style="font-size:15px;"> ‘So much for my walking him twice a day,’ Sam complained, ‘but now you’re here, Maddie, do you know anything about hydrofluoric acid?’
Maddie looked a little startled but she accepted Sam’s hand to help her upright again, and shrugged her shoulders.
‘That’s the stuff that melts glass so has to be kept in plastic containers,’ she offered.
‘I think we’ve already established that. Come through to the office and you can tell me all your news—check-up okay?—while I look up how to treat a hydrofluoric burn.’
They disappeared along the corridor, and Caroline followed Keanu into the young lad’s room. He could feel her closeness—aware of her in a way he’d never been before.
‘You think it’s an acid burn?’ she asked him, all business.
Keanu wasn’t sure what to feel. Last night they’d sat together and talked of love and attraction, and his body clamoured to greet her with a kiss—at least a kiss …
But work was work.
Caroline was by the patient’s bed, leaning forward to examine the wound, so Keanu joined her, pushing the swirl of emotions inside him out of his mind with the practicalities of work.
He bent over Raoul and spoke quietly to him.
‘Did you spill something on your leg?’
The slightest of head movements, but definitely a very subdued yes.
‘Can you tell me what it was?’
Another shake of the head, this one just as definitely negative.
‘You’re not going to get into trouble,’ Keanu said gently, ‘at least not from us, but we do need to know so we can treat it before it gets any worse.’
How he was enduring the pain now, Keanu didn’t know, having heard horror stories of hydrofluoric burns.
‘Calcium glucanate gel,’ Sam announced, coming in to join them by the bed. ‘We don’t have it but I can make it up. In the meantime, Caroline, would you take a blood sample so can we check if it’s affected his electrolytes and, Keanu, can you flush the wound again to remove the cream we’ve been using?’
He turned to Raoul.
‘If you’d told us—’ he began, but Keanu held up his hand.
‘We’ve had that conversation and he’s very sorry.’
Sam nodded and disappeared again, no doubt to mix the solution he needed.
Caroline tightened a ligature around Raoul’s upper arm then tapped a vein inside his elbow. She was so aware of Keanu’s presence she could feel her skin growing hot and tight.
While Keanu was doing nothing more than flush a wound?
Concentrating, remembering all her training, she slid the needle into the vein, released the ligature and drew out blood for testing, telling herself all the time that a strange conversation during one night on a swing didn’t mean anything.
Or did it?
He said they’d talk.
She asked Raoul to hold the cotton-wool ball to the tiny wound while she set aside the phial and found some tape.
Professional, she could do it, for all her nerves were skittering with the … promise, maybe, that had been last night.
Pleased to escape Keanu’s presence, she took the blood through to Sam.
‘And?’ Maddie prompted.
Caroline wondered if she looked as puzzled as she felt.
‘And what?’
Maddie smiled at her.
‘Just because I’ve been off the island doesn’t mean I haven’t been keeping up with the gossip. And that tells me that you and Keanu have renewed your old childhood friendship, though possibly the word friendship isn’t quite enough to describe your relationship.’
‘For heaven’s sake, we’ve barely spent ten hours alone with each other and the gossip mill has us …’
She didn’t have the words she needed.
‘Practically married?’ Maddie kindly put in.
Caroline sighed. Well, Keanu was married, just to somebody else, so no matter what island gossip suggested a real marriage between herself and Keanu wasn’t even an outside possibility for the near future.
‘Things haven’t got quite that far,’ she muttered, unwilling to share more with a virtual stranger.
‘Well, there’s still time,’ Maddie said. ‘Now, didn’t Sam say you could take a break? Go home.’
Home.
The island was home to her and she’d been so happy here since her return. Disturbed by the problems, of course, and confused by her attraction to Keanu, but none of that had spoiled the feeling that she was back where she belonged.
Home.
Keanu.
What was he thinking?
Caroline sighed and headed up to the house, using the track past the lagoon, thinking a swim might clear her head.
But up at the house the bookwork beckoned. She hadn’t got the maintenance and other day-to-day working figures of the mine from Reuben. Hoping he’d still be in the office there, organising the fencing off of the mine, she headed down the steep steps once again.
Keeping busy to keep her mind off Keanu.
But he was already there, sitting with Reuben in the shed.
Why wouldn’t he be?
No reason, but something about the way the pair of them looked at her made her feel uneasy.
Keanu was the first to speak.
‘We’re just sorting out something here, Caro,’ he said, and for some reason his voice sounded tight.
As if they’d been discussing her?
Of course they wouldn’t have been …
‘I’ll see you later at the house,’ he added, and knowing a dismissal when she heard it, she turned and headed back up the steps.
But halfway up she saw the faint marking of an old track, grassy now, and grown over with enthusiastic tropical vines and plants.
Had she been thinking of the grotto that she noticed it?
She certainly hadn’t the last time she’d climbed the steps.
But her feet
