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‘You failed,’ she stated.
He nodded. ‘And I’m sorry for that. There won’t be any more lies.’
She held his gaze but didn’t answer for a long time.
‘I still don’t remember.’
His face softened with sympathy. How could it not, in the face of what she had suffered, and the disappointment in her voice? ‘Did you think...?’
‘That my memories would be back in a flood? No, not really,’ she admitted, looking downcast. ‘But I’d hoped that maybe there’d be...something.’
His arms ached to pull her in at seeing the despondency in her expression. He fought it, hard, and spoke instead. ‘You said you knew that we were together before. How did you know that?’
She shrugged, blushing a little. ‘You were behaving strangely. I just guessed the reason.’ She looked away, though, which made him think that this time she was the one keeping secrets.
Fine, she could keep them if she wanted. The less they said about the past, the better, as far as he was concerned. He had meant what he’d said. What had happened in the past made no difference to who they were now. They had a business relationship and nothing more. All he needed was to get these permits signed off and get off this island. Then Meena could continue working with the project manager and he would never have to speak to her again.
A pang of regret hit him in the chest with that thought.
It was just an echo, he told himself. An echo of the feelings that he used to have for her. That wasn’t what he felt now. It would be a relief, he told himself, to be off St Antoine and away from Meena. Except that thought didn’t seem to ease his pain.
* * *
It was him, Meena told herself with certainty. She’d known deep down as soon as she’d seen that expression on his face that he was the one. By the time she’d asked the question, she already had the answer.
And yet, she didn’t have the answer. She had a thousand more anxieties and a thousand more unresolved questions.
But this she knew: she had had sex with Guy Williams. More than once. And from the blank, expressionless look on Guy’s face, it had meant less than nothing to him. So why had she done it? How could he sit with her, talk with her and dive with her now as if nothing had ever happened?
Why hadn’t he known about the accident? Why had he never got in touch?
Now it was answered, what had seemed like the most important question in her life seemed suddenly irrelevant. She’d had sex—that wasn’t new information. She’d known it since she’d been in the clinic.
But all along she’d thought that knowing the ‘who’ would answer all the other questions that she had. Principal amongst them: why? Why had she changed her mind about waiting? She knew that Guy was attractive. Knew that her body reacted whenever she saw him. That she wanted him. She’d thought that as soon as she knew who her partner had been, who had fathered the baby that she had been carrying, everything else would make sense. Her life, her decisions.
She’d been wrong.
Because nothing that she knew about Guy Williams made her decisions any more understandable. He was cold. He was evasive. He was bulldozing her island, or as good as.
How could this man have been the one? How could she ever possibly know? It wasn’t as if she could ask him outright. It was clear in every line of his body and his face that he didn’t want to talk about their past. He had said he wouldn’t tell her any more lies, but how was she meant to get the important questions out: did you love me? Did I love you? Did you know that we were going to have a baby? Would you have been happy? Why did I love you? Who was I when we were together?
She couldn’t even think about posing a single one of those questions to the hard, stern man standing in front of her, answering her questions with monosyllables while the breeze whipped at his hair.
There had been a moment when they were diving, communicating using only their eyes and their hands, when she had thought that she had felt a connection between them. An understanding and a shorthand that spoke of some deeper understanding than the one that they had formed over the last week. That was what had given her the confidence to ask the question that needed to be asked.
But it turned out that she had been wrong. Sex didn’t equal intimacy. Or, if it ever had, it didn’t apply indefinitely. The knowledge that Guy had once been inside her body didn’t mean that she knew him any better now. And it didn’t mean that she understood herself better, either.
What had she expected? She wasn’t sure, but she did know what she’d wanted. She’d wanted to meet the man that she had fallen for, and she’d wanted every decision she’d made in the past, whether she could remember it or not, suddenly to make sense. She wanted to lose this shame and doubt that had dogged her since she had woken from her accident in a broken body with a broken mind and a broken heart.
But she’d been foolish, childish, thinking that that was going to be the outcome. All she knew now was what she’d known before. She’d had sex with a man who no longer wanted to be a part of her life.
Now that she knew that for certain, it was time to move on. To put to rest the questions that had been burning through her. To concentrate on the future, rather than focussing her energies on something that couldn’t be changed. And that meant moving on from Guy. The more distance she could put between them, the better.
CHAPTER SIX
GUY GLANCED AT the inbox that he shared with his assistant, hoping for a message from Meena. Because he needed these permits sorted so he could get home to Sydney, he told himself. Not because he was feeling awkward over their last conversation, when he had confessed that they had been lovers and that he had returned to Australia and never been in touch again.
But three days had passed since she had made her excuses and they had awkwardly parted at the marina and there had been no word from her since. He wasn’t surprised that she didn’t want to rehash that last conversation, but he had been expecting to hear something about the report from their last dive. Without a plan for the reef at Le Bijou, she wouldn’t sign off the permits. He wanted off this island, and he needed Meena’s cooperation if that was going to happen.
