Praise for Meredith Webber

‘The romance is emotional, passionate, and does not appear to be forced as everything happens gradually and naturally. The author’s fans and everyone who loves sheikh romance are gonna love this one.’

—HarlequinJunkie on The Sheikh Doctor’s Bride

‘The One Man to Heal Her by Meredith Webber was a well-written romance with a well-constructed storyline which was both enjoyable and believable.’

—HarlequinJunkie

Wildfire Island Docs

Welcome to Paradise!

Meet the small but dedicated team of medics who service the remote Pacific Wildfire Island.

In this idyllic setting relationships are rekindled, passions are stirred, and bonds that will last a lifetime are forged in the tropical heat …

But there’s also a darker side to paradise—secrets, lies and greed amidst the Lockhart family threaten the community, and the team find themselves fighting to save more than the lives of their patients. They must band together to fight for the future of the island they’ve all come to call home!

Read Caroline and Keanu’s story in

The Man She Could Never Forget by Meredith Webber

Read Anna and Luke’s story in

The Nurse Who Stole His Heart by Alison Roberts

And watch for more

fabulous Wildfire Island Docs stories coming soon from Mills & Boon Medical Romance!

Dear Reader,

In March 2014, a group of writers from far-flung parts of the country were meeting up for their eighth or ninth writers’ retreat … The first retreat originated when four of us got together for the Crocodile Creek series of books, and with other friends invited it became a yearly event—a week somewhere near a beach, for brainstorming, writing, an occasional sip of wine and, recently, great lobster for lunch at a nearby restaurant.

So there we were, Marion Lennox, Alison Roberts and myself, amongst our other friends, with a vague idea of doing something together again—a series … six books … a tropical island. We threw some ideas around, wrote notes, drew island pictures and then went home—thousands of kilometres from each other but still in touch. About halfway through that year we got serious enough to actually work out a few overall continuity ideas, and each of us decided on our characters and the bare bones of a plot for our own story.

I think it was Marion who put it all together and sent if off for editorial approval—which we got, with a few stipulations. Then began the fun of fitting the books in with already scheduled books and getting the stories written. My workload at the time was lightest, so I said I would do the first book—setting up the island itself, introducing the characters who would be in most of the books and generally getting started.

So here, lucky reader, is the first of six books set on Wildfire Island, a small island in the M’Langi group, way out in the Pacific Ocean. Privately owned, the island is falling on hard times and in need of rescue—so rescuing it and rescues of another kind are a thread running through the books.

Enjoy!

Meredith Webber

MEREDITH WEBBER lives on the sunny Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, but takes regular trips west into the Outback, fossicking for gold or opals. These breaks in the beautiful and sometimes cruel red earth country provide an escape from the writing desk and a chance for the mind to roam free—not to mention getting some much needed exercise. They also supply the kernels of so many stories she finds it’s hard to stop writing!

The Man
She Could
Never Forget
Meredith Webber

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Linda and Alison and the writing friends

we share and love—long may Maytone survive!

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for Meredith Webber

Excerpt

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

AS THE SMALL plane circled above the island, the hard lumps of pain and worry that had been lodged in Caroline Lockhart’s chest for the past months dissolved in the delight of seeing her home.

From the air, the island looked like a precious jewel set in an emerald-green sea. The white coral sand of the beaches at the northern end gleamed like a ribbon tying a very special parcel, the lush tropical forest providing the green wrapping paper.

Coming in from the west, they passed over the red cliffs that lit up so brilliantly at sunset that early sailors had called the island Wildfire.

As they flew closer, she could pick out the buildings.

The easiest to find was the palatial Lockhart mansion, built by her great-grandfather on a plateau on the southern tip of the island after he’d bought it from the M’Langi people who had found it too rough to settle.

Lockhart House—her home for so many years—the only real home she’d known as a child.

The house sat at the very highest point on the plateau, with views out over the sea, ocean waves breaking against the encircling reef, and beyond them the dots of other islands, big and small, settled and uninhabited, that, with Wildfire, made up the M’Langi group.

Immediately below the house and almost hidden by the thick rainforest surrounding it was the lagoon—its colour dependent on the sky above, so today it was a deep, dark blue.

Grandma’s lagoon.

In truth it was a crater lake from the days of volcanic action in the area, but Grandma had loved her lagoon and had refused to call it anything else.

Below the house and lagoon was the hospital her father, Max Lockhart, had given his life to building, a memorial to his dead wife—Caroline’s mother.

Around the main hospital building its cluster of staff villas crowded like chickens around a mother hen. And below that again lay the airstrip.

Farther north, where the plateau flattened as it reached the sea, sat the research station with the big laboratory building, the kitchen and recreation hut, small cabins dotted along the beach to accommodate visiting scientists.

The research station catered to any scientists interested in studying health issues unique to this group of isolated islands, and the tropical diseases prevalent here.

The most intensive research had been on the effects of M’Langi tea—made from the bark of a particular tree—and why the islanders who drank this concoction regularly seemed to be less affected by the mosquitos, which carried a unique strain of encephalitis.

As she frowned at what appeared to be changes to the research station, she wondered if anyone was still working there. Keanu’s father had been the first to show interest in the tea—

Keanu.

She shook her head as if to dislodge memories of Keanu from her head and tried to think who might be there now. According to her father, a man she knew only as Luke had been working there for a short time but that had been four or five years ago.

Circling back to the southern end of the island, past the little village that had grown up after Opuru Island had been evacuated after a tsunami, she could just pick out the entrance to the gold mine that tunnelled deep beneath the plateau.

The mine had brought wealth not only to her family but to the islanders as well, but the only sign of it was a huge yellow bulldozer, though it, too, was partly hidden beneath a cluster of Norfolk pines and what looked like a tangle of vines.

Weird.

Dropping lower now, the sea was multicoloured, the coral reefs beneath its surface visible like wavy patterns on a fine silk scarf. Images of herself and Keanu snorkelling in those crystal-clear waters, marvelling at the colours of the reef and the tiny fish that lived among the coral, flashed through her mind.

An ache of longing—for her carefree past, her childhood home—filled Caroline’s heart, and she had to blink tears from her eyes.

How could she have stayed away so long?

