Victoria Fox - Temptation Island

‘Shall we eat them?’ she asked.

Ralph nodded happily. ‘Where’s JB?’ he said excitedly. ‘I want to show JB!’

‘He’s not here, darling.’

He held out the crabs, his fingers small and sticky where they gripped the rim of the plastic lest anyone try to steal his loot. ‘Do you think Daddy will be pleased?’

Margaret swallowed. Ralph idolised Mr V, more so because he believed him to be his only living parent. It was what he had always been told.

If only .

‘Very,’ she said. ‘Come inside, my love, we’ve got to get you ready. Look at your fingers!’ He had grubby sandmarks under his nails.

‘Can I go to the party?’ he begged as he trailed her inside. ‘JB said the whole world’s coming! That means I have to come!’

Briskly she shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. You heard what Mr V said.’

‘He said I’m not old enough.’

‘And he’s right.’

Ralph was disappointed. ‘Please?’ he tried again, hoping Miss Jensen might be a softer touch. Usually she let him have his way.

‘I’ve said no and that’s the end of it.’ Outside the boy’s bedroom, she turned and crouched down to his level.

‘Besides, we’ll have fun here, won’t we?’ She smiled. ‘Just you and me. Safe on the island. Because, my darling, who knows what could happen at sea?’

Book Two

2009-10

The taxi Lori took from Murcia San Javier airport was driven by a slight, middle-aged Spaniard with a hook nose and thick eyebrows. A rosary swung from his rear-view mirror and the upholstery smelled sweet, like lemons, or vanilla. Dusk had fallen. The gloomy shapes of mountains reared up on both sides as the car wound its way between, tyres throwing up dust.

They drove through a sharp bend, then another, and she realised they were climbing. Each twist required the car to slow completely, almost to a stop, and she knew the ascent must be steep. She wound the window down and breathed the unfamiliar air. Crickets gave off their whistling nighttime rhythm; the sea was close because she could smell its salt.

Lori had travelled an ocean. She had gone halfway across the world. And yet all she had thought about, incessantly and without reprieve, for the past forty-eight hours, was the man who had saved her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw his face and his hands; the leather band around his wrist; the twist, almost cruel, of his top lip. That day felt like a dream, impossible—something out of a novel about which she’d half laugh, half swoon. The way he’d arrived from nowhere, strange as though he’d come from another world, far far away, and how he had kissed her, the urgency in his eyes as he’d tried to resist … Details became her addiction: a specific suddenly surfacing, shedding new light.

Who was he? Why had he come?

And then the soft comfort of her recollection would be punctured by shame. Guilt at having denied Rico the lie that would set him free; the way she had run from her commitment to him, into the arms of another man. She felt as if she had leapt from an aeroplane into wide blue sky, off the top of a mountain, over the rim of the earth, abandoning every principle that had guided her through seventeen years. Never had she endured a sensation so strong it eclipsed every other, stifling her conscience, making her selfish, reminding her that those same principles by which she’d lived so strictly had never made her happy or fulfilled, and in that way drawing her, tempting her, towards a new horizon.

For what? A stranger she knew nothing of?

Lori ran the bud of her thumb over the ring Rico had given her the day they had planned to escape. It felt like centuries ago, another life, another her.

They passed a red and white church buried in the hillside, momentarily bathed in the gold of the headlamps before retreating to its shroud of darkness. By the side of the road was a box, lit by a lone, uncertainly flickering candle: a shrine for a child, tipped from a crumbling precipice. The motion of the car, winding and turning, rising ever higher, began to lull Lori to sleep.

When she woke, the moon was high and bright in the sky. The car was rumbling along a bumpy track and Lori realised her head must have been resting against the window, for it was this motion that roused her. They were in the middle of nowhere. On either side what looked like orchards, clusters of trees whose fingers brushed questioningly as they passed. At the foot of the drive was the dark shape of her grandmother’s house, bordered by the shadowy outline of an olive grove, and a single lamp glowing in the porch.

She thanked the driver in Spanish and heaved her bag from the trunk. She watched as his red taillights disappeared, listening to the silence of a depth and quality entirely new to her.

There was no sound coming from inside and when Lori knocked it seemed to disturb the sleeping hills. She began to wonder if anyone was in when, eventually, a light came on. The slow patter of footsteps approached, accompanied by a wet snuffling.

When the door opened, something quick and small rushed out and Lori felt a damp nose attacking her legs.

‘Pepe!’ the old woman chided. ‘Come back here. Tsk! ’

Lori petted the dog as it sniffed enthusiastically at her knees. Corazón watched her, the old woman’s ancient, pale face cracked by the lines of time and the losses she had known: she had dressed in black since her husband, Lori’s abuelo , passed fifteen years before. Even in the dim glow of the porch her eyes sparkled with happiness.

‘Loriana. Querida , my darling.’ She held her arms out, eyes brimming with emotion.

They embraced, Lori clinging lightly because holding Corazón was like grasping a bundle of sticks and she didn’t want to break them. She told her hello and her grandmother touched her face, her mass of wild hair, and kissed her forehead.

‘ Has crecido! ’ she marvelled, taking her hands. ‘You have grown. Te heche de menos , Loriana; I have missed you.’

Inside, Corazón boiled a pan of water and gave Lori a cup of sweet, hot liquid that smelled of herbs, and a bowl of vegetable stew that through her hunger and fatigue tasted incredible. Pepe the dog darted between her legs, begging for food and attention. They spoke about Lori’s journey and her memories of Spain (what Corazón called her ‘home country’), and why she had come back here. While Lori didn’t go into detail about her strained relationship with her father, she suspected Corazón knew more than she was letting on.

Despite being over ninety, her grandmother was shrewd. Lori didn’t know if it was the tea and the soup, or her exhaustion, or arriving in Spain after dark, but she soon found herself opening up, telling her about her stepsisters, the way she missed her mother, her hopes for the future—and finishing up with Rico, the killing and the arrest. She didn’t tell her about Diego Marquez, or the stranger with the accent, or what had happened afterwards … This was a secret she kept close, a fragile form she couldn’t yet be sure would survive definition.

The old woman listened patiently, nodding sagely once or twice.

‘I am glad you have come,’ Corazón said at last. ‘Important things will happen to you here. I feel it in my bones.’ She looked down at Pepe. ‘Don’t I, chiquita ?’

Lori went to her room a little after midnight. It was humble, just a single bed made with floral linens, a small square closet and a wooden desk. On the desk was a lamp, the only source of light, which cast a pale yellow glow and was not enough to read by. At the head of the bed was a finely carved crucifix. The ceiling was sloped, with thick black beams running across it, and the floor was scratchy and cool beneath her feet. An old rug covered a portion of it.