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Only when he had gone did Lisa move, going automatically upstairs to where Robbie slept in his bed. His little-boy face in sleep had an innocence and purity that tugged at her heartstrings. Mike’s child, Rorke had said, and he had flung the words at her like an accusation, but Robbie wasn’t Mike’s child, he was Rorke’s son, although Rorke himself would never believe it, would never even believe that they had been lovers! It was only after he had gone that Lisa realised that Rorke had left his gloves behind. She recoiled from their touch as she picked them up, wishing he had never come back into her life, as she prepared for bed.
* * *
She had first realised she loved him when she was sixteen; the year her mother had died and Leigh had brought her home from England.
She still had a vivid memory of her arrival at St Martin’s. They had flown British Airways to St Lucia and from there BIWA to the island, the small inter-island plane dipping low over the azure silk of the Caribbean before landing on what was virtually a levelled-out piece of ground close to the main house.
In those days it had been Leigh and not Rorke who looked after their complicated business interests; including the stake the family held in a chain of luxury hotels dotted through the Caribbean.
On St Martins, though, there was no hotel, only the graceful colonnaded Great House built during the sugar-rich years of the eighteen-hundreds when the family had sent their sons and daughters to London and had thought nothing of commissioning every luxury under the sun to be shipped out to their own small empire.
Leigh’s family had been fortunate and wise enough to make good investments, and so, unlike many of their neighbours on the other islands, there was no need for them to sell out.
As she had done the moment she first set foot on the island at the age of six following her mother’s marriage to Leigh, Lisa had felt a surge of pleasure as she stepped out of the plane; a feeling of homecoming so intense that for a few seconds it completely obliterated the pain of losing her mother.
Mama Case, who ruled the household with a rod of iron and who had been Leigh’s nurse and Rorke’s after him, had opened her arms and Lisa had run straight into them. It had been an emotional homecoming. Her mother had been more popular with the native staff than Rorke’s French mother, who, so Lisa gathered from them, had never ceased pining for the sophistication of Paris.
It was only later, adult herself and a mother, that Lisa had wondered if Rorke had perhaps resented her mother taking the place of his. If so, he had never betrayed it. Too old to adopt her mother as his own when the marriage took place, he had nevertheless developed a warm and affectionate relationship with her, just as she had with Leigh.
Her own father had died when she was six months old—meningitis, her mother had told her, but Lisa suspected that her mother’s love for Leigh was far deeper than the emotion she had felt for her first husband.
In their mutual grief it was only natural that she and Leigh should draw even closer together, but she hadn’t realised how much until Mama Case told her gently one evening that they were shutting Rorke out.
‘Leigh his daddy too,’ she reminded Lisa, ‘and that boy sure thought a lot of yor ma, Miss Lisa.’
After that Lisa had made more effort to include Rorke in their conversations, even to the extent of slipping away from the dinner table earlier than usual to give Rorke a chance to talk to his father alone.
She hadn’t realised that Rorke had seen through her ploy until he found her on the verandah one evening, swinging in the hammock that her mother had always loved, her face wet with tears.
The day had been a particularly close one. Leigh had been irritable with Rorke over dinner. Lisa had gathered from the conversation that Rorke was keen to modernise several of the hotels and father and son had exchanged heated words.
‘You can’t live in the past for ever, Father,’ he said curtly. ‘Nor can you grieve for ever.’
Lisa had left then, sympathising with them both; Leigh whose feelings she understood so well, and Rorke who was so much of an enigma to her, but whose smile had the power to twist her insides with delicious pain, and whose bronzed body did strange things to her pulse rate.
Her very awareness of Rorke was something she was finding it hard to come to terms with. She had always worshipped him, adoring him from a distance, but before it had merely been the innocent admiration of a child. Now there was something different. At school the previous term many of the girls had held giggled conversations about their boy-friends; but Lisa had held slightly aloof, half shocked by their disclosures.
And yet since her return to St Martin’s she had found herself becoming aware of Rorke in a way she had not been before, noticing things about him such as the lean hard length of his body as he emerged from the swimming pool where he swam several lengths before breakfast every morning.
The brevity of trunks which previously had gone unnoticed now brought blushing confusion to her cheeks and a desire to avoid his too-seeing eyes.
One half of her was shocked by the wantonness of her thoughts, the other wondered what it would be like to touch the hard maleness of his body, to be kissed by him and touched…
‘Lisa?’
He moved very quietly for such a big man and she jumped, the swinging seat creaking wildly with the jerkiness of her movement as she turned towards the sound of her name and saw him coming towards her out of the dusk, his white shirt a blur in the darkness slashed by the brown vee of his exposed throat and upper chest.
‘Are you okay? Dad thought we might have upset you with our quarrelling.’
His sardonic expression, the way he leaned casually against the verandah, arms folded against his chest, made her ask, ‘But you didn’t?’
‘Not unless you’re a far more sensitive plant than the rest of your sex,’ he said wryly. ‘Besides, you’ve been coming out here after dinner every evening this last week.’
‘I know you like to talk over business matters with your father,’ Lisa told him, wishing she could see his expression as clearly as she was sure he could see hers.
This was the longest conversation they had had since her return, apart from the occasion when he had told her of his sorrow at the death of her mother.
‘You’re a tactful little scrap,’ he told her, his voice suddenly disconcertingly warm. ‘That’s your mother in you, I suppose. What do you plan to do with your life, Lisa?’
