It had done something to her nerves and spun threads of confusion through her head.
‘I talked to your father,’ he said, startling her out of thoughts of kisses and physical closeness. ‘He can’t get over at the moment but has asked me to make sure the mine is closed, at least temporarily until he gets a chance to look at things and maybe get it going again.’
‘You talked to Dad?’
‘I thought it might be easier, the mine closure, coming from me and not a Lockhart. I know how distressed you are about the damage Ian’s done to the family name.’
Caroline turned so she could study him.
‘And you think you telling them will make a difference? It’s still the Lockhart mine, and with everyone connected to it now losing their incomes, of course the blame will come back on the Lockharts.’
She was so upset she had to stand up—to move—pacing up and down the silent ward while her mind churned.
It was the right thing to do—she knew that. It was far too dangerous for the miners to keep working without the tunnel being shored up.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said, suddenly weary of the whole mess, and when Keanu started to argue she even found a tired smile.
‘Best all the blame lands on us,’ she told him. ‘We don’t want everyone hating you as well.’
Keanu shot up from his chair and took her hands.
‘No one will ever blame you, Caroline,’ he said, and the feel of her hands in his—the security of her slim fingers being held by his strong ones—fired all her senses once again.
She eased away from him.
‘I have patients to check, and it’s probably best if you go, because it’s too easy to be distracted when you’re around.’
‘Really?’
He smiled as if she’d given him a very special gift, then leaned forward to peck her cheek before leaving the room.
Keanu went back to his quarters but was too restless to settle down. His phone call to Max, the closing of the mine and his still-vague idea of how to save it, his increasing attraction to Caroline—all were drawing him further and further into the web that was the Lockharts.
He couldn’t help but think of his mother, so humiliated by Ian.
Probably already ill, she’d never really overcome their banishment from the island. It was as if Ian’s words had left an enduring scar in her mind, and poison in her body. In his mother’s mind, the happy Lockhart days had gone, and the stories of the Lockharts taking her in after her own family had disowned her and her husband had died had been long forgotten.
Almost without orders from his brain, his feet took him back out of the villa that was currently his home and up the hill to the grassy slope behind the big house to where his father was buried among dead Lockharts and other islanders who’d lived and worked on Wildfire.
To the grassy slope where Alkiri would be laid to rest tomorrow …
Keanu sat down by his father’s grave, idly pulling a few weeds that had recently appeared, trying desperately, as he often did, to remember his father.
But memories of a two-year-old were dim and not particularly reliable so all he had were the stories his mother had told over the years.
His father, bright star of the school on Atangi, had been sent to the mainland for his high-school education, all the costs met by the Lockhart family. From boarding school he’d gone on to university, studying science, and returning, with the woman he’d met and fallen in love with, to Wildfire to work at the research station and begin the first investigation into the properties of M’Langi tea.
His mother’s tales had told of their early adventures, the two of them roaming the mountains on the uninhabited islands, in search of the special tree from whose bark and leaves the tea was made.
He’d been two years old when his father, working with a local friend, had been killed by a rockfall on an outer island.
Two years old when his mother and he had moved into the comfortable, self-contained annexe off the big Lockhart house. It was only after Caroline and Christopher were born, and their mother died, that old Mrs Lockhart had offered his mother a job—helping with the baby and generally running the house.
‘I thought I might find you here.’
Caroline’s voice startled him out of his reverie.
‘What are you doing? What about your patients?’
‘Hettie sent me home. Sam’s just checked our patients and decided Mina can manage them.’
She sank down beside him on the grass.
‘When I came back to work at the hospital,’ he told her, ‘I brought my mother’s ashes here and scattered them in the grass.’
‘So she and your father could be together.’
Caroline spoke quietly, a statement, not a question.
She rested her hand gently on his shoulder, and his skin burned beneath the touch, his body warring with his mind, wanting her so badly, yet here, beside his mother—
He had to tell Caro.
Now, before anything went any further …
But she was so damned insecure, wouldn’t his marriage—for all it was over now—seem like a further betrayal?
Hurt her as much as his deserting her had?
She slid her hand down his arm to grasp his fingers.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s visit my mother now.’
They’d done this so often as children, coming to the little cemetery, sitting among the graves, talking to her mother and his father, telling them what they’d been doing, laughing, and sometimes crying.
They reached Charlotte Lockhart’s memorial—a simple stone with her name and the words ‘wife and mother’—Max having given the initial of her name to both her children.
‘Hold me,’ Caroline whispered, and Keanu put his arms around her and drew her close, feeling her softness, her breasts against his chest, long silky hair tickling his neck, covering his hands that now held her to him.
She raised her head, and he caught the glisten of tears in her eyes.
Her eyes were shadowed with memories, and not happy ones. This was Caro, so he kissed them, first one and then the other, his lips sliding to her temple, teeth nibbling at her ear lobe, kisses along her jaw, although her mouth—that wide, sensual mouth—had always been his destination.
Or so it seemed as he tasted her, his tongue sliding around her lips, delving, probing.
Had her mouth opened to him?
Were her lips responding?
For
