The Man She Could Never Forget. Meredith Webber

       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