by Sandra Field
But that was a long time ago.
The only thing she’d have to beware of was touching him. The physical bond between them had never ruptured, not even in the worst of times, and when he’d wrapped his fingers around hers last night as she’d passed him the key, all the old magic had instantly exploded to life, like fireworks glittering against the blackness of sky.
He’d seduced her—literally—from the beginning. She mustn’t, for her own sake, allow him to do it again.
There were six other people in the group; she’d have lots of protection. Plus the itinerary would keep everyone busy. On which note, Rowan thought lightly, you’d better get moving. She scrambled out of bed, headed for the shower and left her room at ten to six.
Breakfast started at six on a charming open patio twined with scarlet hibiscus and the yellow trumpet-shaped flowers called Allamanda. The six other members of the group were tucking into slices of juicy papaya; Brant was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d decided to heed her advice and take the day off, thought Rowan; or, even better, fly back to Toronto. She beamed at everyone, inquired how they’d all slept, and heard Brant’s deep voice say from behind her, “Good morning—sorry I missed seeing all of you last night.”
Rowan said evenly, “This is Brant Curtis, from Toronto. He’s taking Rick’s place, because Rick’s ill with pneumonia.” Quickly she introduced the others to Brant, then said, “I’m sure you won’t remember everyone’s name. But you’ll soon get to know each other. Coffee, Brant?”
“Shower first, coffee second,” he said easily, “that’s been my routine for a long time.”
He was smiling at her. Often they’d showered together; and they’d both loved Viennese coffee ground fresh and sweetened with maple syrup. Willing herself not to snarl at him, Rowan said, “Personally I prefer herbal tea—can’t take the caffeine anymore.”
Peg and May, the two elderly sisters from Dakota who looked fluttery and sweet and knew more about birds than most encyclopedias, passed Brant the plate of papaya and the cream for his coffee; Sheldon and Karen, the newlyweds from Maine, gave him the bemused smiles they gave everything and everyone; Steve and Natalie, unmarried and so argumentative that Rowan sincerely hoped they weren’t contemplating marriage, both eyed Brant speculatively. Steve no doubt saw Brant as a potential rival for Alpha male; whereas Natalie was probably wanting to haul him off to bed the minute Steve was looking the other way.
Brant was a big boy. Let Brant deal with Natalie.
Peg said, “You missed some wonderful shorebirds in Antigua yesterday, Brant. But you’ll have lots of time to catch up...I’m sure you saw the mangrove cuckoo in the breadfruit tree?”
“And the black form of the bananaquit in the bougainvillea?” May added.
Brant took a deep draft of coffee; he was going to need it. He said cautiously, dredging his memory for the pictures in the bird book, “I thought a bananaquit was yellow?” and realized he’d said exactly the right thing. Peg and May launched into an enthusiastic and mystifying discussion about isolation and Darwinian theory, to which he nodded and looked as though he understood every word, munching all the while on a deliciously crumbly croissant smothered with jam.
Natalie, who was wearing a cotton shirt with rather a lot of buttons undone, smoothed her sleek black hair back from her face and pouted her fuschia-colored lips at him. “On the way back to our rooms, Brant, I’ll have to show you where I saw the crested hummingbird.”
“You can show me first,” Steve said aggressively; he had the build of a wrestler and the buzzed haircut of a marine.
“Oh,” piped Karen, who had fluffy blond curls and artless blue eyes, “what’s that black bird with the long tail on the ledge of the patio?”
“A male Carib grackle,” Rowan replied. “The equivalent of our starling, we’ll be seeing a lot of them.”
Sheldon, Karen’s husband, said nothing; he was too busy gazing at Karen in adoration.
Everyone else, Brant saw, had brought binoculars to the table; he’d forgotten his. Rowan looked as though she hadn’t had much more sleep than he’d had. Good, he thought meanly, and took another croissant. He was already beginning to realize that keeping up with this lot was going to take a fair bit of energy and that he probably should have read more of the bird book and thought less about Rowan on the long flight from Toronto.
Not that he was here to see birds.
He was here to see Rowan—right?
