One Life at a Time Read online

  'Christopher…' She tried the name, several times. 'Actually, I rather like Christopher.'

  'No, definitely not Christopher,' he stated bluntly, the smile gone.

  Michael was watching him thoughtfully. 'It could be a name from your past, you know. Every free association like that is significant, so the more you talk the faster you'll regain your memory. There's nothing else you can do for now. Just live through it.' He smiled, no longer the doctor but her humorous, much loved brother again. 'You can thank your lucky stars, you know. You couldn't have asked to be stranded in a better place. St Patrick is just the place to lead a totally uneventful, sheltered, peaceful life.'

  A week later, physically fit except for the recurring pangs of headache, and outwardly resigned to his temporary amnesia, Kane moved into their large plantation house. It was Michael's idea:

  'If we sent you now to England, you'd probably be treated as nut-case until you regained your memory. You're better off here, in St Patrick. No one here will bother you with questions, except my sister, that is. I'd keep away from her, if I were you. She's quite capable of driving you batty with her chatter.'

  They introduced him to their parents as a friend of a friend of Michael's who had come from England to the Seychelles to recuperate after a long illness. And Ariel, her rich imagination working overtime, filled any possible gaps with an ingenious supply of background information.

  Kane, according to Ariel's gospel, was a film scriptwriter. One of the reasons he had chosen to recuperate on St Patrick was a screenplay he had been working on and which happened to take place in an isolated island in the Indian Ocean.

  'Why a script-writer?' Kane turned on her mildly when they were alone. 'Why not a novelist while you're at it?'

  'Because my father is an avid reader and he would want to read one of your books. On the other hand, he's vehemently opposed to films and television. There isn't one on the island, anyway. So you're quite safe there.'

  Kane accepted her reasoning. 'All right, but why make me a writer in the first place?'

  'I don't know. It just felt right.'

  He laughed. 'All right, then. Actually, I find the idea rather intriguing.'

  Her mother, even her stiffly proper father, were quickly caught up in the spell of Kane's casual charm, manners and humour. 'Nice to know that England can still produce such young men,' her father remarked drily. 'I told you, Michael. The old system still works.'

  There was no doubt that Kane had led quite a privileged life in the past. Putting aside his extensive knowledge and sophisticated taste, he also turned out to be magnificently adept at water-sports. Even in his weakened physical condition, he proved to be a great water-skier, skin-diver and long-distance swimmer, better than Ariel and Michael who were almost of professional standard. And he handled the Stewarts' yacht with an expertise that aroused Michael's good-natured envy.

  After two weeks together, it was hard to remember the circumstances which had brought Kane into their life. He and Michael had become good friends, both treating her with the exasperated affection of older brothers. To all intents and purposes, they were all spending a vigorous and very enjoyable holiday together. Only those persistent if occasional twinges of sharp headaches kept reminding them of Kane's initial near-death condition.

  But to Ariel's growing frustration, the fitter Kane became, the less she saw of him. He seemed perpetually drawn to the silent isolation of the island's forests and hills, or the vast blue desert of the Indian Ocean. When pestered, he would agree to join her in her various pastimes, but it was obvious to her that he preferred the loneliness of his own company to hers.

  'Leave him alone, Ariel,' Michael exploded once, just before he left for England. 'Don't you see that he's going through hell? Try and imagine yourself waking up one fine day to find out that you are a stranger to yourself, that you have no past.'

  As it happened, Ariel's fictitious profession for Kane proved to be an inspired flight of fantasy. The film justified Kane staying on after Michael returned to his hospital duties in London, and his writing gave Ariel a good excuse to spend time with him.

  'Breakfast is ready!' she announced, bursting into his bedroom the morning after Michael's departure. 'Holiday's over. Get up, Kane!'

  Kane, she had discovered, wasn't at his best in the mornings. He still needed long hours of sleep and, he once explained to her, whatever he might have been in his other life, he felt in his bones that he was never required to be up at the crack of dawn, which was Ariel's daily custom.

