-shot peace negotiator here who didn’t even notice the belly dancer.’
Lisa laughed aloud at that. But then her face darkened. She said in a hard tone, ‘I bet the ecology delegates wouldn’t notice either. I can’t tell you how long it is since Nikolai touched me.’
Ouch, thought Kit.
She dived into her mango juice. She really did not want to know about this. It was private. It was painful. And she was the last person in the world to know how to help.
But Lisa seemed to have forgotten that. Still staring out to sea, she said in a low voice, ‘He doesn’t want me any more, Kit.’
It was none of her business. She had always been hopeless about sex, anyway. How many times had Lisa pulled her back from the brink of disastrous relationships? That last one had nearly killed her, too.
And yet—And yet—She knew how Lisa felt.
She went over and put an arm round her competent sister.
For a moment Lisa stiffened. Then she dropped her head onto Kit’s shoulder.
‘I never thought it would happen to me,’ she said in a stifled voice. ‘I thought I could handle anything. You know?’
‘You can,’ said Kit stoutly.
‘Not this.’ Lisa detached herself from Kit’s comforting arm. Her voice was flat.
Despairing, thought Kit.
She said hurriedly, ‘Good sex is chemical, they say. Nothing to do with knowing someone. Or loving them. Take me, for instance—only last night I met a guy when I was swimming. We hardly spoke. But the chemistry was there all right.’
Lisa said nothing. That was unusual in itself. Normally she would have demanded all the details, delighted that Kit was showing some interest in men at last.
‘Scared me a bit,’ said Kit, fishing for a reaction. ‘I’d forgotten that attraction could be so strong. It may be nothing more than chemistry but it certainly shakes you up.’
‘Oh?’ said Lisa, indifferent.
‘Just goes to prove that relationships are a lot more than sex. You know me. Miss Iceberg of the century. Yet I fancied the guy like crazy and I didn’t even know his name. It didn’t mean anything.’
Lisa shrugged.
‘Surely it works the other way round, too?’ said Kit desperately. ‘I mean, if you’re committed to each other, you can weather a few—er—’
Lisa turned. ‘Nice try, Kit. Shame it won’t wash.’
‘What? Why?’
‘We stopped talking to each other before we stopped sleeping together,’ Lisa said brutally. ‘Tell me how we weather that.’
Kit gave up. There was nothing to say.
Philip ran his minder half way round the island on his morning run.
‘I spent too long in the conference room yesterday. I need to get my lungs open,’ he said.
He did, too. But he knew that he was really hoping to see the girl again. He didn’t.
Well, it was a long shot. And if he had seen her, there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
He went back to his meetings and put her out of his mind. And then, quite suddenly, he looked up from a diagram of new roads demanded by Rafek’s rival guerrilla leader and—there she was!
She was running down the stepping-stone path from the cliff to the beach. He was sure it was her. This morning she was wearing cotton cut-offs and a T-shirt. Her hair was no longer plastered to her head. In fact, her hair was a true fairytale gold—and as long as that of any of the princesses pictured in the old books in the nursery at Ashbarrow. Philip smiled at the thought.
She was bouncing from stone to stone. The storybook hair flew out in a fan of rainbow lights as she jumped. His brain went on sifting the evidence and balancing the probabilities, as it had been taught. But his body recognised her. It was her, his water nymph of the starry night.
At last.
He had not been watching for her. Of course he hadn’t. It was just chance that had him taking his coffee to the open windows every time the meeting broke for what Fernando called a comfort moment.
Who was she?
Surely she was not attached to one of the subsidiary negotiations? The delegates were all middle-aged management types. Like me, he thought, trying not to wince. He was thirty-five and he felt as old as the world. Whereas his golden girl was youth and spring and every playful creature he had ever seen.
For a moment he thought of the unicorn painting at Ashbarrow. It was supposed to be a study for a larger painting and the insurance was crippling because it could be an Utrillo. The unicorn was jumping through the trees, all four feet leaving the ground at once in his delight. The forest floor was scattered with daisies and anemones. They shone like jewels under the unicorn’s hooves. And the feathery mane flew like the girl’s gleaming hair.
How long was it since he had been to Ashbarrow? Four months? Five?
The girl would look good in his ancestral home, Philip thought idly. With her pearl-pale skin and corn-gold hair she could have been designed for the Queen’s Room. All that old cherry-wood four-poster needed was a golden girl lying across its green velvet coverlet, shadowed by its cloth of gold curtains, in the lavender-scented shadows of a summer afternoon…
He brought himself up short. He was breathing a little too hard.
For a moment he could not see anything but the prism of light that fractured out of the girl’s flying hair. The sea beyond her was dazzling.
He blinked and turned, intending to ask the waiter with the coffee pot who she was. He had even opened his mouth to call the man.
And a black shutter came down over his left eye. Philip went very still. Then he put his coffee down, carefully.
He looked round. No one had seen this time. Another lucky escape. That made four times that the shutter had blinded him.
It was temporary. The sight came back in a matter of minutes. But it was a complication he did not need. Everyone at the negotiations had to have total confidence in his ability to carry it through to a successful conclusion. That would not be helped by doubts over his health, however unfounded.
