A Child To Open Their Hearts

Max?

‘Let me take him.’ It was an order, a curt command that brooked no opposition. ‘Get yourself to the atoll.’

‘You can’t.’

‘You’re done,’ he said, and she knew she was.

‘S-Sefina?’

‘She’s dead. We can’t do anything for her. Go. I’m right behind you.’

And Joni was taken from her arms.

Relieving her of her load should have made her lighter. Free. Instead, stupidly, she wanted to sink. She hadn’t known how exhausted she was until the load had been lifted.

‘Swim,’ Max yelled. ‘We haven’t done this for nothing. Swim, damn you, now.’

She swam.

* * *

He could do this. He would do this.

Too many deaths...

It was three short weeks since he’d buried his son. The waste was all around him, and the anger.

Maybe it was Christopher who gave him strength. Who knew?

‘Keep still,’ he growled, as the little boy struggled. There was no time for reassurance. No time for comfort. But it seemed to work.

The little boy subsided. His body seemed to go limp but he reached up and tucked a fist against Max’s throat. As if checking his pulse?

‘Yeah, I’m alive,’ Max muttered grimly, as he started kicking again against the rip. ‘And so are you. Let’s keep it that way.’

* * *

Rocks. The atoll was tiny but she’d made it. The last few yards across the rip had taken every ounce of her strength, but she’d done it.

She’d had to do it. If Max and Joni were swept out, someone had to raise the alarm.

She wasn’t in any position to raise any alarm right now. It was as much as she could do to climb onto the rocks.

She knew this place. She’d swum out here in good weather. She knew the footholds but her legs didn’t want to work. They’d turned to jelly, but somehow she made them push her up the few short steps to the relatively flat rock that formed the atoll’s tiny plateau.

Then she sank to her knees.

She wanted—quite badly—to be sick, but she fought it down with a fierceness born of desperation. How many times in an emergency room had she felt this same appalling gut-wrench, at waste, at loss of life, at life-changing injuries? But her training had taught her not to faint, not to throw up, until after a crisis was past. Until she wasn’t needed.

There was a crisis now, but what could she do? She wasn’t in an emergency room. She wasn’t being a professional.

She was sitting on a tiny rocky outcrop, while out there a sailor fought for a toddler’s life.

Was he Max Lockhart?

More importantly, desperately more importantly, where was he? She hadn’t been able to look back while she’d fought to get here, but now...

Max... Joni...

She was a strong swimmer but she hadn’t been able to fight the rip.

Please... She was saying it over and over, pleading with whomever was prepared to listen. For Joni. For the unknown guy who was risking his life...

Was he Max? Father of Caroline? Owner of this entire island?

Max Lockhart, come home to claim his rightful heritage?

Max Lockhart, risking his life to save one of the islanders who scorned him?

So much pain...

If he died now, how could she explain it to Caroline? For the last three days, when the cyclone had veered savagely and unexpectedly across the path of any boat making its way here from Cairns, Hettie’s fellow nurse had lost contact with her father. She’d been going crazy.

How could she tell her he’d been so near, and was now lost? With the child?

Or not. She’d been staring east, thinking that, if anything, he’d be riding the rip, but suddenly she saw him. He was south of the atoll. He must have been swept past but somehow managed to get himself out of the rip’s pull. Now he was stroking the last few yards to the rocks.

He still had Joni.

She’d been out of the water now for five minutes. She had her breath back. Blessedly, she could help. She clambered down over the rocks, heading out into the shallows, reaching for Joni.

She had him. They had him.

Safe?

CHAPTER TWO

FOR A WHILE they were too exhausted to speak. They were too exhausted to do anything but lie on the rocks, Joni somehow safe between them.

The little boy was silent, passive...past shock? Maybe she was, too, and as she looked at Max collapsed beside them she thought, That makes three.

‘S-Sefina,’ she whispered.

‘Neck,’ he managed, and it was enough to tell her what she needed to know.

Oh, God, she should have...

Should have what? Cradled Sefina yesterday as she was cradling Joni now?

Yes, if that’s what it would have taken.

If this had happened at a normal time... But it hadn’t. Sefina had been admitted into hospital, bashed almost to the point of death, while the cyclone had been building. With the cyclone bearing down on them Hettie hadn’t had time to do more than tend to the girl’s physical needs.

