Christmas Baby for the Billionaire (South Shore Billionaires 1)

‘The owner of the development company.’ She’d received an email telling her that she should expect him tomorrow, yet here he was, interrupting her relaxation practice a day early.

‘You’ve lost your memories?’ he said, still looking at her strangely. Meena rolled her eyes; she used to get this a lot.

‘Yes, just like in a movie. Should I remember something about you?’

He shook his head. He was taking this even worse than most people she told. Generally, people just looked puzzled but, even though Guy Williams was a stranger, she could tell from his expression that he was struggling to accept what she’d just revealed. Maybe he didn’t believe her.

‘Then this is a fresh start,’ Meena said, eager to move the conversation along. ‘I expect you want to know about the environmental impact assessment. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow but I was just about to get started.’ She glanced around, looking for her clipboard, sure that she had brought it out with her. Oh, way to make a good impression, she thought. Introduce herself with a side note about a brain injury and then look around the beach as if you have no idea what you’re doing there.

She was not usually so distracted by a pretty face—even one as pretty as this. High forehead, golden tan, long, straight nose, full lips, a hint of a cleft in his chin. The body wasn’t half bad either—she supposed, if she were absolutely pressed to give her opinion on the subject—from what she could see of it, anyway.

He was dressed for business in a conservative shirt and navy suit. But his collar was open, showing just a hint of his throat and making her want to lean closer, to let her fingers drift into that notch, feel the heat of his skin, the throb of his pulse beneath her fingers.

She shook her head. Where had that thought come from? She took a step away from him. She should not be thinking that way. She did not want a man in her life. She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly feeling cold despite the growing heat of the day. She’d proved to herself a long time ago that she wasn’t capable of making good decisions about men. About sex. It was safer to deny herself either rather than risk repeating her mistakes.

‘Are you okay?’ Guy asked.

‘I’m fine, thank you. I was just about to begin.’

Ah, there. She spotted the clipboard from the corner of her eye and scooped it up in a single, easy movement that belied the many months of physio she’d endured after her accident to enable her to take even a single step.

She caught him looking at her from the corner of her eye and momentarily stopped. ‘Are you sure we didn’t meet...before?’ she asked, hating the black hole in her memory that made the question necessary. She shouldn’t have to look at every man she met and ask herself, Was it you? Was it your baby I was carrying?

He gave her a look so bland that she knew it couldn’t possibly have been him. It was as if he barely saw her at all. As if she were barely there at all. Well, she supposed that answered her question well enough.

‘I’m sure,’ he said with firm politeness. Another one to strike off the list, she thought, trying not to cringe at this internal game of ‘who’s the daddy?’ that she had been forced to play for the last seven years.

She could let it rest, of course. There was no baby. Not now. When she had eventually woken from the coma, the doctors in the clinic had broken it to her gently that it hadn’t just been her memories that she’d lost. She didn’t even know if she’d known before the accident that she’d been pregnant. Given the conservative attitude to premarital sex across almost every culture on St Antoine, she was sure that an unplanned pregnancy would have been more cause for anxiety than celebrations.

She still remembered the whispers that had followed a school friend who had fallen pregnant in her late teens, and who had hastily been married before the baby arrived six months later. Was that why Meena’s lover had disappeared? Had he feared he would be forced into a shotgun wedding? Tied to a woman he didn’t love?

Her parents were hardly traditional, though. They had raised eyebrows with their own marriage—Meena’s French-Mauritian mother and Hindu father had married at a time when such relationships had been even more unusual than they were now—but that didn’t mean that people wouldn’t talk. They always talked.

She had been unusual too in living away from her parents: it had taken every ounce of determination she’d had to move out when she’d been sufficiently recovered from her accident.

But if her family knew about any boyfriend she’d had they had never said anything. So she had no choice but to assume that the relationship had been a secret. How could she have been serious enough about someone to have slept with him but not serious enough to introduce him to her parents?

Her mind had spent many hours tying itself in knots trying to work it out. She hadn’t been far along and what worried her the most was that she had no idea who the father could have been. She was only missing a few months of memory, and there had been no sign of a boyfriend in her life, so where had this baby come from—and what had happened to the father? Where had he been when she’d been trapped under that car, her memories and their baby leaving her body?

Leaving her broken.

Guy turned to look back up the beach to the scrubland where the hotel complex would be built. Where it could be built, Meena corrected herself, as long as the environmental studies were clear and planning permission was granted by the relevant government department. If she couldn’t find something to hold up the development... She took a deep breath. She would find something—she had to—because there was something about this tiny jewel of an island on which she wasn’t going to give up.

For seven years it had felt like her secret. In all the trauma and recovery of that time, she had spent more time here, at this secluded beach, than just about anywhere else. It was the only place where she felt still. At peace. Where her mind rested and her heart didn’t hurt. So when she had heard about the upcoming development she had made sure that she was on the environmental impact team. If there was any way of stopping the resort from being built, then she was going to be the one to find it.

* * *

Meena Bappoo. Flat-backed on the beach, just as he’d left her. Eyes closed to the sun, as if it had been minutes since he had last seen her here rather than years. He’d nearly turned and walked away when he’d seen the Environmental Agency logo on her shirt and realised she was the agency marine biologist he was meant to be meeting. The notes that he’d received from his project manager’s schedule hadn’t mentioned her by name, only her job title and the time and location of the meeting, though it turned out that he had mixed up the date.

And then her lids had snapped open, he’d seen those warm golden-brown eyes again and he’d known he was too entranced to walk away.

Did he believe her story? Her memory loss seemed far-fetched. But she hadn’t really given him a choice: he had to believe her. The way she’d looked at him was so completely blank. Surely she couldn’t have been so unmoved if she’d remembered even a moment of those few months that they’d spent together?

Because he remembered. He remembered everything. The way that she spoke, her island creole accent that he knew could slip so quickly into perfect French or her slightly American-sounding English. The way that she smelled—of salt, sand and the coconut oil that she rubbed into her skin. The way that she had looked at him after they had made love for the first time, as if they had just created the stars in the sky.

The way that he had waited for her as they’d agreed, after he had returned to Australia, and she had never shown up.

Had it been the accident? he wondered now. That would make sense, answer the questions he had been carrying around in the years since they had been together. It hit him like a blow to the chest, the thought that perhaps he had been wrong. That she had wanted to come as desperately as he had wanted it. But it didn’t hurt any less when she looked at him and didn’t see him.