Because Keanu was no longer here?

Or because she’d been afraid he might be …

‘Are you okay?’ Jill asked, and Caroline turned to her friend—her best friend—who, from seven hundred miles away, had heard the unhappiness in Caroline’s voice just a short week ago and had told her she should go home.

Insisted on it, in fact, although Caroline suspected Jill had wanted to show off her new little plane, and her ability as a pilot.

‘I’m fine, just sorry I’ve stayed away so long.’

‘In recent times it’s been because you were worried that rat Steve would take up with someone else if you disappeared on him for even a week.’

The words startled Caroline out of her sentimental mood.

‘Do you really think that? Do you believe I was that much of a doormat to him?’

Jill’s silence spoke volumes.

Caroline sighed.

‘I suppose he proved he didn’t really care about me when he dropped me like a hot cake when the story about the Wildfire gold mine being in trouble appeared in the paper.’

But it was still upsetting—wounding.

Could the man who’d wooed Caroline with flowers, and gifts and words of love, who’d wrapped her in the security of belonging, really be the rat her friends thought him?

Had she really been so gullible?

‘Maybe he did meet someone else,’ Caroline answered plaintively. ‘Maybe he was telling the truth.’

‘That man wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on the butt,’ Jill retorted, then fortunately stopped talking.

Caroline wasn’t sure if it was because Jill was concentrating on her landing, or if she didn’t want to hurt her friend even more.

Although she’d realised later—too late—that Steve had been inordinately interested in the mine her family owned …

The little plane bumped onto the tarmac, then rolled along it as Jill braked steadily.

‘Strip’s in good condition,’ she said as she wheeled the craft around and stopped beside the shed that provided welcome to visitors to Wildfire Island.

But the shed needs repainting, Caroline thought, her elation at being home turning to depression because up close it was obvious the place was run-down.

Although the strip had been resurfaced.

Could things have come good?

No, her father had confirmed the mine was in trouble when she’d spoken to him about the article in the paper. Although all his time was spent in Sydney, working as a specialist physician at two hospitals, and helping care for Christopher, her twin, severely oxygen deprived at birth and suffering crippling cerebral palsy, the state of the mine was obviously worrying him.

He had been grey with fatigue from overwork and his fine face had been lined with the signs of continual stress from the hours he put in at work and worry over Christopher’s health, yet with the stubborn streak common to all Lockharts he’d refused to even listen when she’d asked if she could help financially.

‘Go to the island, it’s where you belong,’ he’d said gently. ‘And remember the best way to get over pain is hard work. The hospital can always do with another nurse, especially now clinical services to the outer islands have expanded and we’ve had to cut back on hospital staff. Our existing staff go above and beyond for the island and the residents but there’s always room for another pair of trained hands.’

Losing himself in work was what he’d done ever since her mother had died—died in his arms and left him with a premature but healthy baby girl and a premature and disabled baby boy to look after.

‘Maybe whoever owns that very smart helicopter has an equally smart plane and needed the strip improved.’

Jill’s comment brought Caroline out of her brooding thoughts.

‘Smart helicopter? Our helicopters have always been run-of-the-mill emergency craft and Dad said we’re down to one.’

But as she turned in the direction of Jill’s pointing finger, she saw her friend was right. At the far end of the strip was a light-as-air little helicopter—a brilliant dragonfly of a helicopter—painted shiny dark blue with the sun picking out flashes of gold on the side.

‘Definitely not ours,’ she told Jill.

‘Maybe there’s a mystery millionaire your shady uncle Ian has conned into investing in the place.’

‘From all I hear, it would take a billionaire,’ Caroline muttered gloomily.

She’d undone her seat harness while they were talking and now opened the door of the little plane.

‘At least come up to the house and have a cup of tea,’ she said to Jill.

Jill shook her head firmly.

‘I’ve got my thermos of coffee and sandwiches—like a good Girl Scout, always prepared. I’ll just refuel and be off. It’s only a four-hour flight. Best I get home to the family.’

Caroline retrieved her luggage—one small case packed with the only lightweight, casual summer clothes she owned. Her life in Sydney had been more designer wear—Steve had always wanted her to look good.

And I went along with it?

She felt her cheeks heat with shame as yet another of Steve’s dominating characteristics came to mind.

Yes, she’d gone along with it and many other ‘its’, often pulling double shifts on weeknights to be free to go ‘somewhere special’ with him over the weekend.

The fact that the ‘something special’ usually turned out to be yet another cocktail party with people she either didn’t know or, if she had known them, didn’t particularly care for only made it worse.

But she’d loved him—or loved that he loved her …

Jill efficiently pumped fuel into the plane’s tank, wiped her hands on a handy rag, and turned to her friend.

‘You take care, okay? And keep in touch. I want phone calls and emails, none of that social media stuff where everyone can read what you’re doing. I want the “not for public consumption” stuff.’

She reached out and gathered Caroline in a warm, tight hug.

‘You’ll be okay,’ she said, and although the words were firmly spoken, Caroline heard a hint of doubt in them.

Dear Jilly, the first friend she’d made at boarding school so many years ago, now back in the cattle country of Western Queensland where she’d grown up, married to a fellow cattleman, raising her own family and top-quality beasts.

Caroline returned the hug, watched as Jill climbed back into the plane and began to taxi up the runway. She waved to the departing plane before turning to look around her.

Yes, the shed was a little run-down and the gardens weren’t looking their best, but the peace that filled her heart told her she’d done the right thing.

She was home.

Bending to lift her suitcase, she was struck that something was missing. Okay, so the place wasn’t quite up to speed, but where was Harold, who usually greeted every plane?

Harold, who’d told her and Keanu all the legends of the islands and given them boiled lollies so big they’d filled their mouths.

Her and Keanu …

Keanu …

She straightened her shoulders and breathed in the scented tropical air. That had been then and this was now.

Time to put the past—all the past—behind her, take control of her life and move on, as so many of her friends had advised.

And moving on obviously meant carrying her own suitcase up the track to the big house. Not that she minded, but it was strange that no one had met the plane, if only out of curiosity.

Had no one seen it come in?

Did no one care any more?

Or was Harold gone?

How old had he been?