Afterwards, when there’d been time to take stock and question her, Keanu, the island doctor on duty, had contacted the police. ‘I want her husband brought in. With the extent of these injuries it’s lucky he didn’t kill her.’

It’s lucky he didn’t kill her...

She remembered Keanu’s words and her breath caught on a sob.

Hettie de Lacey was a professional. She didn’t cry. She held herself to herself. She coped with any type of trauma her job threw at her.

But she sobbed now, just once, a great heaving gulp that shook her entire body. And then somehow she pulled herself back together. Almost.

Max’s arm came over her, over Joni, enfolding them both, and she needed it. She needed his touch.

‘You’re safe,’ he told her. ‘And the little one’s safe.’ And then he added, ‘Keep it together. For now, we’re all he has.’

It was a reminder. It wasn’t a rebuke, though. It was just a fact. She’d been terrified, she was shocked and exhausted, and she still had to come to terms with what had happened, but the child between them had to come first.

And Max himself... He’d swum over those rocks. Over that coral...

She took a couple of deep breaths and managed to sit up. The sun was full out. The storm of the past days was almost gone. Apart from the spray blasting the headland and the massive breakers heading for shore, this could be just a normal day in paradise.

Wildfire Island. The M’Langi isles. This was surely one of the most beautiful places in the world.

The world would somehow settle.

She gathered Joni into her arms and held him tight, crooning softly into his wet curls. He was still wearing a sodden hospital-issue nappy and a T-shirt one of the nurses had found for him in the emergency supplies. It read, incongruously, ‘My grandma went to London and all she brought me back was this T-shirt’.

It was totally inappropriate. Joni didn’t have a grandma, or not one who’d acknowledge him.

Max had allowed himself a couple of moments of lying full length in the sun, as if he needed its warmth. Of course he did. They all did. But now he, too, pushed himself to sitting, and for the first time she saw his legs.

They’d been slashed on the coral. He had grazes running from groin to toe, as if the sea had dragged him straight across the rocks.

What cost, to try and save Sefina?

He’d saved Joni.

‘I never could have got him here,’ she whispered, still holding him tight. The toddler was curled into her, as if her body was his only protection from the outside world. ‘I never could have saved him without you.’

‘Do you know...? Do you know who he is?’ Max asked.

‘His name is Joni Dason. His mother’s name is...was Sefina.’

‘A friend?’ He was watching her face. ‘She was your friend?’

‘I... A patient.’ And then she hesitated. ‘But I was present at Joni’s birth. Maybe I was...Sefina’s friend. Maybe I’m the only...’

And then she stopped. She couldn’t go on.

‘I’m Max Lockhart,’ Max said, and she managed to nod, grateful to be deflected back to his business rather than having to dwell on her shock and grief.

‘I guessed as much when I saw your yacht. Caroline will be so relieved. She’s been out of her mind with worry.’

‘My boat rolled. I lost my radio and phone three days ago. Everything that could be damaged by water was damaged.’

‘So you’ve been sitting out here, waiting for someone to notice you?’

‘I reached the island last night. It was too risky to try for the harbour, and frankly I wasn’t going to push my luck heading to one of the outer islands. So, yes, I’ve been here overnight but no one’s noticed.’

‘I noticed.’

‘Thank you. You are?’

‘Hettie de Lacey. Charge nurse at Wildfire.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Hettie.’ He hesitated and then went on. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you. Without both of us... Well, we did the best we could.’

‘You’re injured. Those cuts need attention.’

‘They do,’ he agreed. ‘I need disinfectant to avoid infection, but the alternative...’

‘You never would have saved Joni without swimming over the coral,’ she whispered, and once again she buried her face in the little boy’s hair. ‘Thank you.’

‘I would have...I so wanted...’

‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘But she jumped too close to the rocks for either of us to do anything.’

‘Depression?’

‘Abuse. A bully for a husband. Despair.’

The bleakness in her voice must have been obvious. He reached out to her then, the merest hint of a touch, a trace of a strong hand brushing her cheek, and why it had the power to ground her, to feed her strength, she didn’t know.

