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Of all the people to be unsurprised by what the human brain could remember and forget, it should be her. Her brain had forgotten everything: who she was, how to walk, how to feed herself. And then it had relearned or remembered almost all of it again. Even with the whole ‘missing summer’ issues, she couldn’t deny being impressed by what she and her brain had achieved between them. Summoning a perfect, naked Guy from just the glimpses she had seen so far proved that various important parts of her were functioning just fine.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge those thoughts before Guy could guess what she was thinking.
‘You made it,’ she said, offering him her hand to shake, trying to remember to be professional. She simply refused to be affected by the touch of his skin on hers. Nor to remember anything about her dreams inspired by the spark of electricity she felt. She was going to be working with him in her role at the Environmental Agency even if she didn’t take up his job offer.
Although, with Guy due to be far away at his Sydney office in a couple of weeks, she barely needed to know that he existed at all in order to do her job. That was for the best, she told herself. Being distracted by a man was in no way a part of her plan for her life. She was here to work, to protect as much of the islands that made up St Antoine as possible, and nothing else.
‘Do you have snorkel gear?’ she asked Guy, setting a professional tone. ‘I have some spares in the lockbox,’ she went on, trying to avoid meeting his eye, instead busying herself with equipment and checklists. ‘You can stay on the boat if you prefer; see the reef through the glass floor. It’s not a bad view from there, and then I can do the underwater stuff.’
‘I have my equipment in the boat,’ he said shortly.
‘Great.’ She kept her voice neutral, refusing to react to his brusque tone. There was no reason he should be anything but cold and short with her. They were business colleagues and nothing more, she reminded herself. ‘I always prefer to have a buddy in the water, even if I’m only snorkelling.’
‘I only have an hour.’
She tried not to bristle again at his tone. She had no reason to court his approval. She didn’t want to be his friend. In fact, the more brusque he was with her, the better. The last thing she needed was to think about getting close to this man. Any man, in fact.
She had already proved that she couldn’t trust herself to manage her own desires sensibly. In the space of a summer she had met, slept with and then lost her only sexual partner. A man who, it seemed, had been happy to take her to bed but less keen on sticking around after her accident, for her miscarriage or her rehab. If that was the kind of man that she chose for herself, she was better off single. Or even giving in and allowing her aunties to arrange an introduction to someone that fit the older generation’s idea of a ‘nice young man’.
But that didn’t exactly appeal either.
And what nice young man would want her, if they knew? A woman with a brain injury, with the scars of the accident still clear on her body and in her mind. Who had carried and lost a baby without even knowing who the father was.
She didn’t need to worry about that with Guy, at least. He looked at her with disdain, spoke with impatience and was in a hurry to leave the country. He hardly needed warning off. He clearly didn’t share the fantasies playing through her mind.
She checked over the equipment that he fetched from the boat. Guy might be experienced, but if he was accompanying her then she would be responsible for his safety, even if it was just a shallow snorkel for the most part. The equipment was top of the range, of course. Far superior to her own snorkel, mask and fins.
She glanced over at him as they both sat on the edge of the boat, steering the way over to where she had anchored by the reef before, and felt a stab of déjà vu. It wasn’t an unusual feeling for her; with an injury like hers she was constantly unsure of whether a memory was real or imagined. Before the accident, she would have just shrugged it off. But Guy had piqued her curiosity, telling her that he had attended the dive school when she had been teaching. Could they be sure that they hadn’t dived together before? There had to be some reason why she was feeling this way around him.
‘What?’ Guy asked when he turned and caught her staring at him.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said, creasing her brow, still getting that feeling of déjà vu. Trying to unpack whether there was any truth to the feeling that they had sat like this, on the side of a boat, before.
‘Just that...this feels familiar. Us, on a boat like this. It feels like a memory. I’m sorry. It’s hard to explain.’
Guy frowned, his forehead lining in what she knew must be a mirror image of her own.
‘You remember something?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not a memory, just a weird feeling. I’m sure it’s nothing.’ She shrugged, trying to rid herself of the weird sensation. She almost gasped in shock when his hand landed on hers.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must be difficult.’ She hadn’t been expecting to see empathy in his expression, but there it was. With most people who knew about her amnesia she saw pity. Or gratitude that it had happened to her and not them. But she could see her own pain reflected in Guy’s eyes—real understanding—and she didn’t know what to make of it.
‘It’s fine, mostly,’ she lied. He didn’t need to know the nights she lay awake, trying to force those memories back. Trying to remember who she had been with that summer. And then, maybe, to try to understand who she had been that summer. The person who had taken risks. Who had snuck around with a secret lover none of her friends or family knew about. Who’d been stupid enough to fall pregnant with a man who hadn’t cared enough to stick around when she’d been hurt.
Guy squeezed her hand and let go, rubbing at the stubble just starting to shadow his jawline. Looking away, she reached over the side of the boat to dip her mask in the water, then slid the strap behind her head and tightened it. It was impossible to be serious with a person wearing a snorkel, and she was counting on that to break the atmosphere that seemed to have grown and thickened between them in the last few moments.