She didn’t like the tightening in her gut at the thought that someone who had been so much part of her life might have died while she’d been away …

Impossible.

Although all adults seemed old to children, she doubted Harold had been more than forty when she’d left—

The blast of a horn sent the past skittering from her mind, and she turned to see a little motorised cart—the island’s main land transport—racing towards her from the direction of the research station.

‘Are you the doctor?’ the man driving it yelled.

‘No, but I’m a nurse. Can I help?’

The driver pulled up beside her and gestured towards his passenger.

‘We phoned the hospital. Someone said the doctor would come to meet us on the way. My mate was fine at first but now he’s passed out, well, you can see …’

He gestured towards the man slumped in the back of the little dark blue vehicle. He had no visible injury—until she looked down and saw his foot.

Clad only in a rubber flip-flop, the foot had a nail punched right through beneath the small toe, and apparently into a piece of wood below his inadequate footwear.

Caroline slid in beside the man and put a hand on his chest. He was breathing, and his pulse—Yes, a bit fast but obviously it had been a very painful wound.

‘I think we should get him up to the hospital as quickly as possible,’ she said, as a figure appeared on the track they would take.

A figure she knew, although the intervening years had stretched him from an adolescent to a man—and for all her heart was bumping erratically in her chest, she certainly didn’t know the man.

Caroline slid out of the cart and took the spare seat in front while Keanu, without more than a startled glance and a puzzled frown in her direction, took over in the back, fitting an oxygen mask to the man’s face and adjusting the flow on the small tank he’d carried with him.

‘Give me a minute to get some painkiller into him.’

Prosaic words but the deep, rich voice reverberated through Caroline’s body—a man’s voice, not a boy’s …

This was Keanu?

Keanu was here?

She didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him, but with witnesses around she could do neither. What she really wanted was to turn around and have another look at him, but the image of that first glimpse was burned into her brain.

Keanu the man.

Now grown into his burnished, almond-coloured skin, his grey eyes—his mother’s eyes—strikingly pale beneath dark brows and hair.

Straight nose, tempting mouth, sculpted shoulders, abs visible beneath a tightly fitting polo shirt.

He was stunning.

More than that, he projected a kind of sexuality that would have every female within a hundred yards going weak at the knees just looking at him.

‘Come back for a break from Sydney society?’

The cold wash of words obviously directed at her fixed the trembling knee thing, while the sarcasm behind them replaced it with anger.

She turned, chin tilted, refusing to reveal the hurt his words had caused.

‘I’m a nurse, and I’ve come back to work, but I am surprised to see you here after the way you cut your connection to the islands so many years ago.’

Fortunately, as Caroline had just realised their driver was listening to this icy conversation with interest, they pulled up at the front of the hospital.

The patient was awake, obviously benefiting from the oxygen and the painkilling injection.

Keanu asked the driver to lend a hand, and the two of them eased the man out of the vehicle.

‘Sling your arms around our shoulders and we’ll help you in,’ Keanu said, and Caroline guessed he was concentrating on the patient so he wouldn’t have to look at her.

Or even acknowledge her presence?

What had happened?

What had she done?

Steely determination to not be hurt by him—or any man—ever again made her shut the door firmly on the past. Whatever had happened had been a long time ago, and she was a different person, had moved on, and was moving on again …

But walking behind Keanu, she couldn’t not be aware of his presence. This man who’d been a boy she’d known so well was really something. Broad shoulders sloping down to narrow hips, but a firm butt and calf muscles that suggested not a workout in gym but a lot of outdoors exercise—he’d always loved running, said he felt free …

She was looking at his butt?

Best she get away, and fast.

But once they had the man on the deck in front of the hospital, Keanu turned back towards her.

‘Well, if you’re a nurse, don’t just stand there. Come in and be useful. Hettie and Sam are on a clinic run to the outer islands and there’s only an aide and myself on duty.’

He stood above her—loomed really—the disdain in his voice visible on his features.

And something broke inside her.

Was this really Keanu, her childhood friend and companion? Keanu, who had been gentle and kind, and had always taken care of her when she’d felt lost and alone?

Back then, his mother’s mantra to him had always been ‘Take care of Caroline’, and Keanu, two years older, always had.

Which was probably why his disappearance from her life had hurt so deeply that for a while she’d doubted she’d get over it.

Head bent to hide whatever hurt might be showing on her face, she took the steps in one stride and followed the three men into the small but well-set-up room that she knew from the hospital plans doubled as Emergency and Outpatients.

Having helped lift the patient onto an examination table, the driver muttered something about getting back to work, and hurried through the door.

Which left her and Keanu …

Keanu, who was managing to ignore her completely while her body churned with conflicting emotions.

‘Nail gun?’ Keanu asked the patient as he examined the foot.

The patient nodded.

‘Never heard of steel-capped workboots?’ Keanu continued. ‘I thought they were the only legal footwear on a building job.’

‘Out here?’ the man scoffed. ‘Who’s going to check?’

‘Just hold his leg up for me, grasp the calf.’

An order to the nurse, no doubt, but even as he gave it Keanu didn’t glance her way.

‘No “please”?’ Caroline said sweetly as she lifted the man’s lower leg so Keanu could see just how far through the wood the nail protruded.

She must have struck a nerve with her words, for Keanu looked up at her, his face unreadable, although she caught the confusion in his eyes.

So she wasn’t the only one feeling this was beyond bizarre.

‘Okay, let it down,’ he said, the words another order.

Maybe she’d been wrong about the confusion.

Only then he added, ‘Please,’ and suddenly he was her old Keanu again, teasing her, almost smiling.

And the confusion that caused made her wish Jill hadn’t taken off again so quickly. She had come here for peace and quiet, to heal after the humiliation of realising the man she’d thought had loved her had only been interested in her family money.

What was left of it.

‘Here’s a key.’

Keanu’s fingers touched hers, and electricity jolted through her bones, shocking her in more ways than one. ‘You’ll find phials of local anaesthetic in the cupboard marked B, second shelf. Bring two—no, he’s a big guy, maybe three—and you’ll see syringes in there as well. Antiseptic, dressings and swabs are in the cupboard next to that one—it’s not locked. Get whatever you think we’ll need. I’m off to find a saw.’

