Falling Again for Her Island Fling

by Ellie Darkins

  Her head doesn’t remember him...

  ...but her heart does!

  Marine biologist Meena isn’t prepared for the jolt of recognition when she meets tycoon Guy Williams while working on development plans for his luxury island resort. Years ago they had a whirlwind fling, but afterward an accident stole Meena’s memories—and much more. She’s been searching for answers ever since. Could Guy be the missing piece to her past and her future—if she’s willing to risk her heart again?

  “I need to know, Guy. I need you to tell me everything.”

  “I’ve already guessed that we knew each other that summer,” Meena prompted him. “When my memories are missing,” she said, hoping that would prompt him to continue. “How did we meet?”

  The look on his face had already confirmed what she had been starting to suspect. What had happened between them to cause the pain that was so clearly resonating from him?

  “We were friends, weren’t we? More than friends.” She made it a statement, rather than a question.

  Guy shook his head, and for a moment, she thought that he was going to deny everything. If he’d done that, she wouldn’t know what to do next. She would know that he was lying. His face had already told her that they had a past. What she needed now were the details.

  “Yes, we knew each other,” Guy said without meeting her eyes.

  “More than knew each other. We were...involved.”

  He looked up then, met her gaze briefly before looking away again. “Yes. We were involved.”

  Dear Reader,

  When I heard that a friend of mine was moving to an island in the Indian Ocean to carry out research for her marine biology studies, I knew that I had the inspiration for a story! The island of St. Antoine was born in my imagination, and I had so much fun populating this island with my gorgeous heroine, Meena, and hero, Guy.

  This is the first time that I have written a reunion romance, and my first amnesia story, which made this a truly emotional journey. Thinking about what made these characters fall in love with each other not once, but twice, and trying to rekindle the magic of their summer fling was a new experience for me and so rewarding. I hope you agree with me that they are finally perfect for one another, and so deserving of their happy-ever-after.

  Love,

  Ellie Darkins

  x

  Falling Again for Her Island Fling

  Ellie Darkins

  Ellie Darkins spent her formative years devouring romance novels, and after completing her English degree decided to make a living from her love of books. As a writer and editor, she finds her work now entails dreaming up romantic proposals, hot dates with alpha males and trips to the past with dashing heroes. When she’s not working, she can usually be found running around after her toddler, volunteering at her local library, or escaping all the above with a good book and a vanilla latte.

  Books by Ellie Darkins

  Harlequin Romance

  Frozen Heart, Melting Kiss

  Bound by a Baby Bump

  Newborn on Her Doorstep

  Holiday with the Mystery Italian

  Falling for the Rebel Princess

  Conveniently Engaged to the Boss

  Surprise Baby for the Heir

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com.

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  For my girls

  Praise for

  Ellie Darkins

  “This is a wonderful book that showcases the growth of two people from lonely, tieless people and makes them blossom... A good one for certain.”

  —Harlequin Junkie on Conveniently Engaged to the Boss

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  EXCERPT FROM CINDERELLA’S PRINCE UNDER THE MISTLETOE BY CARA COLTER

  CHAPTER ONE

  MEENA LAY ON her back, the sand hot beneath her, the sun reaching her face through the leaves of the coconut trees, and breathed deeply, grateful for the shade even this early in the morning. By lunchtime the heat would be fierce, and she would be forced indoors, so she really should be making the most of her time here on the island of Le Bijou before she had to get back to the St Antoine mainland. But lying on the beach, alone in the sunlight, was still something of a dream. Especially here. Something that she had imagined for so long. Had started to fear would never happen again. It was something she could never take for granted.

  She took another breath, long and slow, relaxing her body from the tips of her fingers down to her toes. It was still a marvel that she could make it follow her commands so easily, after the years that she had spent relearning how to use it. It had taken more strength than she’d known she had to get her body working again after the accident, and still more for her to be able to face the world and reintegrate herself into real life.

  From the outside now one would never guess what had happened to her. Her thick dark hair, worn in its natural curls, did a perfect job of hiding the scars on her head. Her standard-issue Environmental Agency polo shirt or a wetsuit over a one-piece swimsuit took care of the rest.

  But the scars were still there. She could feel them on her scalp and her body. Feel them in her mind, every time that she tried to recall the months before the accident and found them blank. And then there were the looks and the whispers that she knew followed her around the island. She was the girl who had been hit by a car and lost her mind.

  The dappled light grew darker behind her eyelids and she blinked them open, uneasy. She sat up quickly as she realised she was right to be concerned. A man was standing over her, casting a shadow where she had been lying in the sand. With the sun behind him, she couldn’t make out his features, and she scrambled to her feet, heart tripping a little faster, glancing around her to see if there was anyone about who might hear her if she had to call out for help.