  'Go away, Ariel!' he now mumbled sleepily, covering his head under the pillow to escape the bright morning light.

  'Oh no you don't!' she insisted. 'You're getting up and coming with me to my beach shed. Your typewriter has just been delivered from Mahe.'

  Kane groaned. 'What the hell are you talking about?' He sat up, the sheet slipping down to bare his lean, deeply tanned chest.

  'Writing… that's what I'm talking about. You're a writer, remember? So you'd better do some writing. Just to keep my parents quiet.'

  'And you just keep that skimpy bikini of yours out of my bedroom. I may have lost my memory, but my body still remembers what to do with a naked woman.'

  Ariel blushed. She suddenly felt ridiculously awkward, like an adolescent schoolgirl. From the first moment she laid eyes on him, she never tried to deny or curb her infatuation, but not until this very minute was she consciously aware of the aching physical thrill his sight awakened in her.

  'I always take a swim first thing in the morning,' she said defiantly. 'Don't expect me to change my dressing habits just because you're staying with us.'

  'I wouldn't dream of it,' he assured her, his eyes roaming over her lithe, golden body, still shimmering with salty sea-water. 'As long as you stay away from me when I'm wearing even less.'

  'Oh, don't be such a prude, Kane.' She tried to reverse their new disturbing roles back to the familiarly comfortable ones, where he was the weak recuperating patient, she the one in control.

  Grinning at her indignant face, he rolled out of bed with a lazy animal grace, and walked to the door where she stood, utterly at ease and uninhibited by his nakedness. 'So who is the prude now, Ariel Stewart?' His low chuckle chased her as she escaped from the room in panic.

  She covered herself up in one of Michael's huge T-shirts and tatty jeans which were cut at the knees, furious with herself for letting him intimidate her, anticipating his mocking acknowledgement of her unusually modest clothes.

  The Stewarts' solidly built plantation house was situated a few hundred yards up the hill, almost hidden from view behind a screen of ancient tacamaca trees and tropical bushes. A long winding snake of narrow stone steps was the only convenient access down the steep slope to the white sandy beach and her improvised 'study'.

  It was, in fact, just an open shed, covered by giant palm fans and supported by beams, giving her an uninterrupted view of the lazy, blue ocean and the small bay where the Stewarts' yacht, their only means of commuting with the main islands, was moored. Her book-loving father, secretly delighted with her choice of career, arranged to connect the primitive shed to the main house generator, so that she could work after nightfall and above all enjoy the luxury of an electric typewriter. The rest was spartan and sparse, only a few rocky chairs and two folding tables.

  By the time Kane had joined her in her 'study' she felt in control again. She made him sit in front of the small manual typewriter which she had ordered from Victoria a few days earlier, deftly inserted a blank page, and ordered him to start writing. Then, prim and smug, she walked away to do the final revisions on her latest story, settling on her favourite rock, her feet dangling a few inches above the clear water of the gently rolling ocean.

  To her own amazement, the familiar sound of a typewriter at work suddenly ruffled the still air. Slow and hesitant at first, it soon began to gather momentum, ending up in a furiously busy rattle.

  She let him work alone for an hour, and then came softly to stand behind him. Her presence didn't seem to stop the flood.

  'That's not a film script!' she couldn't help remarking after a few moments. 'That looks to me remarkably like the beginning of a novel.'

  'I guess it is,' Kane agreed calmly. 'As much as I'd love to justify your, inspired guess, I have no idea how to tackle a script. I don't think I've ever seen one. Sorry, Ma'am.'

  She bent down, politely. 'May I read the first pages?'

  'You may, teacher,' he answered, meekly, still typing away.

  The first thing that struck her was his obvious familiarity with artificial intelligence and computing science.

  'You seem to know a hell of a lot about computers,' she mumbled.

  'Don't I?' he mumbled, typing away.

  'Isn't it odd that you should remember nothing of your personal life, yet retain all that detailed information which you have obviously been accumulating through your studies and reading.'

  He didn't answer. Obviously the thought had occurred to him too.