The patient gave a shriek of protest but Keanu was already out of the room.

Slipping automatically into nurse mode, Caroline smiled as she unlocked the cupboard and found all she needed.

‘He’s not going to cut off your foot,’ she reassured the man as she set up a tray on a trolley and rolled it over to the examination table. ‘Hospitals have all manners of saws. We use diamond-tipped ones to cut through plaster when it has to come off, and we use adapted electric saws and drills in knee and hip replacement, though not here, of course. I’d say he’s going to numb your leg from the calf down, then cut through the nail between your flip-flop and the wood. It’s easier to pull a nail out of rubber and flesh than it is out of wood.’

Their patient didn’t seem all that reassured, but Caroline, who’d found where the paperwork was kept, distracted him with questions about his name, age, address, any medication he was on, and, because she couldn’t resist it, what he was doing on the island.

‘Doing up the little places down on the flat,’ was the reply, which came as Keanu returned with a small battery-powered saw and a portable X-ray machine.

‘The research station,’ he said, before Caroline could ask the patient what little places.

‘They’re doing up the research station when there’s not enough money to keep the hospital running properly?’

The indignation in her voice must have been mirrored on her face, for Keanu said a curt, ‘Later,’ and turned his full attention to his patient.

After numbing the lower leg—Caroline being careful not to let her fingers touch Keanu’s as she handed him syringes and phials—he explained to the patient what he intended doing.

‘Nurse already told me that,’ the man replied. ‘Just get on with it.’

Asking Caroline to hold the wood steady, Keanu eased it as far as it would go from the flip-flop then bent closer to see what he was doing, so his head, the back of it, blocked Caroline’s view. Not that she’d have seen much of the work, her eyes focussed on the little scar that ran along his hairline, the result of a long-ago exercise on her part to shave off all his hair with her grandfather’s cut-throat razor.

Fortunately he must have been able to cut straight through the little bar of the nail, for he straightened before she could be further lost in memories.

Caroline dropped the wood into a trash bin and returned to find Keanu setting up a portable X-ray machine.

‘We need to know if the nail’s gone through bone,’ he explained, helping her get back into nurse mode. ‘And the picture should tell us if it’s in a position that would have caused tendon damage.’

‘Why does that make a difference?’ Now he was pain-free—if only temporarily—the patient was becoming impatient.

‘It makes the difference between pulling it out and cutting it out.’

‘No cutting, just yank the damn thing out,’ the patient said, but Keanu ignored him, going quietly on with the job of setting up the head of the unit above the man’s foot.

Intrigued by the procedure—and definitely in nurse mode—Caroline had to ask.

‘I thought the hospital had a designated radiography room,’ she said, remembering protocols at the hospital where she’d worked that suggested wherever possible X-rays be carried out in that area, although the portables had many uses.

Keanu glanced up at her, his face once again unreadable.

‘There is but I doubt you and I could lift him onto the table and with his leg already numb he’s likely to fall if he tries to help us.’

Which puts me neatly back in my place, Caroline thought.

‘Move back!’

Ignoring the peremptory tone, she stepped the obligatory two metres back from the head of the machine, watched Keanu don a lead apron—so protocols were observed here—and take shots from several angles.

That done, he wheeled the machine to the corner of the room, hung his apron over a convenient chair and checked the results on a computer screen.

‘Come and look at this. What do you think?’

Assuming he was talking to her, not the immobile patient, she moved over to stand beside him—beside Keanu, who had been the single most important person in the world for her for the first thirteen years of her life. Important because, unlike her father, or even Christopher, he’d always been there for her—her best friend and constant companion.

Until he’d disappeared.

But this Keanu …

It was beyond weird.

Spooky.

And, oh, so painful …

‘Well?’ he demanded, and she forgot about the way Keanu was affecting her and concentrated on the images.

‘By some miracle it’s slipped between two metatarsals and though it’s probably hit some ligament or tendon, because the bones are intact it shouldn’t impact on the movement of the foot too much.’

‘And don’t look at me like that,’ she muttered at him, after he’d shot yet another questioning glance her way. ‘I am a trained nurse, and have been a shift supervisor in the ER at Canterbury Hospital.’

‘I don’t know how you found the time,’ he said as he headed back to the patient.

She was about to demand what the hell he’d meant by that when she realised this was hardly the time or place to be having an argument with this man she didn’t know.

Her friend had been a boy—was that the difference?

It certainly was part of it given the way her body was reacting to the slightest accidental touch …

‘Okay, so now I need you to swab all around the nail then hold his foot while I try to yank the nail out. I’d prefer not to have to cut it out.’

Caroline put on new gloves, cleaned the areas above and beneath the foot, changed gloves again and got a firm grasp of the man’s foot, ready to put all her weight into the task of holding on if the nail proved resistant.

But, no, it slid out easily, and as the wound was bleeding quite freely now, it was possible the risk of infection had been limited.

‘Antibiotics and tetanus injections in the locked cupboard,’ Keanu told her as he examined the wound in the patient’s foot. ‘And bring some saline and a packet of oral antibiotics as well. Everything’s labelled as we get a lot of agency nurses coming out here for short stints. I’ll use the saline to flush the wound before we dress it.’

He worked with quick, neat movements, cleaning the wound, putting the dressings on—usually, in her experience, a job left to a nurse—before administering the antibiotic and a tetanus shot. He even pulled a sleeve over the foot to keep the dressings in place and keep them relatively clean.

‘Now all we have to do is get you back to your accommodation,’ Keanu said. ‘Keep off the foot for a couple of days and find your workboots before you go back on the job. If you don’t have any you can phone the mainland and have some sent out on tomorrow’s plane. Nurse Lockhart and I will help you out to a cart and I’ll run you back down the hill.’

‘I’ve got workboots,’ the man said gruffly. ‘And I’ll phone my mate to come and get me, thanks. The foreman on the job doesn’t like strangers on the site.’

‘Strangers on the site? What site? What’s happening at the research station, Keanu?’

He touched her on the arm.

‘Leave it,’ he said quietly, and the touch, more than his words, stopped her questions.

Since when had her body reacted to a casual touch from Keanu’s hand?