By the time they left the hotel, the sky had clouded over and rain was spattering the windshield. Their first stop was an unprepossessing stretch of scrubby forest on the side of a hillside, the residence of an endangered species called the Grenada dove. Brant trooped with the rest up the slope, thorns snatching at his shirt and bare wrists, rain dripping down his neck. Wasn’t April supposed to be the dry season? Where was the famous sunshine of the Caribbean? Where were the white sand beaches? And why was Rowan way ahead of him and he last in line? Natalie, not to his surprise, was directly in front of him, an expensive camera looped over her shoulder, her hips undulating like a model’s on a catwalk. He’d met plenty of Natalies over the years, and avoided them like the plague; especially when they were teamed with bruisers like Steve.
When they were all thoroughly enmeshed in the forest, Rowan took out a tape deck and played a recording of the dove, its mournful cooing not improving Brant’s mood. She was intent on what she was doing, her eyes searching the forest floor, all her senses alert. Maybe if he blatted like a dove she’d notice he was here, he thought sourly.
They all trudged further up the hillside and she played the tape again; then moved to another spot, where there was a small clearing. Rowan replayed the tape. From higher up the slope a soft, plangent cooing came in reply. She whispered, “Hear that? Check out that patch of undergrowth by the gumbo-limbo tree.”
Brant didn’t know a gumbo-limbo tree from a coconut palm. Peg said, “Oh, there’s the dove! Do you see it, May? Working its way between the thorn bushes.”
“I can see it,” Natalie remarked. “Not sure I can get a photo, though.”
“Then why can’t I find it?” Steve fumed.
“Come over here, Steve,” Rowan said, “I’ve got it in the scope.”
She’d been carrying a large telescope on a tripod; Brant watched Steve stoop to look in the eyepiece. Then Karen and Sheldon peered in. Rowan said, “Look for the white shoulders and the white patch on the head. Brant, have you seen it?”
He hadn’t. Obediently he walked over and looked through the lens, seeing a dull brown pigeon with a crescent of white on its side. Natalie rubbed against him with her hip. “My turn, Brant,” she murmured.
May—who had mauve-rinsed hair while Peg had blue—said to him, “Isn’t that a wonderful bird?”
She was grinning from ear to ear; Brant couldn’t possibly have spoiled her pleasure. “A terrific bird,” he said solemnly.
Ten minutes later they emerged back into the cleared land at the base of the scrub forest, and Rowan swept the area with her binoculars. Then she gasped in amazement. “Look—near the papaya tree. A pair of them!”
Brant raised his binoculars. Two more doves were pecking at the earth, their white markings clearly visible. Peg and May sighed with deep satisfaction, Natalie adjusted her zoom lens for a picture and Rowan said exultantly, “This is one of the rarest birds of the whole trip and we’ve seen three of them! I can’t believe it.”
Instead of staring at the doves, Brant stared at Rowan. Her cheeks were flushed, her face alight with pleasure; she used to look that way when he’d walked in the door after a three-week absence, he thought painfully. Or after they’d made love.
She glanced up, caught his fixed gaze on her and narrowed her eyes, closing him out; her chin was raised, her damp curls like tiny flames. Steve snapped, “Hurry up and put the scope on them, Rowan.”
Rowan gave a tiny start. “Sorry,” she said, and lowered the tripod.
Don’t you talk to my wife like that.
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His own words, which had been entirely instinctive, played themselves in Brant’s head like one of Rowan’s tapes. She wasn’t his wife. Not anymore. And why should it matter to him how a jerk like Steve behaved? Furious with himself, he raised his glasses and watched the two doves work their way along a clump of bushes.
Then Peg said, “A pair of blue-black grassquits at the edge of the sugarcane,” and everyone’s binoculars, with the exception of Brant’s, swiveled to the left.
“How beautiful,” May sighed.
“This is the only island we’ll see them,” Peg added.
“Take a look in the scope, Karen,” Rowan offered.
They all lined up for a turn. Brant was last “All I can see is sugarcane,” he said.
Quickly Rowan edged him aside, adjusting the black levers. Her left hand was bare of rings, he saw with a nasty flick of pain, as if a knife had scored his bare skin. “There they are, they’d moved,” she said, and backed away.