Max Lockhart was a big man, in his forties, she guessed, his deep black hair tinged with silver, his strongly boned face etched with life lines. His grey eyes were deep-set and creased at the edges, from weather, from sun, from...life? Even in his boxers, covered with abrasions, he looked...distinguished.

She knew about this man. He’d lost his wife over twenty years ago and he’d just lost his son. Caroline’s twin.

‘I’m sorry about Christopher,’ she said gently, still holding Joni tight, as if holding him could protect him from the horrors around him.

‘Caroline told you?’

‘That her twin—your son—died three weeks ago? Yes. Caroline and I are fairly...close. She flew to Sydney for the funeral. We thought...we thought you might have come back with her.’

‘There was too much to do. There was financial stuff to do with the island. To do with my brother. Business affairs have been on the backburner as Christopher neared the end, but once he was gone they had to be attended to. And then...’

‘You thought it might be a good idea to sail out here?’

‘I needed a break,’ he said simply. ‘Time to get myself together. No one warned me of cyclones.’

‘It’s the tropics,’ she said simply. ‘Here be dragons.’

‘Don’t I know it!’

‘But we’re glad you’re back.’

That got her a hard look.

Max Lockhart had inherited the whole of Wildfire Island on the death of his father. The stories of the Lockharts were legion in this place. Max himself had hardly visited the island over the past twenty years, but his brother’s presence had made up for it.

Ian Lockhart had bled the island for all it was worth. He’d finally fled three months ago, leaving debt, destruction and despair...

Ian Lockhart. The hatred he’d caused...

She hugged the child in her arms tighter, as if she could somehow keep protecting him.

How could she?

The sun was getting hotter. She was starting to get sunburnt. Sunburn on top of everything else?

She was wearing knickers and bra. But they were her best knickers and bra, though, she thought with sudden dumb gratitude that today of all days she’d decided to wear her matching lace bra and panties.

They were a lot more elegant than the boxers Max was wearing. His boxers were old, faded, and they now sported a rip that made them borderline useless.

‘You needn’t look,’ Max said, and she flashed a look up at him and found he was smiling. And in return she managed a smile back.

Humour... It was a tool used the world over by medical staff, often in the most appalling circumstances. Where laypeople might collapse under strain, staff in emergency departments used humour to deflect despair.

Sometimes you laughed or you broke down, as simple as that, and right now she needed, quite desperately, not to break down. Max was a surgeon, she thought gratefully. Medical. Her tribe. He knew the drill.

‘My knickers are more respectable than your knickers,’ she said primly, and he choked.

‘What? Your knickers are two inches of pink lace.’

‘And they don’t have a hole in them right where they shouldn’t have a hole,’ she threw back at him, and he glanced down at himself and swore. And did some fast adjusting.

‘Dr Lockhart’s rude,’ she told Joni, snuggling him some more, but the little boy was drifting towards sleep. Good, she thought. Children had their own defences.

‘My yacht seems to be escaping,’ Max said, and she glanced back towards the reef.

It was, indeed, escaping. The anchor hadn’t gripped the sand. The yacht was now caught in the rip and heading out to sea.

‘One of the fishermen will follow it,’ she told him. ‘The rip’s easy to read. They’ll figure where it goes.’

‘It’d be good to get to it now.’

‘What could a yacht have that a good rock doesn’t provide?’ she demanded, feigning astonishment. And then she looked at his legs. ‘Except maybe disinfectant and dressings. And sunburn cream.’

‘And maybe a good strong rum,’ he added.

‘Trapped on an island with a sailor and a bottle of rum? I don’t think so.’ She was waffling but strangely it helped. It was okay to be silly.

Silliness helped block the thought of what had to be faced. Of Sefina’s body drifting out to sea...

‘Tell me about yourself,’ Max said, and she realised he was trying to block things out, too.

‘What’s to tell?’ She shrugged. ‘I’m Hettie. I’m charge nurse here. I’m thirty-five years old. I came to Wildfire eight years ago and I’ve been here ever since. I gather you’ve been here once or twice while I’ve been based here, but it must have coincided with my breaks off the island.’

‘Where did you learn to swim?’

‘Sydney. Bondi.’

‘The way you swim... You trained as a lifesaver?’

‘I joined as a Nipper, a trainee lifesaver, when I was six.’ The surf scene at Bondi had been her tribe then. ‘How did you know?’

