She shuddered at the thought of having to compromise her ecological principles just because of Guy’s money. She recognised that her superiors in the St Antoine government had their own priorities. But if she didn’t speak to him about this, then someone else would. Quite probably someone who cared a lot less about damage being done to Le Bijou than she did. She couldn’t trust anyone else to value the environment of that island as much as she herself did. So, as much as the idea of compromises pained her, she would be the one to make them.
Unless, of course, Guy had had a huge change of heart overnight and was prepared to scale back the resort to the point where it would no longer have a significant impact on the environment. Not likely, she acknowledged, preparing herself for a fight.
‘Good morning, Guy,’ she said as politely and formally as she could when he walked up the beach to where she was waiting for him, avoiding meeting his eye.
‘Meena,’ Guy said, nodding. ‘Let’s get on with it. I need to know what I finally have to do to get this report going my way.’
‘What you need is plans that don’t harm the environment of Le Bijou.’ Meena didn’t even look at him as she spoke. What was the point? It was the same thing that she had been saying for weeks. It wasn’t her fault that Guy wasn’t getting the message.
‘Because this island is important to you,’ Guy countered, trying to make this personal. She wasn’t going to rise to it. She was here to do her job and that was the end of it. She dropped onto her knees on the sand and started digging carefully at the nest site, scooping sand with her hands, reaching further and further into it up to her wrist, then her elbow, until she was almost lying on the beach, her whole arm reaching into the sand.
‘Because Le Bijou is protected by the government of St Antoine,’ she pointed out, still looking down into the hole because she didn’t trust herself to look at him.
‘And that’s the only reason you rejected the application?’ Guy asked, still determined to make this about them rather than about her job. He had no right. ‘Because I thought we had been working towards a solution.’
She couldn’t answer. All she could think about now was the nest and why, after she had dug down so far that practically her whole arm was disappearing into the sand, she didn’t have even a small piece of egg shell to show for it. She concentrated on widening the hole, wondering whether she had got the location wrong. Whether the marker she had used had moved somehow.
‘I just find it strange that, just a couple of days after we kiss, you decide that you’re not granting the permits after all,’ Guy said.
Well, she wasn’t rising to the bait. She had made that decision based on evidence. He was the one bringing their relationship into this, when there was really no need. ‘You should never have assumed that they would be approved. That was your mistake, not mine.’
‘You gave me every indication—’
‘I did nothing of the sort,’ Meena retorted, sand slipping through her fingers as she searched for any evidence of egg shell. When she had come out here in her boat this morning, she’d had visions of finding hatchlings still in the nest, perhaps unable to find their way out through compacted sand. Now a hollow feeling was growing inside her at the thought that she might have made a mistake. Even a nest full of unhatched eggs would be something. Something that she could use to prevent the development. But if her fears were correct, and the nest was empty, she would be left with nothing.
‘I have maintained throughout this process that the permits would only be granted if you were able to show that the environment around Le Bijou would not be significantly harmed. You failed to do so. This was the only possible conclusion.’ She tried to hide her fears from Guy, tried to hide the worst-case scenario that was playing out under the sand. Until Guy caught her expression.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. And then, ‘Shouldn’t we have found something by now?’
‘Yes,’ she said shortly, not offering more than that monosyllable as she kept on digging,
But when she finally looked up he fixed her with a stare and she couldn’t look away. Because as much as she might be a professional, they both knew that there was more to their relationship than that. She was managing to keep that under control, for now. But the longer that she was forced to look at his face, the harder it was to keep memories from her mind. Those early, hazy memories in the private clinic, as a kind nurse had taken her hand and explained about the baby that had slipped away while she had been sleeping.
‘What’s wrong?’ Guy asked, and she knew from the tenor of the voice that her despair was showing on her face.
She fought to keep the words from her lips, but it was going to be impossible to conceal for ever. The best she could do was get it over and done with. ‘There’s...there’s nothing here. Nothing at all.’
An emptiness opened up inside her as she spoke the words, as she started to accept them.
‘What? What does that mean?’ Guy asked.
‘It must have been a false crawl,’ Meena said, finally sitting back on her heels and rubbing the aching muscles in her arm. She stripped off her blue latex gloves and threw them on the sand. ‘Sometimes, turtles will crawl up the beach, dig a nest but not lay any eggs. That’s what must have happened here.’
‘And that means no baby turtles.’
‘No hatchlings,’ she confirmed. And no hope for a reprieve for Le Bijou. Guy would get her report overturned with her superiors; she knew it. There just wasn’t enough to stop the development. Not without the hatchlings.
She nodded, then moved to the blanket that she’d spread out under the shade of a coconut tree, picking up her water bottle and her clipboard. The longer that she stared into that empty nest, the larger the empty feeling inside her grew. She had to get away from it.
Guy came to sit beside her.
‘Meena,’ he said, the ice melting from his voice. ‘Are you okay? We never talked about what happened the last time we were here. I’m sorry that I accused you of letting that interfere with our work. But...’
