It Happened In Paradise. Nicola Marsh
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smelled of childhood innocence…
He stopped the thought right there.
Women were born devious and he was done with the whole treacherous, self-serving sex.
He’d driven back from the coast on his own, he was certain of that, but if he hadn’t picked her up, where the devil had she come from?
He scrubbed at his face with his hands in an effort to clear away the confusion. Then, dragging his fingers through his hair, he winced as he encountered a damn great lump and a stickiness that couldn’t be anything but blood.
It seemed that the throbbing ache in his head was the result of a collision with something hard rather than the effects of Cordilleran brandy. Unless he had fallen out of the camp-bed he’d set up down here after the rest of the team had left when the rains set in. Going home to their families.
It was drier than his hut in the village during the rains. Quieter. And, without Fliss to distract him, he’d got a lot of work done.
He blinked. The lack of light was beginning to irritate him. He wanted to be able to see this woman. Was she another student backpacking her way around the globe? If so, she’d chosen the wrong day to drop in looking for work experience…
‘Okay, I didn’t pick you up in a bar,’ he began, then stopped. That was too loud. Much too loud. ‘So where—?’
‘You didn’t pick me up anywhere.’ Her disembodied voice enunciated each word slowly and carefully, as if speaking to someone for whom English was a foreign language. ‘I’m fussy about who I hang around with.’
‘Really? My mistake,’ he said, heavy on the irony. ‘So how did you get here?’
‘By bus.’
Jago laughed again and this time he was genuinely amused at the thought of this hoity-toity madam flagging down one of the island’s overcrowded buses and piling in with the goats and chickens.
Apparently she didn’t share his sense of humour.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Not a thing,’ he said, meaning it. Then, ‘What did you say your name was? Amanda…?’ The effort of remembering her surname was too much and he let it go.
‘Miranda,’ she corrected. ‘My friends call me Manda but, since I have no plans for a long acquaintance with you, whoever you are, we might as well keep it formal.’
‘Suits me,’ he replied with feeling. Then, ‘I’m Jago,’ he said, begrudgingly giving up his name at the same time as he remembered hers. Grenville. That was what she had said. The name was vaguely familiar, but he didn’t recognise her voice. Maybe the face… He could strike a match, he supposed, but really it was too much effort and, despite his desire to see her, he wasn’t ready for anything that bright. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I give up. I’ve forgotten where we met.’
‘It sounds to me as if you gave up a long time ago but I’ll put you out of your misery. We’ve never met.’
‘I may be careless, lady—’
‘Will you please stop calling me that,’ she interrupted crossly. ‘My name is Miranda—’
‘I may be careless about some things, Miranda,’ he said, with heavy emphasis on her name, ‘but I’ve given up on inviting strangers home to tea.’
‘Why is that, I wonder? Are you frightened they might steal the silver?’
He wished, but confined his response to, ‘Who are you? What are you?’
GOOD question, Manda thought. One to which the people she lived and worked with could give any number of answers, most of them wrong.
‘Does it matter? I promise I won’t run off with the spoons,’ she said, pulling a face, confident that he would not see it.
It was a long time since afternoon tea had been part of his social life if she was any judge of the situation. But although a little verbal fencing in the dark with an unknown, unseen man might have been amusing at any other time, she’d had enough. She’d had enough of the dark, enough of being scared, enough of him.
‘Oh, forget it. Just point me in the direction of the nearest exit and I’ll be only too happy to leave you alone.’
Jago was beyond such politeness. His head was pounding like the percussion section of the London Philharmonic and all he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes. ‘You got yourself in here. Reverse the process,’ he advised. ‘You’ll be home in no time.’ Then added, ‘Don’t forget to shut the door on your way out.’
An explosive little sound echoed around the dark chamber. ‘Sober up and look around you, Mr Jago. There aren’t any doors.’
He groaned.
Why was it, with the whole world of wonderful things to choose from, God had picked women as the opposite sex?
‘Time and white ants have done their worst,’ he admitted, ‘but I was speaking metaphorically. Entrance. Opening. Ingress. Access. Take your pick.’
‘What on earth is the matter with you? Did a lump of stone fall on your head? Or have you drunk yourself quite senseless?’
‘That was the plan,’ he said, hoping that she might finally take the hint, shut up and leave him in peace. ‘It doesn’t seem to have worked. How did you get in here, anyway? This area is restricted.’
‘To whom?’
To whom? He rubbed his hand over his face again—carefully avoiding the lump on his hairline this time—in an attempt to bring it back to life. Whoever this female was, she couldn’t be a student. No student he’d ever met could be bothered to speak English with that precision. He eased himself into a sitting position. ‘To me, Miranda Grenville. To me. And you weren’t invited.’
‘I wouldn’t have come if I had been,’ she declared. ‘This is the last place I want to be, but I’m afraid you’ll have to stand in line to send your complaint to a higher authority.’
‘Oh? And which higher authority would that be?’ he enquired, knowing full well that it was a mistake, that he would regret it, but completely unable to help himself. There was something about this woman that just got under his skin.
‘Mother Nature?’ she offered. ‘I was simply standing on a footpath, quietly minding my own business, when the ground opened up beneath me and I fell through your roof. As I believe I’ve already mentioned, while you were busy drowning your sorrows there was an earthquake.’
‘An earthquake?’ He frowned. Wished he hadn’t. ‘A genuine, honest-to-God earthquake?’
‘It seemed very real to me.’
‘Not just a tremor?’
‘Not a tremor. I was in Brazil last year when there was a tremor,’ she explained. ‘I promise you this was the real deal.’
Jago fumbled in his pocket for a box of matches. As he struck one, it flared briefly, for a moment blinding him with the sudden brightness so near to his face, but as his eyes adjusted to the light, he stared around, momentarily speechless at the destruction that surrounded him.
The outside walls of the temple, with their stone carvings, had been pushed inward and the floor that he had spent months digging down through the debris of centuries to clear was now little more than rubble.
The woman was right. It would have taken a serious earthquake to have caused this much damage.
It had, all in all, been one hell of a day.
A small anguished sound caught his attention and he turned to his unwelcome companion, temporarily forgotten as he had surveyed