This was where she could do the most good. If the bleaching had gone on for so long that the coral had died, that couldn’t be reversed, and even if she transplanted new coral into those areas it might suffer the same fate. But over on this side of the reef she had a chance to repair the damage. If she could secure the unstable sections of coral by transplanting in new colonies from other parts of the islands, then it stood a chance of growing back as healthy and vibrant an ecosystem as it had been in the past.
But there were no guarantees. She’d been part of several transplantation efforts over the two years that she’d been back at the Environmental Agency. Some of them had flourished; some of them she’d watched as they’d faded and died, despite every intervention that she could think of to try.
She signed to Guy to let him know what she was doing and dived a little deeper, holding her breath as the end of her snorkel dipped below the water. She took some more photographs, going as deep as she could within the reef without touching the coral and adding to the problems it was facing. She tried to decide if underneath the unstable sections it could support a transplanted colony, and the evidence that she would have to present to the Environmental Agency and to Guy if her plan was going to be approved.
She looked up towards Guy and kicked her legs to come up to the surface. He had stayed near the top of the reef, watching her rather than looking at the coral. There wasn’t much of interest on this part of the reef to look at, she acknowledged. With most of the coral dead or dying, the rest of the marine life had followed suit.
When she’d first dived at this reef, back before her accident, before she’d even gone to Australia, it had been a vibrant landscape of marine life. Brightly coloured fish had swum in and out of the coral, and anemones had waved gently in the light current. She had known where to watch out for well-camouflaged stone fish, and where to give a wide berth to avoid getting too close to a lion fish. But global warming and other human interventions had worked fast, turning it into an underwater wasteland.
She tried not to despair. She was here; Guy was here. They were going to try to fix this. If she thought too much about what the reef had lost, she’d never be able to concentrate on what she needed to do to bring it back to life.
When she had all the pictures she needed she signed to Guy that they should head back to the boat, and then she bobbed up above the surface, checking that Guy was alongside her. She climbed back onto the deck of the boat, pulling off her mask and fins and squeezing salt water from her hair.
She was aware of Guy sitting next to her, taking off his equipment, but it wasn’t until he spoke that she turned to look at him and saw the expression on his face.
‘My God, what happened to it?’ he asked, his face pale.
She narrowed her eyes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, the last time I saw it, it was teeming with life. We could barely move for fish.’
We? She didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know with whom he’d been here before.
‘You’ve swum here before?’ she asked, surprised that he’d not mentioned it yet.
He nodded. ‘Last time I visited St Antoine.’
The shock was evident on his features, and she softened towards him a little. It was clear that he did care about the environment of the island, despite his impatience to move on the building project.
‘What happened to it?’ he asked again.
She explained about coral bleaching, the effects of rising sea temperatures and the impact of tourism and watched his face as the information sank in. She would have to wait and see whether that carried through to the decisions that he made as the project progressed. It was easy to be shocked by environmental issues when you were sitting on the water with the evidence right in front of you. In her experience, developers started caring a lot less about the coral when they were back in their offices, staring at a spreadsheet and a schedule.
Well, that was why she was here, she reminded herself—so that Guy wouldn’t forget. She smirked to herself at the irony of the amnesiac being the one responsible for reminding someone of anything. She softened towards him, though. He clearly was very shocked by what he had seen.
‘I know it’s hard to see,’ she said. She knew that all too well. It broke her heart, seeing what had become of what had once been a lively, vibrant reef. ‘But this is why we’re here. You’re doing the right thing, putting this right before the building work starts. Not everyone would.’
Guy shook his head. ‘Looks like we were too late.’
‘Maybe not. I’ve seen other reefs recover.’ Not many. Not often. But she had fresh young coral growing in the lab, waiting to be transplanted out. ‘The situation’s bad, but not hopeless,’ she said as she steered them around the coral, back towards the little dock on Le Bijou. ‘We have to try.’
* * *
Seven years hadn’t seemed so long until he went down under the surface of the water and saw for himself the evidence of how much time had passed. How different the world was now compared to the last time that he had been here. How something that had once been beautiful had been so completely destroyed. Meena had said that maybe the reef could be saved, that they at least had to try. But he could see for himself that it was a lost cause.
When Meena had denied his applications for the permits he needed, he’d not been able to see it as anything but an inconvenience—and an expensive, time-consuming one at that. But now he could see why she was so concerned.
He looked around the island after he had waved her off in her boat and tried to imagine how it would look when the resort was finished. He had artists’ renderings and a three-dimensional model, but they couldn’t tell him how it would feel to lie on the beach with the resort behind him and the sea creeping towards his toes.
Could he lie on the sand, imagining what was happening to the crumbling coral below the sparkling water? That was why he was going to hire Meena, he reasoned. It would be her job to worry about that. Not his. And, now that he had seen her out here, he was satisfied that she knew what she was doing and he shouldn’t have to worry about it any more.