She couldn’t do this now. Couldn’t have this conversation. Not with the emotions that seeing that empty nest had brought rushing to the surface. It was more than the loss of the hatchlings she was feeling. It was another loss, another time, when she had felt all the potential of a life to be lived snatched away before it had started. And she couldn’t let Guy see those feelings, because it would mean telling him about the miscarriage, and she had already decided that she couldn’t do that to him.
‘I should have called you,’ Guy said. ‘To talk about what happened. We shouldn’t have left it like that.’
‘Or I should have called,’ Meena conceded. ‘I should have dealt with our personal relationship before I sent you my decision about the permits.’
‘Dealt with it?’
She shrugged, choosing her words carefully, not sure in what direction she wanted this conversation to go. ‘I should have spoken to you about what happened between us.’
She had barely even let herself think about what she felt about that kiss. The kiss itself she hadn’t been able to hide from. It had played in her mind, over and over, since the minute that it had happened. But as for where that left her and Guy? It was safer not to think about it. Not to wonder whether he was thinking of her at all. Whether he was replaying that kiss in agonisingly intense detail, as she had been.
‘And what would you have said?’ Guy asked, his voice dropping.
Meena held her breath. She didn’t know what she would have said. She still didn’t know what she wanted to say. She wanted to say that the kiss had shaken her and grounded her at the same time. That she was terrified and also desperate to do it again. She wanted to ask if that was how it had been before. If there was something between them that had survived her accident—a part of who she had been that summer who was still living in her skin.
But she couldn’t
say any of that. Because the hard, cold look on his face told her he didn’t want to hear a word of it. ‘I would have said, I hope we can be adult enough to keep what happened separate from our professional life, and that my decision had nothing to do with what happened that night.’
For the first time since he had walked onto the beach, she saw a crack of warmth in his expression, and she breathed a sigh of relief. ‘How am I doing with adulting so far?’ he asked with a wry smile.
She grinned in return. ‘Not great. Me?’
‘Mixed reviews.’
She felt the tension leaching from the atmosphere as they both laughed out loud.
‘Maybe we should talk about it, though,’ Guy said, his voice taking on a serious tone that made Meena inexplicably nervous.
‘What is there to say?’ Meena asked, avoiding meeting his eye.
Guy shrugged. ‘I think I should apologise. I shouldn’t have done it.’
Meena drew her eyebrows together. ‘I don’t remember it being done to me,’ she objected. ‘I’m fairly sure I remember joining in.’
Guy shook his head, and she knew that he was shaking off her words too. ‘But I knew that I shouldn’t be doing it even as it was happening. And so I should apologise.’
Meena swallowed. Just because she had been equally sure that the kiss had been a mistake, that didn’t mean that it was any less bruising to her ego to hear it out loud.
‘Let’s not mention it again, then,’ she said, making her voice extra bright to cover her feelings. But still, she was...curious. She knew her own reasons for resisting the urge that had tried to convince her to take that kiss further. The urge that was trying to convince her it was the right thing to lean in and kiss Guy again. But what were his?
He had wanted her. She might be inexperienced, but she had known that much from the second before Guy’s lips had touched hers. And he had had feelings for her once. So what had happened in the meantime to make the thought of a relationship with her so abhorrent?
She had broken his heart, she reminded herself, when she hadn’t come to Australia to meet him as they had planned. That would be reason enough for him to not want to go over old ground, she was sure. But it seemed like more than that. As if he was hiding something. As if there was something about himself that he didn’t want her to see.
‘It’s probably best,’ Guy said. ‘What happened between us all those years ago, it’s ancient history. There’s no need to drag it all back up again. The other night, that was just a...a slip.’
Of the tongue? Meena thought, remembering the English idiom. Interesting choice of words...
Guy’s eyes were fixed on her face, and Meena felt suddenly uncomfortable under his gaze, the way that he was studying her and the crease that had just appeared in his forehead.
‘What?’ she asked, against her better judgement.
‘I just don’t...’ He hesitated but then seemed to come to a decision. ‘I don’t understand how you knew,’ he said. ‘How you knew that we had been together before. I did nothing that would give it away.’
Meena fought to keep her expression under control, not to give away anything about how she had known that she’d had a lover that summer. That she’d been looking for him for all the years since. But, with thoughts of the miscarriage so fresh in her mind, it was harder than ever to pretend that it had never happened. ‘Well, you might have thought that you hadn’t. But you must have done, because I guessed. What other explanation could there be?’
She hoped that she sounded more confident than she felt...
Guy shook his head slowly and she guessed that she hadn’t quite pulled it off as well as she had been hoping. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, creasing his forehead once more as he looked at her. ‘But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something.’
She shook her head in what she hoped was a casual manner. ‘You think I’m keeping secrets?’ She felt the blood rush to her face as she asked the question, because of course she was keeping a secret.