It was being back on the island …

It was seeing him again …

Remembering the hurt …

Caroline closed her eyes, willing the tumult of emotions in her body to settle. She was here to heal, to find herself again, but she was also here to work.

She cleaned up, dropping soiled swabs into a closed bin marked for that purpose and the needles into a sharps box. Their patient was now sitting on the examination table, chatting to Keanu about, she found as she edged closer, fishing.

Well, it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss right now, and as she needed time to sort out her reactions to seeing Keanu again, she slipped away, heading back down the track to the airstrip to collect her suitcase.

She could walk up to the house on the path behind the hospital and so avoid seeing the source of her confusion again. And once she was up at the house—home again—she could sort things out in her head—and possibly in her body—and …

And what?

Make things right between them?

She doubted that could ever happen. He had disappeared without a word, returned her letters unopened.

But now she’d have to work with him. Was she supposed to behave as if the life they’d shared had never happened?

As if his disappearance from it hadn’t hurt her so badly she’d thought she’d never recover?

Impossible.

She’d reached the airstrip and grabbed her case by the time she’d thought this far and as further consideration of the problem seemed just that—impossible—she put it from her mind and started up the track, feeling the moisture in the air, trapped by the heavy rainforest on each side, wrap around her like a security blanket.

She was home, that was the main thing.

The track from the strip to the big house led up the hill behind the hospital and staff villas.

Staff villas?

Keanu.

Forget Keanu!

For her sanity’s sake, she needed to work—she’d already sat around feeling sorry for herself for far too long as a result of another desertion.

And another nurse would always come in handy on the island even if they couldn’t afford to pay her. She had her own place to live and some money Steve hadn’t known about tucked away in the bank.

And wasn’t this what she and Keanu had always planned to do?

He would become a doctor, she a nurse, and they’d return to Wildfire to run a hospital on the island. As children, they’d shared a picture book with a doctor and a nurse that had led to this childhood dream. Had it seemed more important because they had both lost a parent who possibly could have been saved if medical aid had been closer?

Half-orphans, they’d called themselves …

But as she hadn’t existed for Keanu once he and his mother had left the island permanently, seeing him here, and seeing him carrying out his part of their dream, had completely rattled her.

Trudging up the track, she shook her head in disbelief at his sudden reappearance in her life, especially now when all she wanted to do was throw herself into work as an antidote to the pain of Steve’s rejection.

Could she throw herself into work with Keanu around? Even seeing him that one time had memories—images—of their shared childhood flashing through her head.

Helen, his mother, had died not long after leaving the island. Caroline’s father had passed on that information many years ago, but he’d offered no explanation the year Caroline had found out she wouldn’t be going to the island for her holidays as Helen and Keanu had left and there’d been no one to care for her.

And despite her grief at Helen’s loss, she’d felt such anger against Keanu for not letting her know they were leaving, for not keeping in touch, for not telling her of his mother’s death himself, that she’d shut him out of her mind, the hurt too deep to contemplate.

‘I’ll take that.’

Keanu’s voice came from behind her, deep and husky, and sent tremors down her spine, while her fingers, rendered nerveless by his touch, released her hold on the case.

Why had he come back?

And why now?

But it was he who asked the question.

‘Why did you come back?’

Blunt words but something that sounded like anger throbbed through them—anger that fired her own in response.

‘It is my home.’

‘One of your homes,’ he reminded her. ‘You have another perfectly comfortable one in Sydney with your father and your brother—your twin. How is Christopher?’

She spun towards him, sorry she didn’t still have the suitcase to swing at his legs as she turned.

‘How dare you ask that question? As if you care about my brother. People who care for others keep in touch. They don’t just stop all communication. They don’t send back letters unopened. I was twelve, Keanu, and suddenly someone who had been there for me all my life, someone I thought was my friend, was gone.’

Keanu bowed his head in the face of her anger, unable to bear the hurt in her eyes. Oh, he’d been angry at her reappearance, but that had been shock-type anger. He’d returned to Wildfire thinking her safely tucked away in Sydney, enjoying a busy social life.

Then, seeing her appear out of nowhere, so much unresolved anger and bitterness and, yes, regret had churned inside him he’d reacted with anger. But that anger should have been directed at another Lockhart. It was regret at the way he’d treated her—his betrayal of their friendship—that had added fuel to the fire.

Guilt …

And now he knew he’d hurt her again.

He’d learned to read Caro’s hurt early. He’d first read it in a three-year-old looking forward to a visit from her daddy, the visit suddenly cancelled because of one thing or another.

Usually Christopher’s health, he remembered now.

Throughout their childhood, she’d suffered these disappointments, a trip back to her Sydney home put off indefinitely because Christopher had chicken pox and was infectious. Going back to Sydney at ten when her adored grandmother had died, and learning it would be to boarding school because her father worked long hours and Christopher’s carers could not take care of her as well …

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, apologising for all the hurts she’d suffered but knowing two words would never be enough.

‘I don’t want your “sorry” now, Keanu. I’m here, you’re here, and we’ll be working together, so we’ll just both have to make the best of it.’

‘You’re serious about working in the hospital?’

Had he sounded astounded that she glared at him then turned away and stalked off up the path?

He followed her, taking in the shape of Caroline all grown up—long legs lightly tanned, hips curving into a neat waist, and long golden hair swinging from a high ponytail—swinging defiantly, if hair could be defiant.

The realisation that he was attracted to her came slowly. Oh, he’d felt a jolt along his nerves when they’d accidentally touched, and his heart had practically somersaulted when he’d first set eyes on her, but surely that was remnants of the ‘old friends’ stuff.

And the attraction would have to be hidden as, apart from the fact that he was obviously at the very top of her least favourite people list, he was, as far as he knew, still married.

Not that he could blame Caro—for the least favourite people thing, not his marriage.

They’d both been sent to boarding school while still young, she to a school in Sydney, he to one in North Queensland, but the correspondence between them had been regular and intimate in the sense that they’d shared their thoughts and feelings about everything going on in their lives.

Then he and his mother had been forced to leave the island and there had been no way he could cause his mother further hurt by keeping in touch with Caroline.

She was a Lockhart after all.