Into his vision leaped a small glossy bird and its much duller mate. A pair, he thought numbly, and suddenly wished with all his heart that he was back in his condo in Toronto, or striding along the bustling streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s capital city. Anything would be better than having Rowan so close and yet so unutterably far away.
They tramped back to the van, adding several other birds to the list on the way, all of whose names Brant forgot as soon as they were mentioned. He couldn’t sit beside Rowan; she was in the front with the driver. He took the jump seat next to Peg and tried to listen to the tale of habitat destruction that had made the dove such a rarity.
They drove north next, to the rain forests in the center of the island, where dutifully Brant took note of hummingbirds, tanagers, swifts, flycatchers and more bananaquits. Not even the sight of a troop of Mona monkeys cavorting in a bamboo grove could raise his spirits. His mood was more allied to the thunderclouds hovering on the horizon, a mood as black-hearted as the black-feathered and omnipresent grackles.
When they reached some picnic tables by a murky lake, Rowan busied herself laying out paper plates and cutlery, producing drinks and a delicious pasta salad from a cooler, as well as crusty rolls, fruit and cookies out of various bags. She did all this with a cheerful efficiency that grated on Brant’s nerves. How could she be so happy when he felt like the pits? How could she joke with a macho idiot like Steve?
He sat a little apart from the rest of the group, feeding a fair bit of his lunch to a stray dog that hovered nearby. He had considerable fellow feeling for it; however, Rowan wasn’t into throwing him anything, not even the smallest of scraps. To her he was just one more member of the group; she’d make sure he saw the birds and got fed and that was where her responsibility ended.
He felt like a little kid exiled from the playground. He felt like a grown man with a lump in his gut bigger than a crusty roll and ten times less digestible. He fed the last of his roll to the dog and buried his nose in the bird book, trying to sort out bananaquits from grassquits.
Their next destination was a mangrove swamp at the northern tip of the island. Although it had stopped raining, the sweep of beach and the crash of waves seemed to increase Brant’s sense of alienation.
Rowan glanced around. “The trail circling the swamp is at the far end of those palm trees.”
“I’m going to wait here,” Brant said. “I can see the van, so I’ll know when you get back.”
“Suit yourself,” she said with an indifferent shrug.
May protested, “But you might miss the egrets.”
“Or the stilts,” Peg said.
“I’m going for a swim,” Brant said firmly.
May brightened. “Maybe you’ll see a tropic bird.”
He didn’t know a tropic bird from a gull; but he didn’t tell her that. “Maybe I will.”
“I wish you’d told us this morning we’d be at a beach, Rowan,” Natalie said crossly. “I’d love a swim.”
“You came here to photograph birds,” Steve announced, and grabbed her by the wrist. She glared at him and he glared right back.
“We’d better go,” Rowan said quickly. “Once we’ve trekked around the swamp we have a long drive home.”
Brant had put on his trunks under his jeans that morning; he left his gear with the driver of the van, shucked off his clothes and ran into the water, feeling the waves seize him in their rough embrace. He swam back and forth in the surf as fast as he could, blanking from his mind everything but the salt sting of the sea and the pull of his muscles. When he finally looked up, the group was trailing along the beach toward him.
He hauled himself out of the waves, picked up his clothes from the sand and swiped at his face with his towel. Rowan was first in line. He jogged over to her, draping his towel over his shoulder. “Did I miss the rarest egret in the world?”
Midafternoon had always been the low point of the day for Rowan; and the sight of Brant running across the sand toward her in the briefest of swim trunks wasn’t calculated to improve her mood. She said coldly, staring straight ahead, “There was a white-tailed tropic bird flying right over your head.”
“No kidding.”
She hated the mockery in his voice, hated his closeness even more. Then his elbow bumped her arm. “Sorry,” he said.
He wasn’t sorry; she knew darn well he’d done it on purpose. But Peg and May were right behind her and she couldn’t possibly let loose the flood of words that was crowding her tongue. She bit her lip, her eyes skidding sideways of their own accord. The sunlight was glinting on the water that trickled down Brant’s ribs and through the dark hair that curled on his chest. His belly was as flat as a board, corded with muscle; she didn’t dare look lower.
