Without a word Zach left her, returning several minutes later with the underclothes she had left by the pool, his flesh damp as though he had taken the opportunity to bathe—washing away her touch, Tamara thought sickly as he dropped her bra and briefs on the ground beside her and then started to pull on his jeans.
They walked in silence through the jungle, until Tamara thought she must scream with the tension of it. If only he would say something, even if it was only that she wasn’t to read anything into what had happened. She knew that already, just as she knew that had they not been alone together, fighting for survival, she would never have known Zach’s fiercely demanding possession.
As the day wore on the tension between them increased until Tamara’s nerves were stretched to breaking point. She couldn’t bear another night alone with Zach, and that and that alone kept her going when exhaustion and anguish would have overwhelmed her. She was too dazed to realise that the terrain was gradually changing, the steep slopes giving way to more undulating ground, the forest lusher, aware only of the sickness growing in the pit of her stomach, the burning shame of having given herself to a man who, for all that she loved him, thought of her only as an unwanted encumbrance. Even her fears that they might be pursued retreated as she relived those emotional seconds in the aftermath of Zach’s possession when he had demanded harshly to know if Malcolm had known of her virginity; as though his prime concern was for what Malcolm might have to say when he discovered the truth, and since she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Zach couldn’t possibly be afraid of another man’s reaction she could only come to the conclusion that his anger had sprung from the fact that had Malcolm known of her virginity he might with good reason demand an end to their engagement, and she might try to turn to Zach himself for consolation.
Her face burned at the injustice of it. She would die rather than ask Zachary Fletcher for so much as the time of day. She brushed impatiently at the tickly sensation on her arm, and then froze, her scream disturbing a flock of parrots who rose screeching into the air.
Zach swung round grimly, demanding, ‘What the …!’ his expression changing when he saw the scarlet swelling on her arm.
‘What was it?’ he demanded briskly, reaching her and grasping her arm around the bite.
‘A spider.’ Tamara shuddered. ‘It was huge!’ For some reason Zach’s face kept receding and fading, a strange lethargy affecting her ability to respond to the questions he was rapping out.
‘All right, just keep still.’
She saw the glint of light on the knife he had taken from the guerrilla, but mercifully the poison the spider’s bite had injected had numbed her senses, and she watched like a sleepwalker as Zach drew the blade swiftly across the swollen skin and then bent his head to suck fiercely on the cut, spitting out the blood.
‘We’ll rest now,’ he told her tersely.
‘I can go on,’ Tamara lied doggedly.
‘Perhaps you can, but if you do every breath you take will circulate the poison deeper into your body. You have to rest.’
Tamara opened her mouth to argue and closed it again slowly as a peculiar feeling of light-headedness dizzied her. She was dimly aware of Zachary unzipping her sleeping bag and putting her in it, of him touching her arm, which now felt faintly numb, but it was as though it were all happening to her while she stood apart and looked on, divorcing herself from her body.
It was only later that Tamara was told the full story of their return journey to civilisation—Zach had long since gone and the nurses watching over her in the island hospital thought it very romantic how she had come to be there and delighted in telling her over and over how Zach had walked into a small village at the edge of the rain forest carrying her in his arms, her skin dry and tight with the fever which had come from the poison injected by the spider, but she had no personal recollection of the events leading up to their eventual arrival at the island’s main town, transported there in a donkey cart.
The first person Tamara had seen when she eventually threw off the fever had been Dot Partington. The Partingtons had deliberately extended their holiday to be with her when she recovered, and she had been more touched by their kindness than anything else in her life.
It had been Dot who had told her, avoiding her eyes, that Zach had left the island. Malcolm had not been told of what had happened—Dot had not known where to get in touch with him, and Tamara suppressed the guilty knowledge that once she returned home she would have to face him and terminate their engagement, for both their sakes. She could no longer contemplate the sterile sort of marriage they would have and she knew she could not in all fairness marry him feeling the way she did about Zach. Not that she was foolish enough to believe there was any future for her with Zach. His absence and silence only confirmed her own thoughts which were that he wanted her to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that whatever had been between them had been as a result of proximity and circumstance and was now very definitely over.
Three days after she had first come out from her fever, Tamara was beginning to grow bored with her hospital bed.
Dot had promised to come and spend the afternoon with her, and at the end of the week they would all fly home.
‘You’re a very lucky young woman,’ the doctor told her chidingly, when he came to see her. ‘You’ve cheated death not once but twice.’
Although the hospital authorities had had to be told how Tamara had come to be poisoned, the authorities on the island had deliberately shrouded the kidnapping in secrecy—something which would have gone against Zach and Tamara if they had not managed to escape, Dot had informed her.
‘I honestly never thought I’d see you alive again,’ she told Tamara for the umpteenth time when she came to visit her. ‘When we had to leave you behind with those men … I’m sorry,’ she apologised, ‘I shouldn’t remind you of it. It must have been a dreadful experience.’
‘Yes,’ Tamara agreed listlessly, unable to tell Dot that her memories of St Stephen’s would be among the most treasured of her life.
‘Never mind,’ Dot comforted. ‘You’ll soon be back home with your fiancé …’ She darted Tamara a shrewd look. ‘It’s just as well you’re safely engaged, otherwise I don’t see how you could have failed to fall in love with Zach. I think I would have done myself, George or no George!’
Tamara managed a hollow laugh, diverting Dot’s attention away from her betrayingly pale face to ask her what time she and George would be collecting her from the hospital. She knew she ought to be looking forward to going home, but she wasn’t. All she could feel was an enervating apathy. An aftermath of the poison, so the doctor told her, but Tamara knew differently. It was nature’s way of cushioning her against the agony of losing Zach. She smiled mirthlessly. Nature was fighting a losing battle. Nothing would ever make her forget; he was burned into her mind, imprinted against her flesh, a part of her until the end of her life.
CHAPTER SIX
IT was raining as the huge jet circled Heathrow. They descended through thin grey cloud merging drearily with the tarmac, the only spots of colour coming from the planes themselves with their distinctive markings.
Terminal Three was busy; there had been talk of a go-slow on the part of some of the airport’s personnel, and those who were able were rushing to get away before it started, precipitating the crisis they had hoped to avoid.
Tamara said her goodbyes to the Partingtons in the restaurant, where they had insisted on taking her for a final cup of coffee.
‘Promise you’ll write and let us know how you’re getting on,’ Dot urged her, ‘and any time you feel like a break you know you’ll always be welcome—you and your fiancé. Did you let him know what time you were arriving back? I should have thought he would have met you, knowing how ill you’ve been.’ There was a trace of disapproval in her voice, and Tamara hastened to defend Malcolm, explaining that she hadn’t wanted to worry him and so had simply sent a cable telling him that she was extending her holiday by a week. She intended to phone him once she got home.