Your father then decided that all women should have their babies on the mainland and when young women went to the mainland for training as nurses, the midwives stopped passing on their skills.’
‘But now?’ Caroline asked. ‘Seems to me someone having their sixth baby wouldn’t have got the dates wrong—and then there’s the baby who was in hospital when I arrived.’
‘Exactly,’ Keanu replied with a grin that made her stupid heart race. ‘Now they have the hospital and helicopter as back-up, I think they’ve decided with a little cheating they can have an island birth. In fact, one of the local nurses is over in Sydney, doing some advanced midwifery training. It might not be traditional midwifery but at least, when she returns, the island women will have the option of staying here.’
‘Which is wonderful,’ Caroline declared, smiling herself at the remembered feel of the little baby dropping into her hands. ‘So now?’ she added, feeling that standing in the sun smiling inanely was probably making her look like an idiot. ‘Can we go for a walk? It is so long since I was on Atangi, I need to get the feel and smell of the place back into my blood.’
Keanu swallowed a huge sigh.
He could hardly say no. The baby was fine and whatever was going on inside the clinic was islander business—and women’s business at that.
The problem was that the look on Caro’s face as she’d stared in wonder at the baby she’d caught had stirred all kinds of uncomfortable thoughts in his mind, and unease in his body.
He’d felt tension from Caro’s closeness the whole time they had been in the room and although he was professional enough to not let it affect him, now he wasn’t fully focussed on something else, the awareness had grown.
It was because of the notebook, and something to do with sitting on the rock and feeling her hurt when he’d pointed out the flaws in her idea—feeling her disappointment, although she was smart enough to know it would never have worked. Up until then, he’d been able to explain away his physical reactions to her by the fact she was an attractive woman—nothing more than normal physical reactions.
But this was Caro …
‘I can go for a walk by myself,’ she said, obviously sensing his hesitation.
Get over it, he told himself.
‘No, it’ll be an hour before Jack finishes his refuelling,’ he said to her. ‘Why don’t you wander down to the harbour while I go and see a couple of the elders about Alkiri’s funeral?’
She hesitated, and he wondered if she was feeling the same awkwardness that was humming through his nerves.
‘Come with me or I’ll come with you,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s be friends again.’
He heard the plea in her voice and a faint tremor in the words caused a pain in his chest.
‘Can we just be friends?’ he asked.
Fire sparked in her eyes.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Keanu, I don’t know that any more than you do. But there’s stuff that needs to be done, things we can do to help the situation here, so surely we can get over all that’s happened between us in the past and this inconvenient attraction business that’s happening now and work together to make things better.’
She paused, then added in a quieter voice, ‘Our friendship was special to me and, I think, to you. Maybe the reward for our efforts would be finding that again.’
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close although every functioning brain cell was yelling at him to keep his distance.
The lovely eyes he knew so well looked into his—wary and questioning.
‘Our friendship was the most important thing in my life, Caro,’ he admitted. ‘That will never change.’
She half smiled and shifted so her body wasn’t touching his—apart from his arm, which still rested on her shoulders.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and moved away completely, then in a tone that told him any emotional talk between them was done she added, ‘Let’s go and see the school first.’
But that was a mistake.
The first thing they noticed—everyone noticed—in the schoolyard was the huge old curtain fig tree, so called because air roots grew down from the branches, forming a thick curtain around the trunk.
And behind that curtain, like hundreds of children who’d attended the school over the years, they’d once shared a very chaste kiss. Her grandma had died and Caroline had known they’d both be off to mainland schools the following year, and for some reason—playing hide and seek most probably—they’d both ended up beneath the fig.
Not that an innocent kiss between a ten-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy meant much, but the memory sent a tingle up her spine.
‘All the kids are in school,’ Keanu murmured. ‘Should we?’
Of course they shouldn’t but she was ducking between the trailing roots right behind him, letting him take her in his arms, turn her towards him, and lift her head to his, to relive that first kiss.
In actual fact, it was nothing like that first kiss, more like a first kiss between two people attracted to each other and early on in the courtship.
Tentative, exploring, tasting and then tempting, Keanu felt heat rise in his body, and strained to keep things—well, not exactly casual, more noncommittal, if such a thing was possible.
When Caro began kissing him back as if her life depended on the joining of their lips, the contact of their tongues …
Or was it he who’d intensified things—he couldn’t think straight, could barely think at all, except that there was no way he should be kissing Caro like this when his life was such a mess.
It was a silly, sentimental thing to do, but there was nothing silly or sentimental about the way their lips met, the teasing invasion of Keanu’s tongue, her own tangling with it, the heat in his body as her hands pushed up his shirt to touch his skin, no doubt matched by the heat in hers as his hand slid down her neck towards her breast.
A hundred questions jumbled in her head. Was this just attraction? Or perhaps leftover love from their youth? And hadn’t attraction led her into trouble with Steve? No, she could answer that one honestly—it had been his attention to her that had made her lose her head with Steve.
But this kiss—this kiss was different. This kiss was amazing—
So why was she so bamboozled?
‘Damn it all!’
The explosive words broke the spell.
‘I thought we were trying to be friends,’ he muttered, taking her hand and almost dragging her out from under the tree. ‘Do you realise I could have made love to you right there under the tree with half of Atangi walking by? Why on earth would you kiss me back like that?’
‘Oh, so it’s all my fault?’ Caroline retorted. ‘Anyway, we’re both adults and if we feel like it, why shouldn’t
