Marion Lennox - A Child To Open Their Hearts

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.