by Liz Fielding
‘Jet lag,’ she warned, and he would have been hard put to say whether it was sympathy or relief that he heard in her voice. ‘Give breakfast a miss and take a nap.’
‘Do I look that bad?’ he asked.
‘Memsahib...’
She said something in Swahili to the man waiting to escort her to her canoe before saying, ‘You look exhausted. It will catch up with you sooner rather than later. Far better to be lying down when it does.’
She took another step back and, with a nod, turned to follow the man across the terrace, only hesitating when she reached the steps that led down to the dock to glance back. Almost, he thought, as if she regretted her decision.
Her face was shadowed by the brim of her hat and he wished he could see her eyes.
She’d chatted, been interested, thoughtful and yet he couldn’t get a grip of what she was actually thinking. Whether she was just being charming to some poor bloke who looked like hell after travelling for twenty-four hours or... Or nothing.
He took a mental step back of his own.
Eve Bliss was wearing clothes chosen for comfort rather than style. Her hair, bundled up off her face, was mostly hidden beneath her hat, apart from a few wisps that had escaped. And she’d hidden her eyes, most of her face masked by a pair of large dark glasses and the white streaks of sunblock.
Pretty much all he could see of her had been her mouth, which would explain why it had been the sole focus of his attention from the moment she bit into that pastry. And yet that little lick of an admittedly luscious lip, the defensive lift of her chin, had tugged at some elusive memory.
It had been there from the moment he’d turned and seen her standing behind him. Nothing he could pin down. Nothing, despite the promise of a luscious body beneath the khaki clothes, and an intriguingly familiar accent, to have him thinking to hell with the jet lag, I want more of this, and following her to the canoe.
It had been there at the auction, too. Their only connection had been when he’d stopped her from falling, a quick glimpse of a very ordinary shade of brown hair, a plain black dress. He should be surprised that he remembered that much and yet, as he’d watched her hurry away, he’d felt what he could only describe as a disturbance in the atmosphere and later, as he’d rubbed the exhaustion from his face, there had been the scent of vanilla...
He shook his head. This was crazy.
He’d been tired that night. Even under stress he could sleep on a clothesline—it went with the job—but he’d been feeling guilty about Brad, who wanted this so much. Guilty about not wanting this when it meant so much to his father. Guilty about leaving his team at such a critical moment.
Everyone had been sympathetic to hear about the old man’s stroke, but they’d expected Kit back within a week, two at the most.
Not one of them would understand why he’d apparently abandoned them at such a critical moment.
It hadn’t taken the furious response from the sponsors to his resignation as skipper for him to understand that walking away at such a vital moment could well be the end of his career as an international yachtsman. But he’d made a promise, even though his father hadn’t been listening, had turned his back, waved him away, that if, when, he was needed, he would be there.
He rubbed his hands briskly over his face, attempting to get his head in gear, trying to figure out what he was missing and there it was again.
Vanilla...
Who was she?
Eve’s east coast accent was subtly layered with the kind of British accent spoken by women who hung around the yachting crowd. She’d said she worked in London, but she wasn’t sharply enough turned out to be with one of the PR teams or the gossip media that hung around the yachts hoping for photographs or stories.
Even on safari they wouldn’t have been seen dead in a khaki shirt and pants with the washed-out look of long use that contrasted so starkly with the brand-new gear worn by the rest of the visitors.
They looked like tourists. She didn’t.
Unlike the other guests, who had now dispersed on their game rides, hot-air-balloon trips, or whatever else was on offer, she seemed part of this place. She spoke the language, for heaven’s sake. The staff had spoken to her in Swahili and she’d replied. Not just the standard ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ that everyone picked up but in whole sentences.
He shook his head, dismissing the feeling that they had, somehow, met before. That couldn’t be true; he knew to his cost that the slightest acquaintance was enough to have women clinging to him.
It wasn’t vanity, it wasn’t even about him; anyone with cover appeal would do and he had learned to avoid the worst of it.
The sponsors, however, wanted their money’s worth.
Their yacht, their name, on front covers of the glossies and it was the PR team’s job to make sure it got there. They threw the models and actresses in his direction and he was expected to catch them. His only memory of the occasion would be the sight of a magazine cover as he passed through an airport.
Eve, he thought, despite her understated wardrobe, wasn’t a woman you’d forget.
‘Mr Merchant, can I show you to your suite?’
He’d dumped his bag at Reception, desperate for coffee and to arrange to meet the Merchant partners so that he could leave as soon as possible, but Eve was right.
He’d been travelling for more than twenty-four hours, was seven hours out of his time zone and he needed to at least take a shower before he met with anyone vital to the smooth running of their partnership.
Kit listened patiently while Patrick, his butler, gave him a tour of the suite, then said, ‘Miss Bliss bid on a charity auction for her stay here. I hope she’s being given the VIP treatment?’
‘Yes, sir. As soon as our receptionist saw her name on the guest list she allocated her our very best suite.’ He indicated a sky suite a little ahead of him to the right and just visible through the trees.