A Lockhart!

He caught up with her.

‘Look, no matter how you feel about me, there are things you should know.’

She turned her head and raised an eyebrow, so, taking that as an invitation, he ventured to speak.

‘There’s your uncle, Ian, for a start.’

Another quick glance.

‘You must have known he came here, that your father had left him in overall charge of the mine after the hospital was finished and he, your father, that is, was doing more study and couldn’t get over as often.’

She stopped suddenly, so he had to turn back, and standing this close, seeing the blue-green of her eyes, the dark eyebrows and lashes that drew attention to them, the curve of pink lips, the straight, dainty nose, his breath caught in his chest and left him wondering why no one had ever come up with an antidote for attraction.

Cold blue-green eyes—waiting, watchful …

‘So?’

Demanding …

Keanu shifted uneasily. As a clan the Lockharts had always been extraordinarily close to each other and even though Ian was the noted black sheep, Caroline’s father had still given him a job.

‘Ian apparently had gambling debts before he came—a gambling addiction—but unfortunately even on a South Sea island online gambling is available. From all I heard he never stopped gambling but he wasn’t very good at it. Eventually he sacked Peter Blake, the mine manager your father had employed, and took whatever he could from the mine—that’s why it’s been struggling lately and your father’s having to foot a lot of the hospital bills. Ian stopped paying the mine workers, closed down the crushers and extractors and brought it to all but a standstill.’

He paused, although he knew he had to finish.

‘Then he ran away. No one knows for certain when he went but it was very recently. One day his yacht was in the harbour at the mine and the next day it was gone.’

Blue-green eyes met his—worried but also wary.

‘Grandma always said he was no good,’ she admitted sadly. ‘“In spite of the fact he’s my son, he’s a bad seed,” she used to say, which, as a child, always puzzled me, the bad-seed bit.’

He heard sadness in Caroline’s words but she seemed slightly more relaxed now, he could tell, so he took a deep breath and finished the woeful tale.

‘The trouble is, Ian’s damaged the Lockhart name. I don’t know how people will view your return.’

‘What do you mean, view my return?’

Her confusion was so obvious he wanted to give her a hug.

Bad idea.

He put out his hand and touched her arm, wanting her calm enough to understand what he was trying to tell her. Though touching her was a mistake. Not only did fire flood his being, but she pulled away so suddenly she’d have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed her.

And let her go very swiftly.

‘Lockharts have been part of M’Langi history since they first settled on Wildfire,’ he said gently. ‘Your grandfather and father helped bring prosperity and health facilities to the islands and were admired for all they did. But Ian’s behaviour has really tainted the name.’

He could see her confusion turning to anger and guessed she wanted to lash out at him—well, not at him particularly … or perhaps it was at him particularly, but she definitely wanted to lash out.

She turned away instead and trudged on up the slope, spinning back when she’d covered less than three feet to reach out and say, ‘I’ll take my bag now, thank you.’

Cool, calm and collected again—to outward appearances.

But he knew her too well not to know how deeply she’d been affected by his words. She’d never been a snob, never seen herself as different from the other island children with whom they’d attended the little primary school on Atangi, but she’d felt pride in the achievements of her family, justifiably so. To hear what he was telling her would be shattering for her.

But all he said was, ‘I’ll carry the bag, Caroline, and maybe, one day soon, we can sit down and talk—maybe find our friendship again.’

In reply, she stepped closer, grabbed her bag and stormed away, marching now, striding, hurrying away from him as fast as she could.

And was it his imagination, or did he hear her mutter, ‘As if!’?

CHAPTER TWO

KEANU RUSSELL WALKED swiftly back down the track. He probably wasn’t needed but the hospital was so short-staffed someone had to be there. The situation at the hospital was worse than he’d imagined when, alerted by the elders on Atangi, the main island of the group, he’d come back.

He touched the tribal tattoo that encircled the muscle of his upper arm, the symbol of M’Langi—of his belonging.

‘Come home, we need you.’

That had been the extent of the elders’ message, and as the islanders—with help from Max Lockhart—had paid for his high school and university education, he’d known he owed it to them to come.

He’d tried to contact Max before he’d left Australia but had been unable to get on to him. Apparently, Max’s son, Christopher, had had a serious lung infection and Max had been with him in the ICU.

Trying the hospital here instead, Vailea, the hospital’s housekeeper, had answered the phone and told him the islands—and the hospital in particular—were in big trouble.

‘That Ian Lockhart, he’s no good to anyone,’ Vailea had told him. ‘Max has been paying for the hospital out of his own money, because the mine is run-down and any money it does make, that rotten Ian takes.’

There was a silence as Keanu digested this, then Vailea added, ‘We need you here, Keanu.’

‘Why didn’t you call me? Tell me this? Why leave it to the elders?’

There was another long pause before Vailea said, ‘You’ve been gone too long, Keanu. I did not know how to tell you. I thought with me asking, you might not come, but with the elders—’

She broke the connection but not before he’d heard the tears in her voice, and he sat, staring at the phone in his hand, guilt flooding his entire being.

M’Langi was his home, the islanders his people, and he had stayed away because of his anger, and his mother’s inner torment—caused by a Lockhart …

But if he was truly honest, he’d stayed away because he didn’t want to face the memories of his happy childhood, or his betrayal of his childhood friend.

But home he was, and so aghast at the situation that memories had had no time to plague him. Although sometimes when he walked through the small hospital late at night he remembered a little boy and even smaller girl holding hands on about the same spot, talking about the future when he would be a doctor and she would be a nurse and they would come back to the island and work in the hospital her father had, even then, been planning to build.

Okay, so the ghost of Caroline did bother him—had bothered him even as he’d married someone else—but there was enough work to do to block her out most of the time.

Or had been until she’d arrived in person. Not only arrived but apparently intended to work here.

Not that she wasn’t needed …

The nurse they had been expecting to come in on the next day’s flight had phoned to say her mother was ill and she didn’t know when she might make it. Then Maddie Haddon, one of their Fly-In-Fly-Out, or FIFO doctors, had phoned to say she wouldn’t be on the flight either—some mix-up with her antenatal appointments.

