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Zach took a step towards her, holding her eyes, his lips parted slightly. A blast of goose pimples washed over her forearms and sent blood rushing to her cheeks and thrumming through her ears. When his hand touched hers, it took a supreme effort not to flinch from the spark of electricity that shot through her veins and southwards.
‘You’re trembling.’
‘I…’
Millie found that she couldn’t formulate a coherent sentence. She felt as though her brain had been temporarily disconnected from its modem. It was almost a relief when Zach severed their connection to grab a couple of fluffy white towels from a cupboard in the corner. He tossed one over to her and she took her time drying her arms and legs, then towelling her hair to allow her thoughts to calm and the colour in her cheeks to fade.
What just happened?screamed her brain when at last it caught up with her body’s swirling emotions.
She flopped down on one of the sofas and peered at Zach from beneath her lashes. He had his back to her, fiddling with a box of matches and a storm lantern. She took a moment to enjoy the way his wet tee-shirt clung to his broad, muscular shoulders and the tufts of ebony hair sprang from his crown. With the towel draped around his neck he looked like a boxer in the ring, and when her eyes followed the contours of his body downwards a blast of desire detonated in her lower abdomen. She swiftly averted her gaze, but not before Zach had spun round and caught her ogling his buttocks.
‘Here.’ He handed her a bottle of water and smirked.
Just as she always did when she was embarrassed or thrust unexpectedly into an awkward situation, Millie couldn’t help herself from launching into a garbled monologue of inconsequential utterings as she fidgeted with the tassels on the mohair throw.
‘Thank you for showing me the waterfall, Zach. It was amazing! I love St Lucia. You are so lucky to be able to call it your home, even if it is temporarily. I can completely understand why Dylan and Lottie don’t want to leave and Andrew started a business here. I absolutely adore the fact that the sun shines every day, and that there’s an abundance of fresh produce all year round. I love the Creole cuisine, the calypso music, the friendliness of the people. I could even get used to the rain, especially as it only seems to last thirty minutes before reverting to luscious sunshine again. Oh, look! I think it’s stopped!’
She leapt from her seat and dashed to the door, wrenching it open to peer outside. It hadn’t.
‘Can’t have a tropical rainforest without the rain,’ Zach mused, calmly crossing his ankle over his knee and stretching his arms behind his head, ignoring her strange behaviour.
The daily downpour continued to hammer its staccato tune on the tiled roof overhead, but instead of feeling safe and dry inside the little hut, Millie felt claustrophobic. Something had changed between her and Zach, and whilst she much preferred the Zach she had spent time with that day to the snippy, sarcastic one she had first met, she still felt unsettled at the pull of attraction she had experienced. She craved some time to herself to analyse exactly what it meant, but she would have to wait. Instead, she decided to raise something that had been bothering her all day.
‘Zach?’
‘Mmm?’
‘You remember we were talking about the mysterious disappearance of the cocoa pods when we were at the Purple Parrot a couple of days ago?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know this is going to sound weird, but did you refill those empty crates at the back door of the villa?’
Zach sat upright and stared at her.
‘No. Why?’
‘Because when I checked them this morning, they were full again. Are you sure Claudia doesn’t have an arrangement to sell them to someone?’
‘I’m absolutely sure. If she did, I would know about it. There’s no point in trying to sell them. They have to be harvested on a commercial scale to be viable and at the moment Claudia’s just dabbling, a hobby really because of her interest in food.’
‘Does anyone else nearby grow cocoa?’
‘Thereisa fully renovated plantation in the Soufrière hills that grows the crop commercially. They ship it back to their factories in the UK to make their own luxury brand of chocolate. They even offer holidays and tours of the plantation so that guests can see the process of chocolate-making first-hand and then indulge in tasting the finished product. Theirs is a huge enterprise – Claudia’s plantation is only a couple of acres.’
‘Mm, that’s what I thought. It’s strange, that’s all.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Zach, his tone telling her that was the end of her line of enquiry and to change the subject. She wondered why, but a moment later her curiosity vanished as Zach ventured into much more uncomfortable territory. ‘So, doesn’t your boyfriend mind you spending a whole two weeks in the Caribbean without him?’
Indecision floated through Millie’s mind as she wondered whether she could open up her heart, even a smidgeon, to this prickly man, despite their recent rapprochement. She wished there was something a little stronger than bottled water in the hut to give her the strength to deliver the sad synopsis of her life. An Andy’s Blast cocktail would have done nicely – alcohol had become a supportive friend over the last six months, and she had regularly found solace in the arms of Ricard and Martell and Gordon.
A feeling of total panic swirled around her body. She waited until her heartbeat calmed from sprint to walking pace and inhaled a deep, steadying breath. Zach was watching her as she wrestled with her demons but had wisely decided to remain silent.
‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ she began, but she just couldn’t go any further. Her throat was obstructed by a stone the size of a coconut and she felt as though there was a block of concrete squeezing all the air out of her lungs. To cover her distress, she decided to spin the conversation round to Zach. There must be a reason why he had ended up single-handedly running a dilapidated cocoa planation in the tropical rainforest of St Lucia. ‘What about you? How are you finding life running a cocoa plantation?’
Zach gave her one of his familiar eye rolls. He clearly knew an avoidance tactic when he saw one, but he let it pass.
‘Well, it’s a bit different to working in the Cotswolds, that’s for sure. But when Dom’s mother was taken into hospital, he wanted to spend some time back in the UK and asked if I wanted to do a swap for six months. Who could refuse?’
