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‘Not again.’ She’d positioned the envelope, addressed to Caroline, next to the flowers on the hall table, when Jaye’s voice rang out. Megan jumped, letting out an involuntary yelp of surprise.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.’ He was sitting in an armchair right at the back of the entrance hall, behind the stairs.
‘I imagine if you had, you’d be leaving by the back door right now.’ His voice was kind, but his eyes were devoid of any emotion. The Jaye she’d got a glimpse of last night was lost behind the façade of a charming host.
‘I had to come this way, to leave a thank-you note for your mother.’ Megan picked up the envelope from the hall table.
‘That’s very thoughtful. I’ll give it to her.’
Megan hesitated. They were both thinking it, so she may as well say it. ‘So I’m not so much sneaking off as...leaving unobtrusively.’
‘That makes all the difference.’ For a moment she thought she saw Jaye’s warmth in the flash of his dark eyes.
She held out her hand to him, and he took it, his fingers squeezing hers slightly before he let go again. ‘Thank you very much. The last four days have been... It was a really good course.’
If he’d decided to withdraw the job offer after last night, he gave no hint of it. But Jaye was like her father, able to give or take away on a whim, without needing to explain himself.
‘Good luck. I’m really looking forward to hearing how you do in Sri Lanka. I hope we meet again on your return.’
He was speaking in code, but it was one that was easily cracked. Her job was safe, and she was still going to Sri Lanka. And he wasn’t going to do anything crazy, like turn up out of the blue while she was there.
‘Thank you Jaye. I really appreciate that.’
He nodded. ‘May I walk you to your car?’
‘Thank you. That would be nice.’
He lifted her suitcase into the boot for her and stood back, watching as she drove away. As the drive wound away from the house, and he disappeared from view, it was impossible not to feel a sense of relief, mixed with sadness. In the hothouse atmosphere of the last four days, Megan had experienced almost every emotion, most of them connected with Jaye in some way.
They’d done the right thing, though, in keeping things simple. When they saw each other next, they would both have forgotten all about what might so easily have happened, but hadn’t.
And in the meantime... Sri Lanka beckoned, like a golden glow on the horizon.
Chapter Six
Two months later.
Rural airstrip, Western Province,
Sri Lanka.
JAYE HAD PUT all his efforts into getting the precious medical supplies out of the plane’s cargo hold and stacked by the side of the tarmac. The pilot had made it very clear that the only thing he did between landing and taking off again was to drink iced tea and sit in the shade, and the helpers he’d been promised by the clinic hadn’t turned up yet.
It didn’t matter. He’d been sitting down for too long, first on the flight from Heathrow and then in the cramped cockpit of the chartered cargo plane, and it had given him far too long to think about this. A little hard work was more than welcome.
Something was wrong at the clinic. They were short-staffed, having lost a couple of nurses and the doctor in residence in the last month, and Ranjini, the head of nursing services, had reported that morale was very low. Then, out of the blue, Megan had put in an urgent request for medical supplies that they should already have.
Jaye had become increasingly worried. When he’d last spoken with Ranjini, he’d asked her what she needed him to do and she’d answered straight away.
We cannot work this out on the phone. I need you here, Jaye.
There had been no time to contact Megan, and if there had been Jaye wasn’t sure what he would have said. That one kiss had echoed in his memory, along with the promise to himself that it wouldn’t be repeated, and together they’d morphed into a longing that he didn’t know how to handle.
He’d packed his bags and left, hitching a ride with the medical shipment for the last leg of his journey. Ranjini wouldn’t have called him there unless there were serious problems, and getting to the bottom of them was more important than his own feelings, or Megan’s for that matter.
He heard an engine, and stood up, stretching his back. A battered motorbike was speeding towards the plane, kicking up dust on the dirt airstrip. For the first time in the last three days Jaye smiled. No one kicked dust up quite as well as Dinesh.
Someone was on the back of the bike, but since they were travelling at speed and seemed to be wearing the better half of the road