Sam Taylor, the only permanent doctor, was doing a clinic flight to the other islands, with Hettie, their head nurse—another permanent. They didn’t know of the latest developments but as Keanu himself had come as a FIFO and intended staying permanently whether he was paid or not, he could cover for Maddie.

And, presumably, Caroline could cover for the nurse.

Caroline.

Caro.

He had known how hurt she would have been when he’d cut her out of his life, but his anger had been stronger than his concern—his anger and his determination to do nothing more to hurt his already shattered mother.

Caroline discovered why Harold hadn’t met the plane. He was in the front garden of the house, arguing volubly with his wife, Bessie. It had been Caroline’s great-grandfather, autocratic old sod that he must have been, who’d insisted that all the employees working in the house and grounds take on English names.

‘You come inside and help me clean,’ Bessie was saying.

‘No, I have to do the yard. Ian will raise hell if the yard’s not done, not that I believe he’s coming back.’

Watching them, Caroline felt a stirring of alarm that they had grown old, although age didn’t seem to be affecting their legendary squabbles.

‘Nor do I but someone is coming. Some other visitor. We saw the plane on a day when planes don’t usually come, and anyway it was too small to be one of our planes.’

‘Might be for the research station. Plenty of people coming and going there,’ Harold offered, but Bessie was going to have the last word.

‘In that case you don’t need to do the yard.’

Caroline decided she couldn’t stand behind an allemande vine, wild with shiny green leaves and brilliant yellow trumpet flowers, eavesdropping any longer.

‘Bessie, Harold, it’s me, Caroline!’

She passed the bush and came into view, expecting to be welcomed like a prodigal son—or daughter in her case—but to her utter bewilderment both of them burst into tears.

Eventually they recovered enough from their shock to rush towards her, arms held out.

‘Oh, Caroline, you have come back. Now we have you and Keanu back where you belong, everything will be good again.’

Wrapped in a double, teary hug, Caroline couldn’t answer.

Not that she would have been able to. Although she knew he was here—knew only too well—hearing Keanu’s name knocked the breath out of her. But it had been the last part—about everything being good again—that had been the bigger shock.

But it also gave her resolve. If the trouble was so bad the islanders thought she, whom they’d always considered a helpless princess, could help, things must be bad.

She eased out of their arms and straightened up. Of course she had to help. She didn’t know how, but she certainly would do everything in her power to save the islanders’ livelihood and keep much-needed medical care available to them.

Enough of the doormat.

M’Langi was her home.

‘But why are you working in the house, Bessie? What happened to the young woman Dad appointed after Helen left?’

With Keanu, a voice whispered, but she had no time for whispering voices right now.

‘That was Kari but from the time that Ian got here we thought it would be better if she kept her distance,’ Bessie explained. ‘Ian is a bad, bad man for all he’s your family. In the end I said I’d do the housework. I mind Anahera’s little girl too, but she’s no trouble, she plays with all your toys and loves your dolls, dressing and undressing them.’

Caroline smiled, remembering her own delight in the dolls until Keanu had told her it was girl stuff and she had to learn to learn to make bows and arrows and to catch fish in her hands.

‘Anahera?’ she asked, as the name was vaguely familiar.

‘Vailea, her mother, worked as the cook at the research station while we were caretakers there. But there’s all kinds of funny stuff going on there too, so now she’s housekeeper at the hospital and Anahera—she’s a bit older than you and went to school on the mainland; her grandmother lived there—well, she’s a nurse here so I mind her little one.’

It was hard to absorb so much information at once, so Caroline allowed herself to be led up to the house, where a very small child with dark eyes, olive skin and a tangle of golden curls was lining up dolls in a row on the cane lounge that had sat on the veranda for as long as Caroline could remember.

The cane lounge, potted palms everywhere, a few cane chairs around a table, once again with a smaller pot in the middle of it, and the swing she and Keanu had rocked in so often—this was coming home …

‘This is Hana,’ Bessie said, leading the little girl forward. ‘Hana, this is Miss Caroline. She lives here.’

Caroline knelt by the beautiful child, straightening one of the dolls.

‘Just Caroline will do,’ she said, ‘or even Caro.’

Caro.

No one but Keanu had ever called her Caro, but now wasn’t the time to get sentimental over Keanu, for all he looked like a Greek god, and had sent shivers down her spine just being close to him.

She was here to …

What?

She’d come because she was unhappy, seeking sanctuary in the place she’d loved most, but now she was here?

Well, she was damned if she was going to let things deteriorate any further.

But first she had to find out exactly how things stood, and whether whoever ran the hospital would give her a job, and most importantly of all right now, she had to find the steel in her inner self to work with Keanu …

‘Are you being paid, Bessie?’ she asked, thinking she had to set her own house in order first.

Bessie studied her toes then shook her dark, curly hair.

‘Anahera pays me for looking after Hana, but it’s been a while since Harold got a wage.’

Caroline was angry. She knew their fondness for the Lockhart family and gratitude for what her father had done for the islands would have kept them doing what they could whether they were paid or not.

Knew also that the couple wouldn’t be starving. Like all the islanders, and many people she knew on acreage on the mainland, they had their own plot of land around their bure—the traditional island home—and Harold would grow vegetables and raise a few pigs and chickens, but that didn’t make not paying them right.

‘Well, now I’m here we’ll shut off most of the rooms and I’ll just use my bedroom, bathroom and the kitchen. I can pay you to keep them clean and I’ll vacuum through the rest of the place once a fortnight.’

Bessie began to mutter about dust, but Caroline waved away her complaint.

‘Lockharts have been eating dust since the mine began,’ she said, ‘so a little bit on the floor of the closed rooms doesn’t matter. And now,’ she announced, ‘I’m going down to the hospital to ask whoever runs it for a job. Even if they can’t pay me, they can surely find me something to do.’

She left her case and headed back down the way she’d come. Work would give her the opportunity to find out what was going on. Even small hospitals were hotbeds of gossip.

Although …

Of course she could work with Keanu. She didn’t know the man he’d become so she’d just treat him like any other colleague.

Male colleague.