‘Her name? You know her? She’s a regular visitor?’
‘No, sir. This is her very first visit to the Nymba Safari Lodge, but our receptionist, Ketty Ngei, knew her when she was a little girl and lived here with her parents. She was very much looking forward to greeting her, but her grandfather had to go to the hospital and she has accompanied him to the city.’
She’d lived here? Well, that explained a lot.
‘Ketty Ngei? Is she related to Joshua Ngei?’ He was the village elder who’d signed the original partnership agreement with his father. The man he’d come to meet.
‘Mzee Ngei is her grandfather,’ Patrick confirmed.
‘Is he ill?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I couldn’t say. Is there anything else I can bring you?’
‘No, thank you.’
He set an alarm on his watch for lunchtime before he stripped off, took a shower and lay down under the cool of a stunningly wrought thatched roof. Would it be possible to have something like it on his beach cabin on Nantucket? They used thatch in England, but would it stand up to Atlantic gales?
His last thought, before sleep claimed him, was the memory of an extraordinary night he’d once spent there with an English girl who, like Cinderella, had vanished without trace, leaving behind not a glass slipper but a beloved grey velvet elephant to prove that it hadn’t all been a dream.
* * *
Apart from the initial wobble with the glass, Eve thought she’d handled her unexpected encounter with Kit Merchant pretty well, all things considered.
In some ways it had been made easy for her. He knew that she’d been at the auction, so he expected her to know who he was and that he’d come home because his father was ill.
She’d even handled the suggestion that he might join her in the canoe without choking on her croissant.
But when she’d risked a glance back, she’d discovered that he was watching her. Had some small gesture,
the way she moved her head, her mixed-up accent, triggered a memory, waking a synapse that was flickering but not quite making the connection? Like an old neon sign that was struggling to light.
She was the only one heading down to the waiting canoe and it would have been so easy to call out to him.
She would have insisted that he sit in front and then spent the entire trip looking at his wide shoulders, the lick of sun-bleached hair that settled in the nape of his neck, knowing exactly where he had a tattoo of a famous cartoon sailor and how his skin had tasted as she’d kissed it...
Her skin heated at the thought and a low ache settled in her womb as she closed her eyes, for a moment succumbing to the memory.
Madness...
Her breathing went to pot and she had to grip hold of her seat to stop her hands from shaking.
‘You will be safe.’ The man guiding the canoe through the water, no doubt putting her nerves down to the sight of crocodiles basking on the far bank, attempted to reassure her.
‘Yes. I know how skilled you are,’ she replied before realising that the man had spoken to her not in Swahili but in the local dialect. And she had answered in the same language.
She turned in her seat to look at him and he grinned.
‘Hello, Evie,’ he said, in English. ‘Long time, no see.’
She took off her dark glasses. ‘Peter? Peter Ngei?’ He’d been several years older than her and there had been a huge party before he’d left to study law at the same time as she’d been sent off to boarding school. ‘Mom wrote to tell me that you’d got a first. What on earth are you doing paddling a tourist canoe? You should be a judge by now.’
He laughed. ‘I’m getting there, but I was at home when Ketty told us you were coming to Nymba, so I volunteered to pick you up and bring you to the village. Unless you’re only interested in the hippos? Maybe you’re too grand for us now?’
‘You have got to be kidding! My grandmother left me some money or I’d never have been able to afford this trip.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that you have lost her. And your dear mother. The village wept when we received her bequest for equipment, books, for the school. Mzee Ngei put up a plaque in her honour.’
‘She left money for the school?’
‘You didn’t know?’
She shook her head.
Her mother had made a number of charitable bequests, but she hadn’t been able to stay in the room while the will was read.
It had been worth this trip just to hear that.
She blinked away the stinging sensation at the back of her eyes and said, ‘So tell me about you, Peter. What are you doing? Are you married?’
‘I’m in the Attorney General’s office, married to Maria and we have two boys.’
‘Maria...?’
‘It was always Maria,’ he said.
‘Of course it was.’ They were another couple of childhood sweethearts... ‘I’m so happy for you. Is she here?’
‘No, she’s working and the boys are in school, but it’s Mzee’s birthday next weekend and she’s bringing the boys down for the party. What about you, Evie?’
‘Nothing so grand. I’m an out-of-work teacher, not married,’ she replied, ‘with one little girl.’
‘You didn’t bring her with you?’
‘She was three in May. Most safari lodges don’t take children younger than six and Nymba doesn’t take them at all.’
‘Next time, come and stay in the village,’ he said, neatly edging the canoe alongside a jetty. ‘We take children of any age.’
As if to emphasise that fact, a dozen or more children ran down to meet them before stopping abruptly to stare at her as she stepped from the canoe.
‘My grandmother has told them that your hair is redder than the setting sun,’ Peter said. ‘They can’t wait to see it.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Problem?’