To her infinite relief a night heron flew over the trees. Grabbing her binoculars, Rowan blanked from her mind the image of Brant’s sleek shoulders and taut ribs. He meant nothing to her now. Nothing. She had to hold to that thought or she’d be sunk.
The yellow-crowned night heron was obliging enough to settle itself in the treetops, where it wobbled rather endearingly in the wind. Karen had never seen one before. Quickly Rowan set up the scope, immersing herself in her job again, and when next she looked Brant was standing by the van fully clothed.
Thank God for small mercies, she thought, and shepherded her little flock back into the van. On the drive home along the coast she gave herself a stern lecture about keeping her cool when she was anywhere in Brant’s vicinity, whether he was clothed or unclothed. She couldn’t bear for him to know that the sight of his big rangy body had set her heart thumping in her breast like a partridge drumming on a tree stump in mating season.
It was none of his business. He’d lost any right to know her true feelings; he’d trampled on them far too often.
He was a client of the company she worked for, one more client on one more trip.
Maybe if she repeated this often enough, she’d start to believe it. Maybe.
CHAPTER THREE
AT DINNER Brant ate curried chicken and mango ice cream as though they were so much cardboard, and tried to talk to Karen, whose sole topic of conversation was Sheldon, rather than to Natalie, whose every topic was laced with sexual innuendo. Rowan was sitting at the other end of the table laughing and chatting with Steve, May and Peg; she looked carefree and confident. He had the beginnings of a headache.
Would he be a coward to fly back to Toronto? Or was it called common sense instead?
People dispersed after dinner; it was nine-fifty and they had to be up before six to leave for the airport, to fly to the next island on the itinerary. Rowan had already gone to her room. Brant found himself standing outside her patio doors, where, once again, the curtains were drawn tight. Without stopping to consider what he was doing, let alone why, he raised his fist, tapped on the glass, and in a voice that emulated Steve’s gravelly bass he said, “Rowan? Steve here. Do you have any Tylenol? Natalie’s got a headache.”
“Just a second,” she called.
Then the door opened and at the same instant that her eyes widened in shock, Brant shoved, his foot in the gap and pushed it still wider, wide enough that he could step through. Rowan said in a furious whisper, “Brant, get out of here!”
He closed the door behind him. She had started undressing; her feet were bare and her shirt pulled out of her waistband, the top two buttons undone. In the soft lamplight her skin looked creamy and her hair glowed like a banked fire.
She spat, “Go away and leave me alone—you’re good at doing that, you’ve had lots of practice.”
“For God’s sake, leave the past out of this!”
“I despise you for pulling a trick like that, pretending you were Steve. Although it’s just what I should expect from someone so little in tune with his feelings, so removed from—”
Brant had had enough. With explosive energy he said, “I’m not leaving until you tell me how else I’m going to get five minutes alone with you.”
“I don’t want ten seconds alone with you!”
“We’re not going to spend the next two weeks pretending I’ve come all this way just to see a bunch of dumpy old pigeons.”
Rowan felt her body freeze to stillness; in the midst of that stillness she remembered the resolve she’d made in the van. To keep her cool, her feelings hidden. She wasn’t doing very well in that department so far; she’d better see what she could do to improve matters. Forcing herself to lower her voice, she said, “So why not tell me why you’ve come here, Brant?”
He gaped at her. Because Gabrielle told me to? That would go over like a lead balloon. “I just wanted to see you,” he said lamely.
“You’ve seen me,” she replied without a trace of emotion. “Now you can go back to Toronto. Or to whatever benighted part of the globe you’re writing about next. Either way, I want you to stay away from me.”
“Don’t I mean anything to you anymore?”
He hadn’t meant to say that. Her lips thinned. She answered tersely, “If you’re asking if I’ll ever forget you, the answer’s probably no—the damage went too deep for that. If you’re asking if I want to revive any kind of a relationship with you, the answer’s absolutely no. And for the very same reason.”