So he’d better stop letting himself be distracted by flying gold hair, he told himself. That was no way for a responsible peace negotiator to behave. Not even in his most private fantasies, Philip thought wryly. The girl was a distraction, no question. He could not afford distractions. And nor could all the thousands of helpless people who were expecting him to knit together some agreement between these hard-eyed men.
No more unicorns. I haven’t got time for them.
So he navigated his way carefully back to the table and called the meeting to order. And, as usual, his sight cleared in a few minutes. No one noticed that there had been anything wrong.
And the chance to ask the waiter who she was had passed.
It felt, even after all these months and years of harsh discipline, like the cruellest thing he had ever denied himself.
Kit ran down to the beach without seeing anyone. She was sure-footed as a goat. She could not remember ever feeling so good. The air felt as if the sun was smiling on her while the soft sea breeze kissed her playfully.
Maybe she would put on her swimsuit and run into the sea even if those fishing boats were still out in the bay, she thought.
‘Another new experience!’ she told herself, grinning.
But it was impossible to hang on to her neuroses in this gorgeous place. She was surprised that Lisa had managed to resist the chance to swim from Kit’s deserted beach. But Lisa had said she did not feel well again and Kit had decided not to interfere any more.
So the day was hers. And it promised to be wonderful. She was feeling brave and free and she had acres of
silver sand and the sea to play in.
Just as long as she did not have to think too much about what she looked like, Kit thought. Mirrors and other people’s eyes reminded her of everything she wanted to forget. But she could avoid both.
Which made it all the more odd that she had not tried to avoid the dark stranger by the lagoon last night, thought Kit, kicking up silky sand with her bare toes. What if he had followed her when she swam off?
She looked round her empty beach. The sun was as hot as a garment that someone had left by the fire. The seagulls wheeled lazily in the dazzling sky. She could smell salt and sea grasses and her own skin.
If he had followed her here to this deserted shore? Would she have been afraid then?
No, thought Kit.
She shivered slightly. Not with fear.
And at once thought, Careful!
That was how she had fallen into the trap last time. She had thought she was over the bad stuff. She was at college, she was enjoying her course, she had friends, plans, a life.
And then there was a man! Even to herself, Kit did not say she had fallen in love with Johnny. Well, not any more. It was not love, that wincing, obsessive anxiety that said she was not good enough for him. That she would never be good enough. Not for Johnny Marcus. Not for any man. Before she knew it she’d been out of her depth and spiralling all the way back into the dark place again.
Well, she had recovered. Thanks largely to Lisa, who never gave up on her. Lisa had found her the therapy group. Kit had done the rest.
Kit knew herself now. She knew the dangers. She knew how to avoid them. Mirrors were one big danger; mirrors showed her the body she recoiled from. Men who would take her out of her depth were another.
So it was just as well that the man had not followed her round to her personal beach, Kit told herself. Because when he had kissed her she had responded as she did not think she had ever responded before, not even to Johnny, and he was the leader of the pack at class.
Yet just for a second it had been there: a cameo of herself as a woman who could love and be lovable. There and gone. Between one heartbeat and the next. A small candle flame of revelation. I can do this!
Only then she had thought, But I can’t risk it! and dived back into the friendly water.
But it was still there, thought Kit, stirring and stirring the sand with her toe. Even this morning. In spite of Lisa’s painful confidences, in spite of all her own doubts. The tiny warmth of last night’s flickering candle was still with her.
It seemed disloyal, when Lisa was so wretched. But, all on her own, Kit danced a little hop, skip and a jump in the silky sand.
He wanted me, she thought exultantly. He really wanted me.
CHAPTER THREE
ALL day Kit went round hugging herself secretly. She tried to laugh at herself. She knew it was silly. A stranger kissed her in the moonlight and she felt as if she was Queen of the World! It was mad. He hadn’t even got a good look at her.
But he wanted me, Kit’s secret self said smugly.
She somersaulted in the water with sheer delight.
Eventually the sun got too strong for her to swim, or even sit in the shade in Tatiana’s sun hat and Lisa’s dark glasses. So she took the map from her cottage and explored one of the coastal paths that wound up into the residual rainforest. She tried to persuade Lisa to come with her but Lisa said she wanted to read and sunbathe on her terrace. So Kit went alone.
It became the pattern for the next few days. Kit would breakfast with her sister, usually passing Nikolai on the path up to their cottage. She swam after breakfast, before the sun got too strong. Sometimes Lisa would swim with her. Then Kit went on her solitary forest explorations and Lisa returned to her eyrie.
Kit never met anyone except an occasional hotel worker on these forays. She told herself she was not disappointed. Nikolai never appeared again, not even for dinner. Lisa’s face began to look pinched.
On the fourth morning, as Kit climbed up the dew-wet hill to their cottage, she heard raised voices.
‘Kit can find plenty to amuse herself with in Coral Cove. Why the hell can’t you?’ Her brother-in-law sounded as if he was at the end of his tether.
Lisa’s voice was quiet but deadly clear. ‘Maybe because Kit has lower expectations than I do.’
