‘I’m sure,’ he said with firm politeness. Another one to strike off the list, she thought, trying not to cringe at this internal game of ‘who’s the daddy?’ that she had been forced to play for the last seven years.
She could let it rest, of course. There was no baby. Not now. When she had eventually woken from the coma, the doctors in the clinic had broken it to her gently that it hadn’t just been her memories that she’d lost. She didn’t even know if she’d known before the accident that she’d been pregnant. Given the conservative attitude to premarital sex across almost every culture on St Antoine, she was sure that an unplanned pregnancy would have been more cause for anxiety than celebrations.
She still remembered the whispers that had followed a school friend who had fallen pregnant in her late teens, and who had hastily been married before the baby arrived six months later. Was that why Meena’s lover had disappeared? Had he feared he would be forced into a shotgun wedding? Tied to a woman he didn’t love?
Her parents were hardly traditional, though. They had raised eyebrows with their own marriage—Meena’s French-Mauritian mother and Hindu father had married at a time when such relationships had been even more unusual than they were now—but that didn’t mean that people wouldn’t talk. They always talked.
She had been unusual too in living away from her parents: it had taken every ounce of determination she’d had to move out when she’d been sufficiently recovered from her accident.
But if her family knew about any boyfriend she’d had they had never said anything. So she had no choice but to assume that the relationship had been a secret. How could she have been serious enough about someone to have slept with him but not serious enough to introduce him to her parents?
Her mind had spent many hours tying itself in knots trying to work it out. She hadn’t been far along and what worried her the most was that she had no idea who the father could have been. She was only missing a few months of memory, and there had been no sign of a boyfriend in her life, so where had this baby come from—and what had happened to the father? Where had he been when she’d been trapped under that car, her memories and their baby leaving her body?
Leaving her broken.
Guy turned to look back up the beach to the scrubland where the hotel complex would be built. Where it could be built, Meena corrected herself, as long as the environmental studies were clear and planning permission was granted by the relevant government department. If she couldn’t find something to hold up the development... She took a deep breath. She would find something—she had to—because there was something about this tiny jewel of an island on which she wasn’t going to give up.
For seven years it had felt like her secret. In all the trauma and recovery of that time, she had spent more time here, at this secluded beach, than just about anywhere else. It was the only place where she felt still. At peace. Where her mind rested and her heart didn’t hurt. So when she had heard about the upcoming development she had made sure that she was on the environmental impact team. If there was any way of stopping the resort from being built, then she was going to be the one to find it.
Meena Bappoo. Flat-backed on the beach, just as he’d left her. Eyes closed to the sun, as if it had been minutes since he had last seen her here rather than years. He’d nearly turned and walked away when he’d seen the Environmental Agency logo on her shirt and realised she was the agency marine biologist he was meant to be meeting. The notes that he’d received from his project manager’s schedule hadn’t mentioned her by name, only her job title and the time and location of the meeting, though it turned out that he had mixed up the date.
And then her lids had snapped open, he’d seen those warm golden-brown eyes again and he’d known he was too entranced to walk away.
Did he believe her story? Her memory loss seemed far-fetched. But she hadn’t really given him a choice: he had to believe her. The way she’d looked at him was so completely blank. Surely she couldn’t have been so unmoved if she’d remembered even a moment of those few months that they’d spent together?
Because he remembered. He remembered everything. The way that she spoke, her island creole accent that he knew could slip so quickly into perfect French or her slightly American-sounding English. The way that she smelled—of salt, sand and the coconut oil that she rubbed into her skin. The way that she had looked at him after they had made love for the first time, as if they had just created the stars in the sky.
The way that he had waited for her as they’d agreed, after he had returned to Australia, and she had never shown up.
Had it been the accident? he wondered now. That would make sense, answer the questions he had been carrying around in the years since they had been together. It hit him like a blow to the chest, the thought that perhaps he had been wrong. That she had wanted to come as desperately as he had wanted it. But it didn’t hurt any less when she looked at him and didn’t see him.
He’d thought of her over the years. Thought of them. Thought of the days and the nights that they had spent on this beach. Thought of the night, years later, that he’d made the decision to buy the tiny uninhabited island of Le Bijou and build his resort. Thought of the pain that he had felt when he had been left alone, wanting her, wondering what had gone wrong. Thought of all the ways that he had tried to numb that pain, and the consequences that had spiralled out of control.
And then he couldn’t think about it any more, because the loss and grief from that time of his life was still too painful, too raw even to glance at, never mind examine more closely.
He’d come here to get over her. To face their past, bury it, landscape over the evidence and then move on. But then he’d seen her lying there, looking exactly as she had the day that he’d left her, and known immediately that it was a mistake.
But maybe the fact she didn’t remember him was a saving grace. She had no idea what they’d once shared and he had every intention of keeping things that way. He could never let her know what they had been to one another. What he had felt for her. He’d spent years trying to get over her. To shake the pain that her rejection had caused him. And he couldn’t bear to reopen those old wounds. Not now.
They were over. They had been over for a long time. She didn’t even remember that they had ever been together and, as far as he could see, that was a good thing. He wouldn’t take that away from her and replace it with the anger and bile that had built up and then been fought down over the years. If she knew what he had done—who he had become—after the last time he had left this island she could only be relieved that she had escaped him.
It was kinder to lie, he told himself, convincing himself of its truth. He had to live with what they had lost and he wouldn’t wish that on her too. Not now, when he knew that he could never again be that person he had been when they’d been together. Even though they were here on Le Bijou, they could never go back and be who they had been before.
He couldn’t risk being in a relationship again. The only time he had tried it since Meena had ended in the worst possible way, and it was something for which he would never forgive himself. There was no way that he could ever let Meena get involved with him again. She was better off without him. Better off not knowing him.
Meena turned and looked at him, and he knew he’d been caught staring. He couldn’t let that happen, he chastised himself. Couldn’t let her see what he felt for her—what he had felt for her, he corrected—those long years ago. Before she’d failed to turn up as she’d promised and confirmed what he’d always known about himself—what his parents had made clear for as long as he could remember—that he just wasn’t worth it.
She’d never let him become part of her life here on the island. Or vice versa. He’d agreed to it at the time because, more than anything, he’d just wanted her in his life and the sneaking around had felt fun at first. But