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An old-fashioned boiled sweet did much to restore Robbie to his normal good spirits, and then they were free to leave.
Lisa drove back carefully. The island roads could be treacherous in places. They were narrow and winding, and she had always hated driving along them.
Rorke returned just as she was about to take Robbie upstairs for his nap.
Her mouth went dry and she longed to run away. Coward, she mocked herself. What was she afraid of? That Rorke would throw last night’s victory over her in her face?
‘Lisa…’ He walked towards her, lean and bronzed, and her stomach muscles quivered in agonised response. Why was she so weak?
‘Lisa, I want to talk to you.’
‘Not now, Rorke. I promised to go and see your father. He has to rest in the afternoon and he gets bored.’
A little to her surprise, Rorke didn’t argue. In fact Lisa noticed that he seemed almost tense. What could he want to speak to her about?
‘Tonight, then?’ he suggested briefly. ‘After dinner?’
‘In our room,’ Lisa suggested.
‘No! No,’ Rorke said less sharply. ‘We’ll talk in the library. We can be quite private in there.’
No more private than they could be in their room, Lisa reflected. Why had he sounded so angry when she suggested they talk there? She shrugged aside the thought. If she started worrying about whatever it was he wanted to talk to her about now, she’d be a nervous wreck by tonight.
* * *
Leigh as always was pleased to see her. He looked a little better today, she decided, watching him carefully.
‘Robbie tells me you took him to see Doctor James this morning,’ he smiled, as Lisa closed the door of his pleasant sitting room.
She laughed. ‘Yes. He needed to have some injections. We left England in such a hurry that there wasn’t time for all of them.’
‘He’s a fine boy, Lisa.’ He looked tired all of a sudden. ‘I can’t tell you what it means to me to have you both back here—to have you reunited with Rorke. I should never have agreed to let him marry you when you were so young. I told him as much at the time, but I think, like me, he was frightened if he didn’t we’d lose you. Have you forgiven me?’
‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ Lisa assured him, kissing the papery skin of his cheek. ‘I wanted to marry Rorke—very, very much.
‘And now,’ she added, taking advantage of the situation, ‘I want you to get well enough to have your operation—not just for our sakes, Leigh, but for Robbie’s as well. He needs you. I can vividly remember how I longed to have a larger family, and I very much want Robbie to have the chance to get to know and love you.’
She could te
ll her words affected him. For a moment he said nothing, and then, shakily, ‘I’ll do my best—I’m not promising anything, mind, Lisa… but I’ll certainly do my best.’
‘That’s all we ask.’
Ten minutes later she left him, having persuaded him to rest. If he could just get well enough to have his operation… She sighed, wondering if Robbie was awake. When they first arrived he had protested that sleeping in the afternoon was for babies, but now he went quite willingly to rest. After all, he was still adjusting to the heat, Lisa reflected, as she pushed open his bedroom door, her heart somersaulting as she looked for the tousled dark head and saw only the empty, rumpled bed. Mama Case walked into the room behind her, grinning when she saw Lisa.
‘Mama, where’s Robbie?’
‘His daddy done take him down to the beach for a while, Miss Lisa,’ Mama Case explained. ‘Miss Helen, she came wanting Master Rorke to take her scuba-diving.’ Mama Case’s smile turned to a frown. ‘She can’t take no for an answer, that one.’
So Rorke had gone scuba-diving with Helen and they had taken Robbie with them! They were bound to have gone down to the cove, Lisa decided, stilling the maternal fears leaping to life inside her. It would do no harm to go down and keep an eye on things. Robbie loved the water, fortunately, and she knew Rorke well enough to be sure that he would take good care of the little boy. Even so…
It only took her fifteen minutes to walk down to the beach. She could see Rorke’s discarded jeans and Robbie’s shorts and shoes, and she shaded her eyes, looking out to sea. The cove was protected by a coral reef all round the bay; the water inside it as calm and unruffled as the surface of a pond, the surf moving softly against the silver sand.
On the sea side of the reef the surf pounded unceasingly, throwing up spray and spume, and Lisa wondered how far out Rorke had taken Robbie. She remembered that when she was barely a couple of years older than Robbie, Rorke had taken her right out to the reef and how thrilled she had been when he taught her how to scuba. The underwater world was one that had always fascinated her. Narrowing her eyes against the sun, she searched the sea again, frowning as she thought she glimpsed movement over by the reef. Surely Rorke hadn’t taken Robbie out as far as that? Fear began to pound inside her. Robbie was too young to go out so far; such a very little boy.
Chiding herself, she tried to calm down. Were all mothers like this with their children? Was she becoming too possessive, too cautious, perhaps smothering all Robbie’s natural love of adventure?
As she watched she suddenly saw Helen emerge from the sea and stand on the coral reef that jutted dangerously out of the water. Coral was razor-sharp, and cuts could be dangerous because they became easily infected. Lisa vividly remembered the lecture Rorke had once given her as a child when she had fooled about on the coral. The horrendous mental pictures he had drawn for her of the consequences of her ‘showing off’ had lingered in her mind for a long, long time.