  ‘Meena?’ the man asked, sounding as if he was choking on her name.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she replied in English, picking up on his Australian accent even in that one word. Like most residents of St Antoine, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, she was fluent in the French the islanders used every day as well as English, the official language of government business, and of course the colourful creole that the islanders used amongst themselves. But she’d lived in Australia for a year while she’d been at university and the accent never failed to tug at her heart.

  She narrowed her eyes, looking at him closely. Was there something familiar about him? She felt as if his name and the memory of who he was were right on the verge of making it into a functional part of her brain. But her brain didn’t make the leap, so she launched into her well-rehearsed spiel, the words that she’d carefully formulated over the years to smooth this very social awkwardness.

  ‘I’m sorry if we’ve met before,’ she said, scrambling to her feet while she went through the speech. ‘I suffered a head injury and lost some memories.’

  She didn’t even feel embarrassed any more, she realised, about giving her usual excuse when she didn’t recognise someone but got the sense that she
probably should. It happened rarely these days. Most of the people whom she’d met and forgotten that summer either knew about her accident already or had just been holidaying on the island and she need never worry about seeing them again. She had spent almost her whole life on St Antoine, the beautiful magnet for tourists and the developers who followed them. But most of the people who stayed here were on once-in-a-lifetime trips and would never know that she had completely forgotten meeting them. It had been a few months, at least, since she had had to make her slightly unorthodox introduction.

  The man held out his hand to shake hers, still watching her with trepidation. Probably worried that she was going to fall into a fit or something, she told herself. She’d waited out the five-year danger period after her accident, desperate to get back to diving, her career and her life on hold until she could get back into the water; wondering every day whether this would be the one when a seizure struck. But it had never happened, and she had got herself recertified to dive and back to her conservation work on the island.

  ‘Guy Williams,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’m—’

  ‘The owner of the development company.’ She’d received an email telling her that she should expect him tomorrow, yet here he was, interrupting her relaxation practice a day early.

  ‘You’ve lost your memories?’ he said, still looking at her strangely. Meena rolled her eyes; she used to get this a lot.

  ‘Yes, just like in a movie. Should I remember something about you?’

  He shook his head. He was taking this even worse than most people she told. Generally, people just looked puzzled but, even though Guy Williams was a stranger, she could tell from his expression that he was struggling to accept what she’d just revealed. Maybe he didn’t believe her.

  ‘Then this is a fresh start,’ Meena said, eager to move the conversation along. ‘I expect you want to know about the environmental impact assessment. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow but I was just about to get started.’ She glanced around, looking for her clipboard, sure that she had brought it out with her. Oh, way to make a good impression, she thought. Introduce herself with a side note about a brain injury and then look around the beach as if you have no idea what you’re doing there.

  She was not usually so distracted by a pretty face—even one as pretty as this. High forehead, golden tan, long, straight nose, full lips, a hint of a cleft in his chin. The body wasn’t half bad either—she supposed, if she were absolutely pressed to give her opinion on the subject—from what she could see of it, anyway.

  He was dressed for business in a conservative shirt and navy suit. But his collar was open, showing just a hint of his throat and making her want to lean closer, to let her fingers drift into that notch, feel the heat of his skin, the throb of his pulse beneath her fingers.

  She shook her head. Where had that thought come from? She took a step away from him. She should not be thinking that way. She did not want a man in her life. She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly feeling cold despite the growing heat of the day. She’d proved to herself a long time ago that she wasn’t capable of making good decisions about men. About sex. It was safer to deny herself either rather than risk repeating her mistakes.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Guy asked.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. I was just about to begin.’

  Ah, there. She spotted the clipboard from the corner of her eye and scooped it up in a single, easy movement that belied the many months of physio she’d endured after her accident to enable her to take even a single step.

  She caught him looking at her from the corner of her eye and momentarily stopped. ‘Are you sure we didn’t meet...before?’ she asked, hating the black hole in her memory that made the question necessary. She shouldn’t have to look at every man she met and ask herself, Was it you? Was it your baby I was carrying?

  He gave her a look so bland that she knew it couldn’t possibly have been him. It was as if he barely saw her at all. As if she were barely there at all. Well, she supposed that answered her question well enough.

  ‘I’m sure,’ he said with firm politeness. Another one to strike off the list, she thought, trying not to cringe at this internal game of ‘who’s the daddy?’ that she had been forced to play for the last seven years.

