The Man She Could Never Forget

Shame that she could be related to the man brought heat to her cheeks, but what was done was done.

Unless?

Could she do something to help set things to rights?

Refusing to be waylaid, she continued with her exploration. Next to the dining room was the big entertaining room Grandma had always called the Drawing Room—words Caroline still saw in her mind with capital letters. Here, at least, things remained the same. The furniture, the beautiful old Persian carpets—Ian couldn’t have known they were valuable.

But the elegant, glass-fronted cabinets were empty. Grandma’s precious collection of china—old pieces handed down to her by her mother and grandmother—was gone.

That was when tears started in Caroline’s eyes. Ian had not only stolen physical things, he’d stolen her memories, memories of sitting on the floor in front of the cabinet while Grandma handed her one piece at a time, telling her its history, promising they would be hers one day.

That she’d lost them didn’t matter, but the treachery of Ian selling things he knew had been precious to his mother turned her tears to anger.

Taking a deep breath, she moved on into Grandma’s sitting room.

The little desk she’d used each day to write to friends was there, and Caroline could feel the spirit of her grandmother, the woman who, with Helen, had brought her up until Grandma’s death when Caroline was ten.

Opening off the wide passage on the other side were large, airy bedrooms, all with wide French doors and folding shutters that led onto the veranda. The filmy lace curtains still graced the insides of the windows, although they were beginning to look drab.

Grandma’s was the first room, the huge four-poster bed draped with a pale net, the faint scent of her presence lingering in the air. There’d always been flowers in Grandma’s room, as there had been on the dining-room table and the cabinets in the drawing room …

Leaving her exploration, she hurried out into the garden, minding the thorns on the bougainvillea as she pulled off a couple of flower stems, then some frangipani, a few yellow allemande flowers, some glossy leaves, and white daisies.

Back inside she found vases Ian must have considered too old and cracked to fetch a decent price. She filled them with water and carried them, one by one, into the three rooms where flowers had always stood.

Soon she’d do more—head into the rainforest for leaves and berries and eventually have floral tributes to Grandma that would rival the ones she used to make.

But there was still half a house to explore.

Her father’s room was next, unchanged although the small bed beside her father’s big one reminded Caroline of the rare times Christopher had come to the island. The visits hadn’t lasted long, but she and Keanu had always shared their adventures with him. They would put him in his wheelchair and show him all their favourite places, probably risking his life when they wheeled him down the steep track to Sunset Beach.

The next room must have been Ian’s, then three smaller, though still by modern-day standards large, rooms—hers in the middle.

But as she poked her head into Ian’s room it was obvious he hadn’t been living there as the furniture was covered in dust sheets that seemed to have been there for ever.

‘He lived in the guesthouse.’

Bessie had come in and now stood beside Caroline, looking into the empty, rather ghostly room.

The guesthouse was off the back veranda opposite Helen and Keanu’s suite of rooms, but detached and given privacy by a screen of trees and shrubs.

‘I don’t think I’ll bother looking there,’ she said to Bessie. ‘It was about the only place on the island Keanu and I weren’t allowed to play so there’d be no memories.’

She was back on the front veranda when she heard the whump-whump-whump of a helicopter.

Now she could go down to the hospital and ask for a job.

Right now before she’d let her doubts about working with Keanu solidify in her head.

Or perhaps tomorrow when she’d worked on a strategy to handle working with him …

He had to go up to the house and make peace with Caro, Keanu decided, not skulk around down here at the hospital.

Sam and Hettie would employ her, that much was certain, so he would be working with her. But doctor-nurse relationships needed trust on both sides and although all his instincts told him to run for his life, he knew he wouldn’t.

Couldn’t.

M’Langi was more important than these new and distinctly uncomfortable reactions to Caro. Finding out what had been happening and trying to put things right—that was what the elders expected of him.

So he was here, and she was here, and …

He sighed, then began to wonder just why she was here. He’d never totally lost touch with what Caro was up to, being in contact with her father all through his student years, asking, oh, so casually, how she was doing.

And friends from the islands, staying at the Lockharts’ Sydney house on a visit or while studying, would pass on information. So now he thought about it, he’d known she’d studied nursing, because he’d smiled at the time to think both of them were fulfilling at least the beginning of that childhood promise.

But he’d never expected her to return to Wildfire to actually finish the job, especially as he’d known a little of the life she’d been leading. Known from the Sydney papers he would buy up in Cairns, for the sole purpose, he realised, of torturing himself.

He might pretend he’d bought them for the business section, which was always more comprehensive than the one in the local paper, but, if so, why did he turn to the social pages first, hoping for a glimpse of Caro—a grown-up, beautiful Caro—usually on the arm of a too-smooth-looking bloke called Steve, to whom she was, apparently, ‘almost’ engaged.

What the hell did ‘almost’ mean?

It couldn’t have been jealousy that had made him feel so bad—after all, he’d been the one who’d not almost but definitely married someone else. Someone he’d thought he’d loved because she’d brought him out of the lingering misery of his mother’s death, his loneliness and his homesickness for the island.

So kind of, in a way, he’d betrayed Caro not once—in disappearing from her life—but twice, although that wasn’t really true as trysts made between twelve-and fourteen-year-olds didn’t really count.

Did they?

It was all this confusion—the unresolved issues inside him—that was making him angry, and somehow the anger had made her its target.

Which was probably unfair.

No, it was definitely unfair.

Especially as she was obviously unhappy. He’d put that down to her seeing him again, which would be natural after the way he’d behaved towards her.

So maybe he should stay well out of her way.

Except he’d always hated it when Caro was unhappy. And if he’d caused or even contributed to that unhappiness, which he must have, cutting her off the way he had so long ago, then shouldn’t he do something about it?

At least see if they could regain a little of their old friendship.

Friendship?

When one glimpse of the grown-up Caro had sent his pulses racing, his entire body stirring in a most un-friend-like manner?

Not good for a man who was probably still married …

On top of which, he was torn between two edicts of his mother. The childhood one, always spoken when the two of them as children had left the house, plainly spoken and always understood: take care of Caroline.