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 were already on the barely there track, picking their way through the tangled regrowth, quickening her pace where the track was clear but taking her time to find a way around where thorn bushes formed a barrier.
Hot and sticky, not to mention covered in burrs, she finally reached the pool where the water cascading down from the lagoon came to rest before trickling on past the village to the sea.
She breathed in the humid air, catching scents she couldn’t quite identify, resting for a moment before turning towards the waterfall.
‘You’re being silly,’ she told herself, speaking the words aloud in the hope they might stop this trek back into the past.
Didn’t work, and she kept going, arriving eventually at the hidden space behind the waterfall, the water making music all around her, the thick fern growth giving the space a special magic.
He’d married someone else.
She told herself this was okay, only to be expected—of course he would have married, and it was only the small child she’d once been that was bleating But he’s mine deep inside her head.
She sat on a rock, her clothes damp from spray, and tried to make sense of her life as it was—not as she’d once imagined it would be.
‘Caro, are you in there?’
Keanu’s voice.
How had he guessed?
And of course it wasn’t anything to do with linked thoughts.
‘Caro,’ he called again, and this time she knew she’d have to answer.
‘I’m in the grotto,’ she called, and within minutes he was there beside her, sitting on what had always been ‘his’ rock.
‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘It