  She could let it rest, of course. There was no baby. Not now. When she had eventually woken from the coma, the doctors in the clinic had broken it to her gently that it hadn’t just been her memories that she’d lost. She didn’t even know if she’d known before the accident that she’d been pregnant. Given the conservative attitude to premarital sex across almost every culture on St Antoine, she was sure that an unplanned pregnancy would have been more cause for anxiety than celebrations.

  She still remembered the whispers that had followed a school friend who had fallen pregnant in her late teens, and who had hastily been married before the baby arrived six months later. Was that why Meena’s lover had disappeared? Had he feared he would be forced into a shotgun wedding? Tied to a woman he didn’t love?

  Her parents were hardly traditional, though. They had raised eyebrows with their own marriage—Meena’s French-Mauritian mother and Hindu father had married at a time when such relationships had been even more unusual than they were now—but that didn’t mean that people wouldn’t talk. They always talked.

  She had been unusual too in living away from her parents: it had taken every ounce of determination she’d had to move out when she’d been sufficiently recovered from her accident.

  But if her family knew about any boyfriend she’d had they had never said anything. So she had no choice but to assume that the relationship had been a secret. How could she have been serious enough about someone to have slept with him but not serious enough to introduce him to her parents?

  Her mind had spent many hours tying itself in knots trying to work it out. She hadn’t been far along and what worried her the most was that she had no idea who the father could have been. She was only missing a few months of memory, and there had been no sign of a boyfriend in her life, so where had this baby come from—and what had happened to the father? Where had he been when she’d been trapped under that car, her memories and their baby leaving her body?

  Leaving her broken.

  Guy turned to look back up the beach to the scrubland where the hotel complex would be built. Where it could be built, Meena corrected herself, as long as the environmental studies were clear and planning permission was granted by the relevant government department. If she couldn’t find something to hold up the development... She took a deep breath. She would find something—she had to—because there was something about this tiny jewel of an island on which she wasn’t going to give up.

  For seven years it had felt like her secret. In all the trauma and recovery of that time, she had spent more time here, at this secluded beach, than just about anywhere else. It was the only place where she felt still. At peace. Where her mind rested and her heart didn’t hurt. So when she had heard about the upcoming development she had made sure that she was on the environmental impact team. If there was any way of stopping the resort from being built, then she was going to be the one to find it.

  * * *

  Meena Bappoo. Flat-backed on the beach, just as he’d left her. Eyes closed to the sun, as if it had been minutes since he had last seen her here rather than years. He’d nearly turned and walked away when he’d seen the Environmental Agency logo on her shirt and realised she was the agency marine biologist he was meant to be meeting. The notes that he’d received from his project manager’s schedule hadn’t mentioned her by name, only her job title and the time and location of the meeting, though it turned out that he had mixed up the date.

  And then her lids had snapped open, he’d seen those warm golden-brown eyes again and he’d known he was too entranced to walk away.

  Did he believe her story? Her memory loss seemed far-fetched. But sh
e hadn’t really given him a choice: he had to believe her. The way she’d looked at him was so completely blank. Surely she couldn’t have been so unmoved if she’d remembered even a moment of those few months that they’d spent together?

  Because he remembered. He remembered everything. The way that she spoke, her island creole accent that he knew could slip so quickly into perfect French or her slightly American-sounding English. The way that she smelled—of salt, sand and the coconut oil that she rubbed into her skin. The way that she had looked at him after they had made love for the first time, as if they had just created the stars in the sky.

  The way that he had waited for her as they’d agreed, after he had returned to Australia, and she had never shown up.

  Had it been the accident? he wondered now. That would make sense, answer the questions he had been carrying around in the years since they had been together. It hit him like a blow to the chest, the thought that perhaps he had been wrong. That she had wanted to come as desperately as he had wanted it. But it didn’t hurt any less when she looked at him and didn’t see him.

  He’d thought of her over the years. Thought of them. Thought of the days and the nights that they had spent on this beach. Thought of the night, years later, that he’d made the decision to buy the tiny uninhabited island of Le Bijou and build his resort. Thought of the pain that he had felt when he had been left alone, wanting her, wondering what had gone wrong. Thought of all the ways that he had tried to numb that pain, and the consequences that had spiralled out of control.

  And then he couldn’t think about it any more, because the loss and grief from that time of his life was still too painful, too raw even to glance at, never mind examine more closely.

  He’d come here to get over her. To face their past, bury it, landscape over the evidence and then move on. But then he’d seen her lying there, looking exactly as she had the day that he’d left her, and known immediately that it was a mistake.