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‘I... I picked up a bit of French helping my sisters with their homework. And yes, it was GCSE homework,’ she said, the confession lifting the corner of his lips. ‘And I’m an office manager for a construction firm.’
‘Which one?’
She huffed out a laugh. ‘You won’t have heard of it.’
‘Try me.’
‘R. Cole Builders.’
In that instant he realised that she’d been right. It was probably...
‘It’s a small company in the New Forest area.’
‘That’s where you’re from?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Very different to this.’
‘In what way?’
‘Do you really want to hear about my childhood growing up in a two-bedroom rented house just outside of Salisbury with two half-sisters, a single mum whose greatest regret was missing Woodstock and an absentee father who started another family as quickly as was humanly possible?’
His feet had slowed, partly because he was consuming all the information she had just disseminated and partly because no one could have missed the echo of pain in her voice. He knew what that was like. Not wanting to talk about the past, parents or childhood. And he had no intention of pressing on that wound. Hers or his.
‘I didn’t think so,’ she answered, misunderstanding his silence. Which was probably just as well. She’d be out of his hair and out of his life as soon as they got back to his house and she could call for help.
He gripped the machete in a tight fist, refocusing on the pathway in front and the sneaking suspicion that they might have gone off route.
Slash, slash, sweep. Slash, slash, sweep.
They couldn’t be lost. He wouldn’t allow it.
After five minutes of silence Skye was beginning to wonder if Benoit was lost. It wasn’t that they’d passed the same tree exactly, but his movements had become a little...urgent. But perhaps that was a preferable thing to consider rather than to question why she’d just revealed painfully personal details to a complete stranger who was probably not used to more from women than a ‘Yes, thank you, more please.’
She exhaled a long breath. She shouldn’t have been so defensive. She should be trying to get him on side. But suddenly it had all felt too much—getting to safety, to a phone where she could call her sisters, to convince Benoit to give her access to the map, if there even was a map after all this time. She bit down hard against the urge to give in to tears. She wouldn’t quit. Couldn’t.
She followed Benoit into a clearing and came to a sudden stop, the sight before her cutting off her thoughts.
‘Don’t be deceived. It has a five-star rating on TripAdvisor,’ Benoit replied cynically.
CHAPTER THREE
BENOIT STUDIED THE old plane wreck, relief thrumming through his veins. He was soaked through and he wasn’t the only one. He’d seen the crash site when out walking on his previous visits and knew that it was too far away from the road to attract unwanted attention.
‘Just let me go first.’ He didn’t mention that there might be things like snakes or poisonous spiders, but they were a real risk. He pulled a torch from his bag and ducked through the jagged hole in the side of the plane where the door had once been. Hitting the torch against the ceiling to scare off any animals, he checked behind what was left of some of the seating of the twin-engine Jetstream and scoured any other possible hiding places he could think of.
Satisfied they were gone, he tossed down the bag and assessed the situation. A fire would be possible—hard, but possible. Though he’d have to be careful what they burned because some of the plane’s detritus could have chemicals in it. But there was enough dead wood scattered about for a good few hours of fire, hopefully long enough for them to at least dry off. Nights were dark and cooler than the days, but it would still be warm enough.
But it wasn’t really the heat he was worried about. He had to get Skye Soames out of those wet clothes. The way the rain had plastered her clothes to her body was messing with his head and he couldn’t afford to be distracted. He cast a look to where she stood outside, her hand at her forehead sheltering her eyes, waiting for his permission to enter, clearly trying to hide the shivers racking her body. Whether it was the cold from the rain, or fear finally kicking in after the crash and the thought of having to spend a night in the rainforest with a complete stranger, he suddenly felt guilty. And Benoit did not like feeling guilty.
He called her inside and set about making a fire, not missing the way she perched on the edge of a seat as if ready to flee at any sign of danger. Good. She was learning then.
The smoke from the damp wood wasn’t pleasant, but trails of it were finding their way outside through the cracks in the broken windows. Once the fire took hold and the smoke began to clear, he saw Skye shift closer to the heat. The light caught on fascinating strands of red gold in the slowly drying tangles of her brown hair. Hair that rested just above the V in her white shirt, open enough for him to see a tantalising glimpse of...
Scratches. Little angry red lines and an alarming number of bites were already beginning to swell along her slender arms. He stood, not quite to his full height—the angle of the plane’s cabin too low for him to straighten fully—and took her in properly, looking past the flare of his unwanted awareness of her to assess the damage the trek through the rainforest and the crash had done to her.