Oh, lord, thought Kit, and pelted up the steps to their terrace.
They were standing by the balustrade, squared up to each other like duellists.
Oh, lord!
It was going to be just like their father, thought Kit. Nikolai was going to leave Lisa. And it would break her heart!
Panic fluttered, dispelling all her pleasure in the silver morning. She could not remember their father but she had heard their mother describe the last months before he left so often, it was as if she had been part of it.
She could not bear it. She flung herself onto the terrace, saying brightly, ‘Breakfast together at last. How nice.’
Nikolai said curtly, ‘I’m not stopping.’
‘But—’
‘I’ve got a breakfast meeting with the UN negotiator.’
Lisa turned her shoulder and looked out to sea.
Nikolai cast her a fulminating look, then ignored her. He told Kit, ‘This new guy from the UN is a real operator. The holistic approach in a big way. It looks as if we may be able to do a package deal. Peace, humanitarian aid program and conservation all rolled into one, plus the money to fund the lot. We’re getting round a table this morning to compare notes.’ He looked back at Lisa’s stony profile. ‘It’s worth a shot, anyway. Isn’t it?’
Lisa said nothing. Kit knew that set look.
She said desperately, ‘Lisa—’
Lisa turned her shoulder.
Nikolai did not even bother to look at her again. ‘So what will you do today, Kit?’ he said pointedly.
Kit searched her mind desperately for something non-controversial. Inspired, she said, ‘I met a man who told me about the phosphorescence. He said it was due to—’ she stumbled over the word ‘—eucarida. And he told me about those blue birds as well. I thought I’d rummage around on the bookshelves in the hotel lobby and see what I can find.’
Lisa gave a crack of laughter. ‘See. That’s all she can find to do here,’ she told the sea triumphantly. ‘All anyone could find to do. Some bloody zoology extension course.’
Not such an inspiration after all, thought Kit. She said hastily, ‘Well, you know me. I can never pass up the chance for self-improvement.’
Neither of them laughed.
Nikolai said curtly, ‘The hotel will be useless. If you’re interested, you’d better look on the internet. My laptop is set up inside.’
‘It is indeed,’ Lisa told the ocean sweetly. ‘I fall asleep to the sound of it and I wake up to the “bing” when he logs on.’
Kit made a face. But Nikolai was not looking at her. He was glaring at his wife’s arctic profile.
‘I’m sorry I’ve disturbed you. Maybe I’d better see if they can give me another room.’
Lisa’s jaw locked. She did not look at him. ‘Fine,’ she said.
Nikolai looked stunned. Kit wanted to jump up and down and scream, Don’t challenge her. She never backs down from a challenge. But they were married and if Nikolai didn’t know that much about his wife, he was going to have to learn fast.
He said between tight lips, ‘Fine.’
Oh, no, thought Kit, looking between the two of them.
Nikolai seized some papers from the table and made for the steps.
‘Goodbye, Kit. Have a good day.’ He ignored Lisa.
‘G-goodbye,’ said Kit weakly.
He ran down the steps without a backward look.
As soon as he had gone Lisa’s shoulders relaxed. She spun round, blue eyes flaming.
‘If he gets another room,’ she announced dangerously, ‘I’m on the next flight back.’
‘I’m sure he won’t,’ said Kit soothingly. ‘He’s just mad. You provoked h
im, be fair.’
‘I do not,’ said Lisa unnecessarily, ‘feel fair. Men. How right you are to have nothing to do with them.’ She shook herself. ‘Right. Sit down and have breakfast. Then I’ll show you how to use that laptop of his.’
Kit was alarmed. ‘But I’m not really used to surfing the net. I might crash it.’
Lisa gave her a sudden grin, wide and unexpected. ‘How much would that cost me?’
Relieved, Kit laughed. Maybe it would work out all right after all. If Lisa could still laugh, the situation could not be hopeless.
‘It’s looking good,’ said Philip as the room emptied that night. ‘Basically we’ve got the jigsaw designed. Now all we’ve got to do is get them to talk without killing each other and we can get the deal done.’
The resident representative, a Frenchman of huge experience and reassuring cynicism, pursed his lips.
‘Maybe you can bring it off, after all. I’ve never seen Gantalan agree to a schedule so quickly before.’
Philip smiled. ‘I’d say that was because his arch rival wasn’t here. Nothing to do with me. The moment Rafek turns up, both of them will have something to prove. I said it’s looking good, not that we’re out of the woods yet. If Gantalan and Rafek have a trial of strength, the talks could grind to a halt. Or worse.’
The Frenchman looked serious. ‘You think Rafek will come, then? He never has before.’
Philip kept his expression carefully noncommittal. He had not admitted to anyone that he had had discussions with the guerrilla leader. As far as the conference knew, his uncomfortable week hiking into the rainforest was a relaxing trip looking at wildlife before the talks began.
‘Who knows?’ he said now evasively.
He flicked through his papers with the speed of long practice. He gave the largest pile to his assistant.
‘Shred those, would you, Fernando? And make sure you get the interpreters’ notebooks before they go back to their rooms and shred those too.’
The Frenchman raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re very thorough.’
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