‘The house?’ he said. ‘Like the Lockhart mansion? Since when did our nurses get lucky enough to stay there while important blokes like me sleep in little better than prefabricated huts?’
‘Since their surname is Lockhart,’ Keanu said, enough ice in his voice to stop further speculation. ‘And all the hospital buildings are prefabricated, as you well know. It makes it much easier to pack them into shipping containers and land them here, then it only needs a small team of men to put them together.’
He turned to Caroline.
‘Prefab or not, the staff villas are really lovely so just ignore him.’
Jack was ignoring them both. He was still staring at Caroline.
‘You’re a Lockhart?’ he said with such disbelief Caroline had to smile.
‘Did you think we all had two heads?’ she asked, but Jack continued to stare at her.
Maybe she had grown a second head.
But two heads would give her two brains and she only needed one—even a part of one—to know she didn’t want Keanu walking her home. Her feelings towards him were in such turmoil she doubted she’d ever sort them out.
For years she’d hated him for his desertion. Hadn’t he realised he’d been her only true friend? Even after they’d both gone to boarding school, he’d still been the person to whom she’d poured out her heart in letter after letter.
Her homesickness, the strange emptiness that came from being motherless, the pain of her time spent with Christopher, who couldn’t respond to her words of love—writing to Keanu had been a way of getting it out of her system.
So he knew everything there was to know about her life, from her envy when other girls’ parents came to special occasions to the realisation that, for her father, Christopher and the hospital on Wildfire were more important than she was.
She’d told Keanu things she’d never told anyone, before or since, then suddenly, he’d been gone.
Nothing.
Until now, and although the confusion of seeing him again had at first been confined to her head, since he’d held her—if only to warm her—it was in her heart as well.
Damn the man.
‘I don’t need you to walk me home,’ she said when they’d left the staffroom. ‘I do know the way.’
‘And I know there are a lot of unhappy Lockhart employees—or ex-employees—on the island at the moment, and while I don’t think for a minute they’d take out their frustration on you, I’d rather be sure than sorry.’
So he was walking her home to protect her. Looking after Caroline as his mother had always told him to when they’d been children.
She felt stupidly disappointed at this realisation then told herself she was just being ridiculous.
As if that kind of a hug meant anything. And anyway she didn’t want Keanu hugging her.
That just added to her torment.
‘What employees and ex-employees are upset?’ she asked to take her mind off things she couldn’t handle right now.
‘Just about all of them,’ Keanu replied. ‘But mostly the miners, and although some of them are from other islands, a lot of them live in the village. They’ve had their hours cut and the ones who’ve been sacked haven’t been paid back wages, let alone their superannuation.’
‘But if Ian’s gone, who’s here to pay them or to cut hours? Who’s running the mine?’
‘Who knows? Ian’s disappearance, as you may have gathered, is fairly recent. He was here last week, then suddenly he was either holed up in the house or gone.’
‘Gone how?’ Caroline asked as they reached the front steps of the house, where Bessie had left a welcoming light burning.
‘Presumably on his yacht. It was a tidy size. One day it was in the mine harbour and the next it was gone.’
‘But the mine’s still operating?’
Keanu nodded.
‘Then we should go down and check it out.’
‘Go down to the mine?’ Keanu demanded.
Caroline grinned at him.
‘Not right now, you goose, but tomorrow or whenever we can get some time off together. That’s if you want to come with me.’
‘Well, I damn well wouldn’t let you go alone, although why you want to go—’
‘Because I need to know—we need to know. Without the mine there’s no way we can keep the hospital going, not to mention the fact that the entire population, not just those here on Wildfire, will lose their medical facilities as well as their incomes.’
She was so excited her eyes gleamed in the moonlight, and it was all Keanu could to not take her in his arms again, only this time for a different reason.
But if holding her once had been a mistake, twice would be fatal.
And he was still married—or probably still married, even if he hadn’t seen his wife for five years.
Did that matter?
Of course it did.
He could hardly start something that she might think would lead to marriage if he couldn’t marry her.
So forget a hug.
‘We can’t run the mine,’ he said, far too bluntly because now a different confusion was nagging at him.
She shook her head in irritation.
‘Then we’ll just have to think of something.’
He had to agree, if only silently. The continued survival of the hospital—in fact, of all the health care in the islands—depended on support from the mine.
‘I imagine once we know what’s happening we can find someone who can,’ he said, reluctantly drawn in and now thinking aloud. ‘Some of the local men have worked there since it opened, or if they’re not still there we could find them. We want men who trained under Peter Blake or maybe beg Peter to come back.’
‘And pay him how?’ Caroline demanded.
Keanu held up his hands in surrender.
‘Hey, you’re the one who wanted to think of something. I’m just throwing out ideas here. You can take them or leave them.’
He saw the shadow cross her face and knew he’d somehow said the wrong thing.
‘Is that how you felt about me back then? That you could take me or leave me? Yes, Ian obviously hurt your mother, but what did I do to you to make you cut me out of your life?’
She was angry—beautiful with anger—but he stood his ground, then he leaned forward and touched her very gently on the cheek.
‘You were never right out of my life, Caro,’ he said quietly, his hand sliding down to rest on her shoulder. Momentarily. He turned and walked swiftly back down the track, not wanting her to see the pain her words had caused written clearly on his face.
But she was right. He had come back to see what he could do to save the hospital, and saving the mine should have been the obvious starting place.
But joining forces in this crusade would mean seeing more of her, working with her outside hospital hours, feeling her body beside his, aware all the time of the effect she had on him, aware of her in a way he’d never been before, or imagined he ever would.
Physically aware of the one woman in the world who was beyond his grasp—the woman whose trust he’d betrayed when she’d been nothing