‘I saw how you took Joni from me,’ he reminded her. ‘All the right moves.’

‘You were a Nipper, too?’

‘We didn’t have Nippers on Wildfire. I did have an aunt, though. Aunt Dotty. She knew the kids on the island spent their spare time doing crazier and crazier dives. I’ve dived off this headland more times than you’ve had hot dinners. We reckoned we knew the risks but Dotty said if I was going to take risks I’d be trained to take risks. So, like you, aged six I was out in the bay, learning the right way to save myself and to save others.’ He shrugged. ‘But until today I’ve never had to save anyone.’

‘You are a surgeon, though,’ she said gently, looking to deflect the bleakness. ‘I imagine you save lots and lots.’

He smiled at that and she thought, He has such a gentle smile. For a big man...his smile lit his face. It made him seem younger.

‘Lots and lots,’ he agreed. ‘If I count every appendix...’

‘You should.’

‘Then it’s lots and lots and lots. How about you?’

‘Can I count every time I put antiseptic cream on a coral graze?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘Then it’s lots and lots and lots and lots and lots.’

And he grinned. ‘You win.’

‘Thank you,’ she managed. ‘It takes a big surgeon to admit we nurses have a place.’

‘I’ve never differentiated. Doctors, nurses, even the ladies who do the flowers in the hospital wards and take a moment to talk... Just a moment can make a difference.’

And she closed her eyes.

‘Yes, it can,’ she whispered. ‘I wish...oh, I wish...’

* * *

He’d stuffed it. Somehow they’d lightened the mood but suddenly it was right back with them. The greyness. The moment he’d said the words he’d seen the pain.

‘What?’

Her eyes stayed closed. The little boy in her arms was deeply asleep now, cradled against her, secure for the moment against the horrors that had happened around him.

‘What?’ he said again, and she took a deep breath and opened her eyes again.

‘I didn’t have a moment,’ she said simply. ‘That’ll stay with me for the rest of my life.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning Sefina was brought into hospital just before the cyclone. Ruptured spleen. Concussion. Multiple abrasions and lacerations. Her husband had beaten her to unconsciousness. Sefina’s not from M’Langi—she came here eighteen months ago from Fiji. Pregnant. Rumour is that...Joni’s father...brought her here and paid Louis to marry her. Louis’s an oaf. He’d do anything for money and he’s treated her terribly. She’s always been isolated and ashamed, and Louis keeps her that way.’

There was a moment’s silence while he took that on board, and somehow during that moment he felt the beginnings of sick dismay. Surely it couldn’t be justified, but once he’d thought of it he had to ask.

‘So Joni’s father...’ he ventured, and she tilted her chin and met his gaze square on.

‘He’s not an islander.’

‘Who?’

‘Do I need to tell you?’

And he got it. He looked down at the little boy cradled in Hettie’s arms. His skin wasn’t as dark as the islanders’.

His features...

His heart seemed to sag in his chest as certainty hit. ‘My brother? Ian? He’s his?’ How had he made his voice work?

‘Yes,’ she said, because there was no answer to give other than the truth. ‘Sefina is... Sefina was a Fijian islander. As far as I can gather, Ian stayed there for a while. He got her pregnant and she was kicked out of home. In what was a surprising bout of conscience for Ian, he brought her here. He paid Louis to marry her and he gave her a monthly allowance, which Louis promptly drank. But a few weeks ago the money stopped and Louis took his anger out on Sefina. The day before the cyclone things reached a crisis point. They were living out on Atangi. We flew her across to Wildfire, to hospital, but then the storm hit...and I didn’t have that moment...’

‘I’m sure you did your best.’ It was a trite thing to say and he saw a flash of anger in response.

‘She needed more.’

‘She had no one else?’

‘You need to understand. She was an outsider. She was pregnant by... And I’m sorry about this—but she was pregnant by a man the islanders have cause to hate. She married an oaf. Her mother-in-law wouldn’t have anything to do with her, and vilified anyone who did. And the only person responsible—your brother—is now missing.’

‘He’s dead,’ he said, and her gaze jerked to his.

‘Dead?’

