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Trip was gazing down at her in silence and there was something about the expression on his beautiful face, almost as if he hated hearing her say that. Which made absolutely no sense.
Now he was nodding. ‘That’s true,’ he said after a moment. ‘But what’s also true is that I’m only here because of you. You’re the reason I got out of that jungle alive.’
Trip felt his chest tighten. Lily was staring at him, a small, puzzled furrow between her eyebrows. Her hair was tied neatly at the nape of her neck and she was wearing shorts and a cropped white blouse that seemed to hide everything and yet still hint at what lay beneath in a way that both confused and excited him.
‘I don’t understand.’
Watching her frown, he felt his hands ball into fists.
He hadn’t either. He still didn’t, which was why he hadn’t told anyone what had happened, what he had seen, why he had planned on never telling anyone. But he found that he wanted to tell Lily.
The memory of it was suddenly clearer and more real than the vines and the earth. ‘The guy who was in charge of tying me up drank—I could smell the alcohol on him—and one evening I realised I could get my hands free. I waited until they fell asleep and then I took off the blindfold and I managed to get away.’
He could still remember the fear that one of them would wake or, worse, shoot him. His heart had felt hot and slippery in his chest and he’d had that same feeling of being in a game so that even though it had been the most intense situation he’d ever been in, it had also felt as if it were happening to someone else.
‘How did you know which way to go?’ Lily’s grey eyes were light like summer storm clouds and, suddenly and overwhelmingly so that it winded him, he wanted to bury himself in their softness.
‘I didn’t,’ he said simply. ‘I was just making it up as I went along. One day, I was trying to climb up to the top of this ridge when everything just collapsed under me. That was when I lost my water bottle.’
The memory rolled over him like a cool mist, barely there but still enough to chill him to the bone.
‘Everything got a bit harder after that.’ Catching sight of her pale, stunned face, he forced his mouth to curve at one corner. ‘I was so thirsty and I drank from this pool. I don’t know what was in the water but afterwards I could hardly walk. I was shivering so much I kept biting my tongue.’
Backed up against a tree, skin burning, canopy closing in on him, he had offered up a prayer in desperation.
‘That’s when I saw you. You were wearing a cream dress like the one you wore to that lunch meeting the first time we met, and you held out your hand to me—’
He felt his fingers tighten around the rope in his hand. Even then, he’d known he was hallucinating, that Lily was in New York. But he had still reached out for her hand, stumbling forward, heart slowing with relief as her fingers had closed around his and suddenly he had been blinking into the sunlight.
After so many days of near darkness and delirium, he’d thought he was still hallucinating so that for a moment he hadn’t even realised that there were people moving towards him. All he’d cared about was Lily and he’d called out her name but, as the dark foliage had fallen away from him and his eyes had adjusted, she’d disappeared, breaking apart into petals.
He blinked away the image. ‘That’s how I found the village. Because of you. You were there with me—’
She was gazing up at him, an expression on her face that he didn’t understand but that turned his heart into a pinwheel beneath his ribs, and he reached out and touched her cheek, grazing his fingers against the skin.
‘I didn’t mean to make you cry,’ he said hoarsely. ‘And I didn’t not want you yesterday.’
Did that even make sense? Did it matter if it didn’t? It was just words, a collection of sounds that were just a step up from the babbling of a child. It didn’t come close to what he meant, to what he was feeling. But there was something taking shape between them, something tentative and precious and fragile, and he was scared that if he tried again, he would get it wrong and that newly formed shimmering thing would burst like a bubble.
Maybe Lily felt the same way because instead of replying she swayed slightly, the movement making her lean into the curve of his hand, and he felt his body react instantly. Hungrily.
Her chin jerked up and round towards the rumble of an engine and he followed the direction of her gaze to where a tractor was cresting the brow of the hill. He swore inwardly as Lily stepped back into the shadow of the vines and the air opened up between them.
‘It’s just Maurizio. He works here,’ he said, unnecessarily, because why else would Maurizio be driving a tractor across his land? But he wasn’t thinking straight. Correction: he wasn’t thinking at all. His mind was just heat and hunger.
Maurizio must have spotted him, because the tractor came to a stop and suddenly it was silent. Trip watched him climb down from the cab. Maurizio had worked on the estate since he’d left school and was now well past retirement, but after his wife’s death he had been so lost, so in need of occupation, that Trip had kept him on.
He turned to Lily to explain all of that but she was moving between the vines in that delicate, precise way of hers. At the dark fringe of woods edging the field, he watched as the trees seemed to move apart a little to receive her and then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone.
Something between loss and panic spiralled up inside him but it took another five minutes before he could extricate himself from the old man. By then Lily had long since disappeared. But he had to look for her.
And he knew he would find her. He could feel every single cell in his body, each breath and beat of his heart arrowing in on her location.
It was cool and light and green in the woods. Heart pounding, he followed one of the twisty paths, picking the wider one when it split in two, only to backtrack a moment later to take the one that was more overgrown. And that was when he saw her.
Lily was standing in the middle of the path, her grey eyes wide in the half-light crisscrossing her face, a flush of pink highlighting her cheekbones.
His pulse jumped. They had looked into each other’s eyes a hundred times or more over the last few days but there was something different this time, an intensity, an anticipation that made his mouth dry and his stomach tremble.