  He had instinctively opted for the genre of Science Fiction… no, rather Science Fantasy, the kind which made books like Dune or films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind so popular. The period was the present, but the plot involved the meeting of three worlds, past, future and present, all clashing by a quirk of time-span on a small, hardly inhabited island in the Indian Ocean. The scientific fluency was amazingly well-matched with the hard, masculine prose and a fascinatingly rich plot which seemed to unfold almost from the first paragraph.

  Totally unconscious of the voluptuous provocation of her gesture, Ariel threw her head back, scooping her long, chestnut hair to the top of her crown, and burst into her silvery breathless chuckle. 'Well, well, well,' she declared, smugly. 'So much for Dr Michael Stewart.
All you need to bring your memory back, Kane, is having me around. I've obviously hit the nail right on the head when I made you a writer. You are, of course. I mean, you were in your other life.'

  He usually reacted with indulgent good nature to all her wild assumptions about his past. But this time, he turned to her, his expression grave, thoughtful. 'I don't think so, Ariel. The moment I started writing, I felt as if something in me had been unleashed, set free from a long self-inflicted prison. I actually felt wicked, like a naughty boy secretly indulging in some forbidden game instead of doing his homework.' He smiled, crookedly. 'I think it means that I've always wanted to write, but never felt free to do so.'

  Losing all interest in her own work, Ariel now flopped on the soft white sand, settling comfortably at Kane's bare feet, and proceeded to devour the typed pages as they came out of the small typewriter one by one at amazing speed. He didn't seem to mind her intrusion into his private creative world. In fact, he seemed oblivious of her existence. She felt a twinge of envy at the effortless ease in which he seemed to pick the right word, the exact turn of phrase first time round. His first draft hardly needed any revisions. Even his spelling was faultless, she commented sourly to herself.

  The sun was beginning to set in red splendour over the misty horizon when she looked up, her eyes wide with the dawning realisation:

  'Kane!' Her grave voice made him stop typing and turn down to absorb her perplexed expression. 'What do you know about The Tempest?'

  Without pausing to think, he answered lazily, as if humouring a child: 'Shakespeare, last play, Enchanted Island, such stuff as dreams are made on, Prospero, Miranda, Ariel…' He stopped, in sudden awareness of what he was saying.

  'You're basing your novel on The Tempest.' She confirmed his awakened suspicion.

  They stared at each other, silently. And suddenly, Ariel burst out laughing, her radiant face trustingly open to his piercing blue eyes.

  'I love your laugh.' He spoke so softly she wasn't sure she heard him. 'It's the one thing that makes this hell worthwhile.'

  Bewildered by the painful, uncharacteristic heavy tone, she sat up, her laugh faltering.

  'No, don't stop!' He bent down, his hands stretched out to take hold of her head between them, the long fingers spread to capture the sides of her small, impish face. 'Don't stop laughing.' His thumbs were stroking the wide forehead as if trying to smooth away the worried frown.

  'I can't, Kane,' she apologised huskily, shaken by the warm grasp of his hands as much as by his confession. 'I… I didn't realise you were so unhappy.'

  Kane slid down from the chair to kneel on the soft sand, his head bowed down to study her face closely.

  'I'm not. Not at this minute. You almost fill the gaping hole of my life. So don't look so distressed. Come on, smile at me.' His finger touched the corner of her lips, jokingly trying to pull it into a smile.

  'It must be awful,' she whispered, as her imagination, lulled by the sheltered life she had led until now, only now began to grasp the horror of living without a memory. 'Oh, Kane… I wish I could do something.'

  He smiled down at her, but his eyes were dark with agony he couldn't hide. 'Just be there, that's enough… Oh, hell,' his voice dropped as he noticed the tears brimming her eyes, 'don't start crying, darling. That's no help at all, you know.'

  'I'm sorry, I can't help it.'

  With a groan, his hands came down on her sagging shoulders, and he scooped her into his arms, holding her head tight against his warm bare chest, comforting her as if it were she who was going through this hell, not he.