‘That’s another reason I couldn’t get back here until now. Ian’s been gambling—heavily. Unknown to me he racked up debts that’d make your eyes water. That’s why he’s bled the island dry. And that’s why...well, his body was found two weeks ago, in Monaco. Who knows the whys or wherefores? The police are interested. I’m...not.’

There was a long, long silence.

She was restful, this woman, Max thought. Where others might have exclaimed, demanded details, expressed shock, disgust or horror, Hettie simply hugged the child in her arms a little tighter.

She was...beautiful, he thought suddenly.

Until now, despite the lacy knickers and bra, despite the attempt at humour, she’d seemed a colleague. A part of the trauma and the tragedy. Now, suddenly, she seemed more.

She was slight, five feet four or five. Her body was tanned and trim, and the lacy lingerie showed it off to perfection.

Her dark hair was still sodden. Her curls were forming wet spirals to frame her face.

Thirty-five, she’d said, and he might have guessed younger, apart from the life lines around her shadowed green eyes.

Life lines? Care lines? She’d cared about Sefina, he thought. She was caring about Joni.

Her body was curved around him now, protective, a lioness protective of her cub. Everything about her said, You mess with this little one, you mess with me.

His...nephew?

‘You realise he’s yours now,’ she whispered at last into the stillness, and the words were like a knife, stabbing across the silence.

‘What...?’

‘This little boy is a Lockhart,’ she said, deeply and evenly. ‘The M’Langi islanders look after their own. Joni’s not their own. He never has been. He was the child of two outsiders, and the fact that an oaf of an islander was paid to marry his mother doesn’t make him belong. The islanders have one rule, which is inviolate. Family lines cross and intercross through the islands, but, no matter how distant, family is everything. Children can never be orphaned. The word “orphan” can’t be translated into the M’Langi language.’

‘What are you saying?’ There was an abyss suddenly yawning before him, an abyss so huge he could hardly take it in.

She shrugged. ‘It’s simple,’ she said softly. ‘According to the M’Langi tradition, this little one isn’t an orphan, Dr Lockhart. This little boy is yours.’

* * *

He had complications crowding in from all sides but suddenly they were nothing compared to this one.

Ian had had a son.

The boy didn’t look like Ian, he thought. He had the beautiful skin colour of the Fijians but lighter. His dark hair wasn’t as tightly curled.

He was still sleeping, his face nestled against Hettie’s breast. Max could only see his profile, but suddenly...

It was a hint, a shade, a fleeting impression, but suddenly Max saw his mother in Joni.

And a hint of his own children. Caroline, twenty-six years old, due to be married next week to the man she loved.

Christopher, buried three weeks ago.

Christopher, his son.

This little boy is yours...

How could he begin to get his head around it? He couldn’t. Every sense was recoiling.

He’d loathed Ian. Born of gentle parents, raised on this island with love and tenderness... There’d never been a reason why Ian should have turned out as he had, but he’d been the sort of kid who’d pulled wings off flies. He’d been expelled from three schools. He’d bummed around the world until his parents’ money had dried up.

Max thought back to the time, a few years back, when Ian had come to see him in Sydney.

‘I’m broke,’ he’d said, honestly and humbly. ‘I’ve spent the money Mum and Dad left me and I can’t take the lifestyle I’ve been living anymore. I need to go back to Wildfire. Let me manage the place for you, bro. I swear I’ll do a good job. We both know it’s getting run-down and you don’t have time to be there yourself.’

It was hope rather than trust that had made him agree, Max thought grimly. That and desperation. It had been true; the island had needed a manager. But Max had needed to be in Sydney. Christopher had been born with cerebral palsy and he’d lurched from one health crisis to another. Max had been trying to hold down a job as head of surgery at Sydney Central, feeding as much money as he could back into the island’s medical services. Caroline, too... Well, his daughter had always received less attention than she’d needed or deserved.

If Ian could indeed take some of the responsibility...

Okay, he’d been naive, gullible, stupid to trust. That trust was coming home to roost now, and then some. He was having to face Ian’s appalling dishonesty.

But facing this...

This little boy is yours...

His son was dead. How could he face this?

‘You don’t need to think about it now,’ Hettie was saying gently, as if she guessed the body blow she’d dealt him. ‘We’ll work something out.’

‘We?’

‘I love Joni,’ she said simply. ‘I’m not going to hand him over until I’m sure you want him.’