Falling Again for Her Island Fling

by Ellie Darkins

  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

  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, mos
tly,’ 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.