  She had never felt so safe, so sheltered as she did now, cradled by his strong arms against that smooth hard chest, and soothed by the steady, strong beat of his heart.

  Finally, she gave a shaken chuckle. 'I'm not crying any more,' she said as she raised her head, but her smile was arrested before it could form on her lips.

  His face was only a few inches above her, illegible behind the blond beard. His masculine smell reached her flaring nostrils, and her eyes opened wide as they encountered the exposed hunger in his blue gaze.

  She remained motionless, almost rigid in her breathless anticipation of what was coming, her wide-open eyes fixed unblinking on his bearded face as it came slowly down, soon to dissolve into a hazy blur. Then she had to shut her eyes and there was nothing but a tingling darkness as she felt the rasp of his beard on her cheeks and at last the touch of his mouth on her half-open, unknowing lips.

  Neither had the will or the thought to stop the inevitable kiss, forgetting how exposed they were in the open shed. His hand was circling her long neck, luxuriating in the warm richness of the heavy hair, as his mouth barely opened to savour her lips in airy, light kisses, softly insistent, until she began to kiss him back, timidly.

  His hold tightened, pulling her unresisting body closer to him, and at the same time bending her backwards until she could feel the soft warm sand under her bare skin, while his lips kept stirring her dormant senses to life with slow, deliberate insistence.

  His arm slipped under her to encircle her narrow waist, rolling her on her side and gathering her to him as he stretched alongside her taut, still uncomprehending body, one hand slipping down to pull her hips against his own, moulding her form against his hard, long body, willing it to emerge out of its stunned rigidity, his warm hands whispering at her sleeping sensuality, urging it gently to respond, to take over, to rebel against the domination of the mind.

  Something was happening to her, taking control over her nerveless muscles, melting them into total submission. She was sinking slowly into a dark sensual well, conscious only of the unrelenting, yet still gentle pull of the two hard hands, and the slow movement of the firm lips, open now to capture her whole mouth.

  She had been kissed before, of course, and had always enjoyed the pleasant tingling thrill of those tentative embraces, but never before had she felt that torturing ache which made her whole body quiver with the terrifying need to get nearer, closer, push beyond the confining barriers of her loose T-shirt, even beyond the bare skin of his chest, to be wholly sucked into that hard wall of smooth, sinewy muscles.

  Her arms, tentative and timid at first, rose to touch the warm, smooth texture of his bare back with escalating impatience, taunted by the unbearable torture of those slow, barely moving lips, her own mouth opened, hungry for more than that frustratingly teasing contact, and she moaned, utterly unprepared for the hard moist sweetness of his tongue as it thrust forward to take full possession of her mouth.

  She felt an almost imperceptible shudder go through his body as his warm hand moved between their tightly pressed bodies, pushing under the T-shirt to cup her breast, gently savouring its firm roundness, the long fingers toying, teasing. Then, tearing his mouth away from her demanding lips, his head came down to her exposed breasts, the grazing beard tormenting her skin, and with a barely audible groan his lips captured the aroused, erect tip making her whole body quiver as his flickering tongue set to torment her further with yet another new, unfamiliar thrill.

  She was vaguely, frustratingly aware of confining bits of clothes, which kept her from losing all distinction as to where her body ended and his began. Their legs were intertwined now, one muscled thigh pushing hard between hers. Both his hands, voraciously, deliriously greedy, were roaming down her back, savouring the silky texture of her exposed skin, and finally struggling with the tight waist band of jeans to push further down and cover the firm mounds under it, cutting her breath as with one powerful jerk they pulled her against his flat stomach.

  The lower part of her body recoiled as if scathed, startled by the strange, thrilling sensation of something vibrant stirring, growing, lashing out against her stomach. And she lay quiet, for a second, not quite comprehending, startled by the wonder of it.

  She was now suddenly aware of a slight chill, a sense of physical bereftness, as if severed from what had become one with her own body. The sound of the calmly rolling sea, the swaying arms of the huge palm trees, penetrated the ethereal silence into which she had been plunged.

  And Kane was sitting up, grinning down at her startled, crestfallen expression.