She glanced over and smiled at the sight of Guy in his mask. She was right; not even Guy—as sexy as he was, as vividly sensual as her dreams had been—could carry off that look. He grinned at her in return, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Ready?’ she asked, and then slipped off the side of the boat and entered the water with a splash. She looked around to make sure Guy had followed her in. He was right behind her, and her body bumped his as she turned. She moved away, dipping under the water, exhaling through her snorkel, leaving a trail of bubbles behind her. His skin on hers was too distracting; she needed to put a sensible amount of space between them. She swam over to the reef, her camera on a tether clipped to her top, and waited for Guy to catch her up. She pointed out the areas where the coral bleaching was at its worst, and then over to the other side of the reef where there was a large unstable section and some damage that looked as if it had been caused by a boat anchor.
This was where she could do the most good. If the bleaching had gone on for so long that the coral had died, that couldn’t be reversed, and even if she transplanted new coral into those areas it might suffer the same fate. But over on this side of the reef she had a chance to repair the damage. If she could secure the unstable sections of coral by transplanting in new colonies from other parts of the islands, then it stood a chance of growing back as healthy and vibrant an ecosystem as it had been in the past.
But there were no guarantees. She’d been part of several transplantation efforts over the two years that she’d been back at the Environmental Agency. Some of them had flourished; some of them she’d watched as they’d faded and died, despite every intervention that she could think of to try.
She signed to Guy to let him know what she was doing and dived a little deeper, holding her breath as the end of her snorkel dipped below the water. She took some more photographs, going as deep as she could within the reef without touching the coral and adding to the problems it was facing. She tried to decide if underneath the unstable sections it could support a transplanted colony, and the evidence that she would have to present to the Environmental Agency and to Guy if her plan was going to be approved.
She looked up towards Guy and kicked her legs to come up to the surface. He had stayed near the top of the reef, watching her rather than looking at the coral. There wasn’t much of interest on this part of the reef to look at, she acknowledged. With most of the coral dead or dying, the rest of the marine life had followed suit.
When she’d first dived at this reef, back before her accident, before she’d even gone to Australia, it had been a vibrant landscape of marine life. Brightly coloured fish had swum in and out of the coral, and anemones had waved gently in the light current. She had known where to watch out for well-camouflaged stone fish, and where to give a wide berth to avoid getting too close to a lion fish. But global warming and other human interventions had worked fast, turning it into an underwater wasteland.
She tried not to despair. She was here; Guy was here. They were going to try to fix this. If she thought too much about what the reef had lost, she’d never be able to concentrate on what she needed to do to bring it back to life.
When she had all the pictures she needed she signed to Guy that they should head back to the boat, and then she bobbed up above the surface, checking that Guy was alongside her. She climbed back onto the deck of the boat, pulling off her mask and fins and squeezing salt water from her hair.
She was aware of Guy sitting next to her, taking off his equipment, but it wasn’t until he spoke that she turned to look at him and saw the expression on his face.
‘My God, what happened to it?’ he asked, his face pale.
She narrowed her eyes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, the last time I saw it, it was teeming with life. We could barely move for fish.’
We? She didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know with whom he’d been here before.
‘You’ve swum here before?’ she asked, surprised that he’d not mentioned it yet.
He nodded. ‘Last time I visited St Antoine.’
The shock was evident on his features, and she softened towards him a little. It was clear that he did care about the environment of the island, despite his impatience to move on the building project.
‘What happened to it?’ he asked again.
She explained about coral bleaching, the effects of rising sea temperatures and the impact of tourism and watched his face as the information sank in. She would have to wait and see whether that carried through to the decisions that he made as the project progressed. It was easy to be shocked by environmental issues when you were sitting on the water with the evidence right in front of you. In her experience, developers started caring a lot less about the coral when they were back in their offices, staring at a spreadsheet and a schedule.
Well, that was why she was here, she reminded herself—so that Guy wouldn’t forget. She smirked to herself at the irony of the amnesiac being the one responsible for reminding someone of anything. She softened towards him, though. He clearly was very shocked by what he had seen.
‘I know it’s hard to see,’ she said. She knew that all too well. It broke her heart, seeing what had become of what had once been a lively, vibrant reef. ‘But this is why we’re here. You’re doing the right thing, putting this right before the building work starts. Not everyone would.’
Guy shook his head. ‘Looks like we were too late.’
‘Maybe not. I’ve seen other reefs recover.’ Not many. Not often. But she had fresh young coral growing in the lab, waiting to be transplanted out. ‘The situation’s bad, but not hopeless,’ she said as she steered them around the coral, back towards the little dock on Le Bijou. ‘We have to try.’
Seven years hadn’t seemed so long until he went down under the surface of the water and saw for himself the evidence of how much time had passed. How different the world was now compared to the last time that he had been here. How something that had once been beautiful had been so completely destroyed. Meena had said that maybe the reef could be saved, that they at least had to try. But he could see for himself that it was a lost cause.
When Meena had denied his applications for the permits he needed, he’d not been able to see it as anything but an inconvenience—and an expensive, time-consuming one at that. But now he could see why she was so concerned.
He looked around the island after he had waved her off in her boat and tried to imagine how it would look when the resort was finished. He had artists’ renderings and a three-dimensional model, but they couldn’t tell him how it would feel to lie on the beach with the resort behind him and the sea creeping towards his toes.
Could he lie on the sand, imagining what was happening to the crumbling coral below the sparkling water? That was why he was going to hire Meena, he reasoned. It would be her job to worry about that. Not his. And, now that he had seen her out here, he was satisfied that she knew what she was doing and he shouldn’t have to worry about it any more.
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