Friendly, but keeping her distance …

Definitely keeping her distance, given how the accidental touches had affected her …

Lost in her muddled thoughts, she was halfway to the hospital when she remembered the only people there had been Keanu and an aide. What had he said? Hettie and Sam were on a clinic run? Caroline knew the hospital ran weekly clinics on the other inhabited islands of the group and today must have been one of those days.

That was probably the only reason Keanu had accepted her help with the injured man earlier.

She walked back up the hill, wondering why she’d thought returning to the island was such a good idea.

Wondering how things had gone so wrong, not only with the island but between herself and Keanu.

Had she judged him too harshly?

Refused to accept he might have had a good reason for stopping communication between them?

But surely they’d been close enough for him to have given her a reason—an explanation?

Hadn’t they?

Totally miserable by the time she reached the house, she went through to her old bedroom and unpacked the case that either Bessie or Harold had left there.

Then, as being back in her old room brought nostalgia with it, she slowly and carefully toured the house.

Built like so many colonial houses in those days, it had a wide veranda with overhanging eaves around all four sides of it. She started there, at the front, looking down at the hospital and beyond it the airstrip, and onto the flat ground by the beach, and although she couldn’t see the research station, she knew it was there, sheltered beneath huge tropical fig trees and tall coconut palms.

As she knew the village was down there, on the eastern shore, nestled up against the foothills of the plateau. The village had been built on land given by her father, after the villagers on another island had lost their homes and land in a tsunami.

Now some of the villagers worked in the mine and at the hospital, and worshipped in the little white church they’d built on a rocky promontory between the village and the mine. A chapel built to celebrate their survival.

She knew the beach was there as well, but that too was hidden, although as she turned the corner and looked across the village she saw the strip of sand and the wide lagoon enclosed by the encircling coral.

On a clear day, from here and the back veranda, she’d have been able to see most of the islands that made up the M’Langi group, but today there was a sea haze.

The western veranda formed the division between the main house and the smaller copy of it, an annexe where Helen and Keanu had lived.

No way was she going there now, although their home had been as open to her as hers had been to Keanu.

This time she entered the house through the back door, through the kitchen with its different pantries opening off it and the huge wooden table where she and Keanu had eaten breakfast and lunch.

The pantries had provided great places for hide and seek, although Grandma’s cook had forever been shooing them out, afraid they’d break the precious china and crystal stored in them.

Caroline opened the door of one—empty shelves where the crystal had once reflected rainbows in the light.

The sight sent her hurrying to the dining room, on the eastern side of the main hall. Looking up, she saw with relief that the chandelier still hung above the polished dining table.

Grandma had loved that table and the grandeur of the chandelier. She had insisted Caroline, Keanu and Helen join her there for dinner every evening, the magic crystals of the chandelier making patterns on the table’s highly polished surface.

Helen would report on anything that needed doing around the house, and talk to Grandma about meals and what needed to be ordered from the mainland to come over on the next flight.

Grandma would quiz Keanu and Caroline about their day at school—what they’d learned and had they done their homework before going out to play.

Ian might have sold her grandmother’s precious crystal to cover his gambling debts but at least he’d left the chandelier.

He must have been desperate indeed to have packed the delicate objects before sending them out on the boat that made a weekly visit to the harbour at Atangi.

Before or after he’d started skimming money from the mine?

Taking away the livelihood of the workers?

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.

Then, as his mother had been dying from pancreatic cancer that had appeared from nowhere and killed her within six weeks, while he, a doctor could do nothing to save her. Then she had cursed the Lockharts …

Well, Ian Lockhart anyway.

Anyway, wasn’t he beyond superstitions like curses?

He shook his head to clear the memories and useless speculation, checked the few patients they had in the hospital, then let out a huge sigh of relief when he heard the helicopter returning.

He almost let himself hope it was bringing in a difficult case, something to distract him from the endlessly circling thoughts in his head.

Hettie and Sam had left the hospital’s makeshift ambulance down near the helicopter pad so Keanu walked down to the airstrip, not really wishing for a patient but ready to help unpack anything they might have brought back. And it would be best to break the news about the FIFO nurse and Maddie not coming now, rather than leaving it until the morning.

Would he tell them about Caroline’s arrival?

He’d have to at least mention it.

Sam would be only too delighted to have an available nurse.

And he would be doomed to work with the woman he didn’t really know but had been instantly attracted to in a way he’d never felt before.

It was because of the old friendship. The attraction thing. It had to be, but with any luck, after the way he’d treated her, she’d want to have as little to do with him as possible.

He was almost at the helicopter now, and could see Sam and Jack Richards, the pilot, lifting out a stretcher.

Good! That means work to do, Keanu thought, then realised how unkind it was to be wishing someone ill. But it was only when he saw the patient that he felt a flush of shame at his thoughts. It was old Alkiri, from the island of Atangi, the elder who had been one of his and Caro’s favourite people and true mentor when they had been young.

He moved closer and greeted the elder in his native language, touching the old man’s shoulder in a gesture of respect.

Even through the oxygen mask, Keanu could see the blue tinge on their patient’s lips and he wondered just how old Alkiri might be.

‘He had a fall, perhaps a TIA as apparently he’d been falling quite a lot recently.’

TIA—transient ischemic attack—often a precursor to a full-blown stroke. Had Alkiri been putting these falls down to old age? He was a private man, unlikely to seek help unless he really needed it. Yet, as Caroline’s grandfather’s boatman, he had not only lived here at Wildfire but had taken two small children under his wing. It was he who had taken them and the village children to and from the school on Atangi, teaching them things about the islands, and life itself, that to Keanu were as important as the learning he’d had at school.

He should tell Caro Alkiri was—

He stopped the thought before it went any further. It had been automatic for he knew she’d loved the old man as much as he had—and probably still would …

But he was no longer the boy who’d run through the house, calling for his friend to pass on a bit of news.

And she was no longer the girl he’d always wanted to find so he could tell—

They strapped the stretcher into the converted jeep, especially modified for just that reason, then Jack and Hettie rode back to the hospital, Sam walking with Keanu to check on any news and pass on information from the clinics on the other islands.

The scent of a nearby frangipani hung in the air, but today such a reminder that he was home didn’t soothe Keanu as it had on other days, on other such walks with Sam, or Hettie or whoever had done the clinic run.

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