Except, he owned this island now. He was always going to worry about it. He wondered, not for the first time, if he had made a mistake when he had bought it. He looked back at his thought-process; he’d been so sure that he was making a rational decision, but the more he pondered it the more he realised that he just couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else having it.
He remembered the first time they had come to the island. Meena had mentioned it when they’d been sitting in the back of a different boat, on their way out to a group dive at the resort he’d visited before—back when he’d just finished university, had been an apprentice in the family’s global, multi-million-dollar business, trying to impress his parents. Before he’d started his own company, trying to earn their respect if he couldn’t have their love, instead being accused of trying to undercut them and steal corporate secrets. Long before he’d realised that it wouldn’t matter how hard he tried: he would always be a disappointment to them.
That summer he’d noticed the beautiful dive instructor—of course he had. But, in a large group, he hadn’t had a chance to speak to her. So, when he had spotted a space beside her on the boat, he’d jumped at the opportunity. They’d chatted as they’d motored through the waves out to the dive site. He’d not been able to take his eyes off her: the way her eyes had lit up with excitement as she’d explained the dive to him. The way she’d gestured with her hands to emphasise what she was saying. The passion in her voice as she’d spoken about the reef ecosystem.
They’d been diving at one of the larger reefs with the group, a regular stop on the tourist train. He’d wanted to see what was on offer at the other resorts on St Antoine, still trying to find his place in the business for which he’d just found himself responsible decades before he’d expected it.
‘
If you want a quieter dive site,’ she’d said, ‘there’s an island I love—Le Bijou.’ ‘The jewel’. ‘I could take you out there some time, if you wanted.’
If he’d wanted? He was fairly sure that what he’d wanted had been written all over his face. He’d been too young, too green in business and too in love to have mastered hiding his feelings.
Anyway, back then, he’d had no reason to. He’d been free to fall for Meena. And he had—hard. And then he’d gone back to Australia and had waited for her to call. To email. To turn up on his doorstep as they had arranged. But she hadn’t. He’d never heard a word from her.
Because she’d been lying in the clinic, with no idea who she was, never mind her feelings for anyone else.
And no one had called him about it, because no one had known about him. They had been so careful to keep their relationship a secret. She’d said that it was because he was a guest at the resort, the owner’s son, and she just an employee. Because the conservative society of the island would judge their relationship. Would judge her for having a relationship with a white guy from a wealthy family.
She’d been worried that she would lose her job for breaking the rules. That the gossip that would follow her around the island would be unrelenting. He hadn’t pushed her then because it hadn’t occurred to him that he needed to. He’d gone back to Australia full of plans for their future, and when she hadn’t turned up he’d assumed that she’d changed her mind about him. Her mobile number had stopped working. He couldn’t ask about her at the resort without risking getting her into trouble. So he’d had to let it go.
Except he hadn’t, had he? He’d buried his feelings in drink, had partied harder than he ever had before. Convinced himself that he was over Meena. He had started a relationship with a woman he’d met in a nightclub, who’d agreed that all he needed to cheer himself up was her and a bottle of something potent.
And it had worked, for a while. They’d distracted each other from the pain that had driven them to numb rather than face their feelings. Until the morning that he’d woken in a too-quiet flat to dozens of missed calls, and realised that something was horribly, horribly wrong.
And now it turned out that Meena hadn’t abandoned him at all. The opposite. He was the one who had left her fighting life-threatening injuries. Alone. There could be no doubt that she was better off without him in her life. The sooner he could get off this island, get himself well away from her, the better.
She looked at him now and had no idea of what they had once shared. He’d come here because he’d wanted to wipe his memories of that time. To overwrite them. To overwrite the whole island. And instead he found himself as sole guardian of these memories—if he wanted the job. If he chose to forget, it would be as if they had never happened. But it didn’t feel right, doing that. She had lost enough. He couldn’t tell her what they had shared—not when being so close to him could bring her nothing but harm. Not when he himself knew that he couldn’t offer what he had once promised.
Keeping it a secret was for the best. Telling her would only hurt her. It would have hurt him, if that was even possible any more. No. He had to plough on with the plans he had made before he had arrived here. Get work on the resort under way and then start forgetting he and Meena had ever been here. Even if it seemed that she was remotely interested in him. Which she most definitely didn’t seem to be. He couldn’t risk hurting her all over again. Even though he knew now that Meena hadn’t meant to hurt him, that didn’t change who it had made him.
The fact was that he hadn’t been able to trust in any relationship that he’d had since then. His inability to trust and commit had hurt people. No—she was better off without him. Better off not knowing. If he told her how they had once felt about one another, she’d be curious. She’d have questions. She’d want to pick at wounds that had long ago scarred over.
He walked back towards his boat, feeling the sand beneath his feet, the sun pounding his shoulders. Was this it? The last time he would stand on their beach? The last chance to remember what they had shared here before he went back to Sydney, the bulldozers moved in and he moved on with his life?
