A Marriage In The Making. Natalie Fox
decided quickly, bear-hugging the boy to her and planting a squidgy kiss beneath his ear, making him laugh.
Daniel might come to the cottage looking for his son but Saffron was here and would tell him where they were. Optimistically Karis imagined telling him all about his estranged son, what a good swimmer he was, how well he could read—an amazing achievement for a five-year-old who a year ago hadn’t been able to string a sentence together.
Yes, she would have so much to tell him, so why was that grey cloud of uncertainty looming? She knew but didn’t want to think about it. One day soon, she and Tara would lose Josh to his cold, unfeeling father and…No, she wouldn’t think about it, not yet. Josh wanted to swim and dive and chase sea turtles under the water and frankly so did she.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind staying on while I’m over at the main house, Saffron?’ Karis asked later.
Saffron lived over at the staff cottages behind the plantation house and Karis had never had reason to ask her to stay late before. She had no social life and there was certainly nowhere to go on the tiny island even if she had. She had never been issued with an invitation to join one of Fiesta’s house parties, of which there were numerous in the holiday season. She was staff after all.
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Saffron told her as she finished off the washing up and turned to gaze at Karis, who was trying to do something with her unruly hair in front of the kitchen mirror. ‘Best if you find out what that boy’s father’s intentions are.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Karis murmured thoughtfully. She coiled her hair in a bundle on the top of her head and secured it with a gilt clasp. She had dressed in her best outfit—a slip of a silk dress in dark green with fine shoulder straps. Her feet were bare, though. After a year of tropical island living shoes and even sandals were unbearable on her feet. She supposed she had gone native this last year but the laidback lifestyle of the West Indians had appealed to her after the formality of life in Britain. She was freer here than she had ever been before. But she was bowing to convention now, making the best of herself to face Fiesta and possibly Josh’s father, because it was important that she give a good impression…but blow the shoes!
‘Are you sure Josh’s father didn’t come to the cottage while Josh and I were along at the creek?’ she asked as she tucked an unruly wisp of dark hair back into the clasp.
Earlier she’d told Saffron about Josh’s father arriving on the island and had fully expected him to come to the cottage to see his son once he had unpacked. She couldn’t believe that he hadn’t.
‘I’m sure,’ Saffron assured her. ‘I sat out on that verandah all the time and he didn’t come near.’
And yet Karis had been sure they had been watched as they’d swum and practised diving in the tiny creek on the other side of the island, only fifteen minutes’ walk away but far enough to claim seclusion. Fiesta’s guests were generally a lazy lot who never ventured far from the opulent plantation house with its swimming pool and the bar lavishly stocked with every cocktail ingredient imaginable.
She must have been mistaken, unnerved by that dark man’s unyielding eyes as he had stopped and stared earlier, and imagined he must be shadowing her and Josh.
‘It’s awful,’ Karis sighed, and licked her fingers and smoothed them over her dark brows. ‘He hasn’t seen him at all since I’ve been looking after him. It’s the first time I’ve seen him.’
‘He came when you were on St Lucia with Tara for her check-up, six months ago,’ Saffron told her, rubbing her hands on a tea-towel as Karis swung to face her in surprise. ‘You remember the boy was yowling for a week when you came back.’
‘I thought it was because he was angry with me for not taking him,’ Karis stated in astonishment ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Saffron?’ Oh, she should have done. It would have helped to know the real reason for Josh’s distress.
Saffron shrugged without looking at her. ‘No good you vexing yourself about it too.’
‘Hmm. Maybe.’ Karis exhaled. That was Saffron’s reasoning—ignorance was bliss—and perhaps she was right. Karis would have vexed herself over it.
She would have liked to know all the same; after all, she was the closest to the small, troubled boy and she might have been able to draw him out if she had known what was bothering him. It dragged at her heart to think the child was in such fear of his own father.
‘I won’t be long,’ she told Saffron from the open door onto the verandah. ‘If the children wake—’
“They won’t,’ Saffron laughed, and then the wide grin drained from her round face and she grew serious. ‘I wish you were all dressed up like that for a date.’
‘A date with whom?’ Karis laughed softly and added teasingly, ‘One of those ghastly rich old men that fly down from Miami for Fiesta’s vacations? I’d rather court the devil, Saffron.’
‘Wicked girl!’ Saffron chastised her, with humour softening the remark.
‘Not at all a wicked girl,’ Karis muttered under her breath as she followed the path to the plantation house through the subtly lit gardens. The devil himself was a safer bet than the one man she’d allowed into her life, the man she had married and lost so tragically. Poor Aiden. Karis shivered sorrowfully in spite of the cloying heat. He hadn’t deserved what fate had dealt him, no matter what he had done. But he had given her Tara, the one good thing he had done in his life, and for that she couldn’t allow his memory to fade though her memories of him were tinged with sadness and bitterness most of the time.
It was a velvety black tropical night with heavy cloud obscuring the moon and pressing the heat of the day back down to earth, making the air thick and heady. Karis could hear laughter coming from the beach and smell the charcoal grill sizzling T-bone steaks and so she avoided the waterfront route to the house. Fiesta hadn’t got her nickname for nothing. She knew how to throw a beach party.
As Karis strolled unhurriedly through the scented gardens she rehearsed in her head what she wanted to say to Fiesta…and Josh’s father if he was around. The boy needed so much more than he was getting on the island. He needed proper schooling for one thing, though Karis did her best She didn’t want to lose him, dreaded the thought in fact, but his welfare and future were her chief concern and that small thought she had grasped to her earlier was growing in momentum. If this wasn’t just a visit and Daniel was planning on taking Josh back to the States he would need a nanny for him, and who better for the job than the one who had cared for the child and had worked a small miracle on him this last year?
Karis circled the house till she was under the wide wrought-iron balcony of the sitting room, where lights blazed out from the open French doors. She’d checked with Fiesta’s housekeeper where she was and rather than go through the house and run the risk of bumping into any of the house guests, who were usually well on the way to being drunk at this time of the night, she had skirted the house and opted for the balcony and the small flight of wrought-iron steps that led up to it from the rose gardens beneath.
‘What qualifications has she got?’ The brutal query came from above Karis’s head and it stilled her instantly. She flattened herself against the scratchy coral wall of the house, under the balcony where it was shadowy and she couldn’t be seen. The deep, resonant voice was Daniel Kennedy’s and she knew instinctively he was referring to her.
‘Qualifications? You expect someone with qualifications to give your uncontrollable son the time of day? Get real, Daniel. Karis is the only one to have stayed!’ Fiesta argued stiffly.
‘And it’s quite obvious why,’ Daniel stated emphatically. ‘She’s nothing but a child herself, and wild with it—all that hair and barefoot like a native. She must have thought she’d landed on her feet when you offered her this luxurious life. Where the hell did you drag her up from?’
Karis steeled herself, muscles cramping, closing her eyes tightly against the pain of the insult.
‘And