She wondered for a moment if she could just tell him about the pregnancy. In the years since it had happened, she had never told anybody. Had never spoken to anyone about it since the nurse who’d first told her that it had happened. She didn’t even know if her parents knew about it. They had never said a word if they did. With so much to focus on with her recovery, she’d buried thoughts about the baby as best she could. But, with Guy back in her life, it was suddenly impossible to do that any more, and she couldn’t help but think that everything she was thinking must be written on her face.
Guy was watching her through narrowed eyes, and she knew that he suspected that something was wrong. If he had had a sneaking suspicion before that she was keeping secrets from him, then he must be certain of it now.
But she was entitled to secrets, she reminded herself. She didn’t owe him her honesty, or anything else, for that matter. He was an associate and nothing more. That kiss on the beach of Le Bijou was a throwback to a different time. It didn’t change anything about who they were to each other in the present.
But she felt different from how she had before it had happened, she acknowledged. She couldn’t help it. She had wanted that kiss and, now that she knew how good it was to kiss him, to really kiss him, rather than just fantasise about it, she wanted more. And, from the heated look he gave her as he held her eye, she guessed that everything she was thinking was showing on her face.
Guy moistened his bottom lip, and with that tiny movement she was so very nearly lost. Because she knew that he was thinking the same as her. That he could taste her, as she still had the taste of him in her mouth. If she closed her eyes she could feel his hands skimming the curve of her waist, dropping lower, pulling her closer. She could feel the thud of his heart under her hand and hear the rush of blood in her ears as she had abandoned rational thought and let instinct take over.
She closed her eyes for a long moment, took a deep breath, and when she opened her eyes she was in control again. Memories of that night had been banished.
‘What happens next?’ Guy asked, and for a moment she thought that he was talking about them, and she was almost at the point of telling him that nothing happened next when she realised that he was trying to bring the conversation back to work. That he was talking about the permits. She felt another flush of blood to her face and hoped that Guy hadn’t noticed.
‘You submit revised plans,’ she told him simply, trying to get her mind back into the game. ‘Address all of the points in the environmental report and we will reconsider your application. If you meet all the requirements, the permits will be approved.’
His plans would probably be approved eventually, she knew. Guy wouldn’t stop until they were. And then he expected her to come and work here, to oversee the destruction of the island in the guise of trying to protect it. She had thought that accepting his job offer would be for the best. That Le Bijou needed someone to stand up for it, and she would be the right person. But, with everything that had happened here in the last week, she knew that she couldn’t be the person to do it. The memory of their kiss, the fresh raw grief of that empty nest: it was too much.
‘Even if they’re approved, though, I can’t accept your job offer,’ Meena added suddenly.
‘Excuse me?’ Guy said, his head snapping across to look at Meena. Of course he sounded surprised—she was surprised too. She hadn’t meant to say it like that. Or say it at all to his face yet. She had planned to send an impersonal email to Dev and then never have to see the look on Guy’s face when he heard the news.
She wasn’t sure what she was so scared of seeing there. Or maybe it was more a case of what she wanted to see there. Did she want him to be disappointed? To be sorry that after she completed her report there was going to be no reason for them ever to talk again? She couldn’t read him well enough to know which it was. His face was hard, stony, giving nothing away.
‘I thought you were going to take it,’ he said, his words calm and measured, giving her no clue to what he was thinking.
‘I thought I would too,’ she admitted, lifting her shoulders and letting them fall.
‘What changed?’ he asked, his voice hard.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t watch that happen to Le Bijou.’
Guy’s jaw tensed further, and she knew that he was angry. ‘Fine.’
The careful control behind that monosyllable didn’t make him seem any less irritated. He couldn’t really make it any clearer that it was anything but fine. Well, that was okay with her. She wasn’t going to stand here and pretend that she was happy about him destroying the place that she loved more than any other. It wasn’t up to her to make him feel better about what he was doing.
‘Has it got something to do with the secret that you’re keeping?’ Guy asked out of nowhere, taking Meena off guard.
‘No! And there is no secret!’ she said, a little too forcefully, making Guy narrow his eyes at her. Great—she’d made him more suspicious of her. It wasn’t fair—her decision genuinely had nothing to do with having lost the baby. But now her over-the-top denial was making her look more suspicious than ever.
‘I’m not sure that I believe you,’ Guy said, taking a step towards her.
That was fine. She didn’t need him to believe her. She just needed him to drop it.
‘Never mind,’ Guy said at last, when it became clear that she wasn’t planning on answering him. ‘It’s none of my business anyway.’
Her face fell. She knew that her expression was giving her away but she couldn’t stop it. Because of all the things that he could have said to her, that was by far the worst. Because of course it was his business. As much as she had tried to put the thought out of her head, it had been his baby that she had lost. If the accident had never happened, it would have been his baby she would have given birth to. Of course that was his business. She had kept the secret, trying to protect him from the hurt that she knew was inevitable. But she wasn’t sure any more that that was her decision to make.
Falling Again for Her Island Fling Page 11