CHAPTER FOUR
THIS WAS PROBABLY a huge mistake, Meena told herself for the hundredth time as she scrolled to Guy’s office number on her phone and her thumb hovered over the call button. It was fine. She could just leave a message with Dev, letting him know that she was going to be visiting the site of one of her coral transplants. Let him know that Guy was welcome to join her if he was interested in how the restoration of the reef might go and then hang up. She wouldn’t have to talk to Guy. And there was no way that he’d even turn up.
So why bother inviting him?
Because she wanted him to care, she told herself. When they had been on the boat before, she had seen the shock on his face at the state of the reef of Le Bijou. And at that moment she’d thought that maybe she’d misunderstood him. Yes, he wanted to build a big hotel complex on this beautiful, untouched island. But that didn’t make him evil. He had offered to hire her to ensure that no harm—or, realistically, as little harm as possible—came to Le Bijou. That counted for something.
The look on his face when he’d seen the destruction of the reef haunted her. It was as if he had lost something important to him. She didn’t want him to leave here thinking that the reef was a lost cause. That nothing they could do could restore it. She wasn’t sure why it was so important to her, didn’t want to look too closely at her motivations, but the fact remained that she was compelled to do something.
And it was time that she went to check on her other transplants anyway. They had been in the water for two years now and were growing better than anyone had hoped. Other sea life had returned to the area and a young, vibrant ecosystem was growing up again around the reef. She wanted Guy to see that. To understand that they didn’t have to resign themselves to losing the reef by Le Bijou.
Was that the only reason? she asked herself. Or was the reality of the situation that she just wanted to see him again? That she had enjoyed spending time with him? Had enjoyed the sight of his bare chest, studying the shape of his calves, the blond hair on his arms.
She shook her head. She shouldn’t be thinking that way about him. About anyone. Thinking that way about men had never led her anywhere good in the past.
So what if her body wanted him? She had been there before, she assumed, and listening to her body then had left her miscarrying alone, afraid of what would happen if her family or their friends ever found out what had happened. She had to be smarter than that. She had to second-guess what she thought she wanted before her desires led her into any more trouble.
She didn’t want to spend her life alone. And she assumed that at some point down the line maybe she’d meet a nice, sensible boy and have a nice, sensible marriage, just as she knew was expected of her. Her body had betrayed her in the past, her passions had left her hurt and alone, and she couldn’t risk that happening again.
She chewed at her thumbnail as she listened to the phone ring. Maybe she’d get voicemail, she thought—hoped—and wouldn’t even have to talk to Dev.
‘Hello?’
The greeting in English threw her momentarily.
There was only one person who would answer the phone in English.
‘Guy?’ The last thing that she had expected was for him to answer his own phone. ‘Where’s Dev?’
‘Meena?’ She resisted a thrill at the thought that he had recognised her voice and forced down the sensation it had triggered in her belly.
‘Guy, sorry, I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘You just called my office.’
‘Yes, but...’ But she’d been hoping she wouldn’t have to speak to him? She knew how stupid that would sound and caught the words before they left her mouth.
She shook off her embarrassment and surprise and remembered that she was a professional. ‘I’
m diving at a reef today where we transplanted in some coral a couple of years ago. I wondered if you would like to see it. It’ll give you an idea of what we might be able to achieve at Le Bijou with some careful conservation.’
She could imagine him in his office, looking at a packed schedule, amused that she thought that he could simply drop everything and head out to look at some coral. The silence at the other end of the line spoke volumes and she was about to die of embarrassment and hang up when he said, ‘I can clear my day from four. Would that work?’
Clear his day? She’d been expecting another snatched hour at most. Hopefully by four the fierce lunchtime heat would have started to abate and being out on the water in her boat would be a little more bearable.
‘That works for me,’ she said, hoping that she was adequately hiding her surprise. ‘Should I meet you there?’
‘I’ll pick you up,’ he said. ‘I prefer to dive from my own boat. Where shall I collect you?’
She hesitated, but then gave him the details of the marina, bristling at his overbearing tone. ‘I’ll see you in a few hours, then,’ he said, sounding distracted, and then hung up.
The hours passed slowly, but as the clock ticked towards four she headed out to her boat to check and gather her diving equipment. Cursing herself for looking out over the water, she tried to catch sight of Guy’s boat. She wasn’t sure what to expect. The marinas around the island were peppered with super-yachts and speedboats more luxurious and expensive than she could possibly dream of owning. Judging by his taste in speedboats and snorkel equipment, she shouldn’t expect Guy to have skimped.
She looked at the worn wooden boards and tired paintwork of her own vessel. She was proud of how she had kept it afloat all these years, having rescued and restored it when she’d been at university before she had gone to Australia. She wouldn’t have made the strides she had in her education without it. It had allowed her to carry out the research that had won her a scholarship for her postgraduate study at the world-leading university in marine biology.
Falling Again for Her Island Fling Page 4