‘For reasons far too complicated to go into, it’s now a rather boring shade of brown.’ She looked at the children. ‘Maybe a picture of Hannah will do the job.’
She opened her bag and took out a leather folder, which contained photographs of her daughter. She took one out, folded herself up so that she was on their level, and held it up for them to see.
There was a collective gasp and when one, braver than the rest, came closer to look, Eve handed it to her to pass around.
‘You may have lost that,’ Peter warned.
‘I am a besotted mother. I never travel with less than six photographs of my baby. Plus the ones on my phone.’
She offered him the folder and he smiled. ‘She is beautiful. The image of you as a child. Almost. I assume she got the blue eyes from her father. He’s not with you?’
She barely hesitated before shaking her head. ‘We are not together.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve shown you mine...?’ she prompted, to divert him.
He produced a phone and brought up pictures of the cheekiest-looking little boys.
‘Oh, they are gorgeous, Peter.’
‘They are a handful...’ That was as far as he got before she was engulfed in hugs.
* * *
Kit was standing under a cold shower. He’d been dreaming. It was one of those recurring dreams that haunted you, where you were looking for someone, travelling down endless corridors until you woke in a sweat.
It hadn’t happened in a while but, considering the way his life had been turned upside down, his disturbed sleep pattern, the fact that he’d been thinking about Red as he fell asleep, it wasn’t surprising.
The sun was high now. Across the river, the savannah shimmered in a heat haze so that at one moment you were looking at a distant herd of zebra and the next they had vanished.
He raised the canvas sidings to let the air blow through and found himself looking into the huge, long-lashed eyes of a giraffe.
They stared at one another for a hold-your-breath moment and then the creature blinked and moved gracefully away to continue grazing on the trees.
A bird swooped past, a flash of blue and mauve, and as he followed it he found himself looking into the face of a small monkey. It bared its teeth at him, swung down on the rail beside him, leapt across the deck and grabbed an orange from a bowl of fruit.
And Kit laughed.
For the first time in weeks, he threw back his head and laughed. Eve would be back from her canoe trip and he couldn’t wait to tell her.
She’d probably roll her eyes, tell him that it happened all the time, but he didn’t care. She could roll her eyes all she wanted so long as she sat next to him at lunch and he could catch her scent.
CHAPTER FIVE
LUNCH WAS BEING served when he reached the terrace, but a glance along the table was enough for him to see that Eve was not there.
Disappointed and a little concerned, he crossed to Reception.
‘Has Miss Bliss returned from her canoe trip?’ he asked.
‘No, sir, she won’t be back until this evening. She is spending the day with friends in the village.’
She hadn’t mentioned that when she was telling him how peaceful and quiet it would be on the river. No wonder she hadn’t wanted company.
‘Mr Lenku wondered if you would prefer to eat in the privacy of the staff dining room, sir?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, thank you. Would you ask him to join me?’
He was here for a meeting, not to indulge his curiosity, indulge anything over a woman.
He’d met James Lenku briefly on his arrival. He was an experienced resort manager, and Kit was relying on him for a briefing before the meeting the next day.
‘What time will it start?’ he asked, when James arrived.
‘I’ve just heard that the meeting will have to be put back for two or three days, Mr Merchant—’
‘Kit.’
He nodded. ‘Kit. Mzee Ngei had a hospital appointment today and they have decided to keep him there for some tests. His grandson, Peter Ngei, is now in control of the day-to-day running of the trust, but the annual meeting can’t go ahead without Mzee present. Your father usually stayed for a week,’ he added, ‘so there is no problem over your accommodation.’
What had been Brad’s parting shot? Don’t hurry back...
‘Is there anything we can do to make Mr... Mzee Ngei’s stay more comfortable?’
‘Ketty will take care of anything he needs. She’ll let me know if she needs anything.’
‘Do we have any idea how long it’s likely to be? As you know my father is not well and I’m needed at home.’
‘Not long. It’s his birthday on Saturday and the village are throwing a big party. Nothing will keep him from that and in the meantime you have an opportunity to experience what Nymba Lodge has to offer the guests you send to us.’
He’d thought he was going to be doing something useful, but apparently this annual meeting was going to be more of a holiday, as it had been a holiday for his father, and he had to fill his time.
‘Certainly. What would you suggest?’
‘There are regular hot-air-balloon flights, river trips, fishing and walking with the elephants.’
‘Walking with them? I thought African elephants were invariably dangerous.’
‘These were orphans raised at Nymba by the behavioural biologist team who worked here. Rose and Jeremy Bliss. I believe you know Eve Bliss, their daughter?’
‘We have met,’ he confirmed. ‘Were the elephants part of their work?’
‘They were here studying the local population. I believe they rescued the babies after their mothers were killed by poachers. The trust has taken care of them since the project ended.’
‘Will Eve be going on the walk?’
‘I can check her itinerary and arrange for you to be in her party.’
That wasn’t what he’d asked... Except why else would he have asked? ‘Thank you.’