When she had gone, by her rough calculation from the sketchy map, about two kilometres north, she halted. Sure enough there was a small track plunging off the road towards the interior of the island marked only 'To Summit'. It led, so the hotel tourist guide had told her, to a look-out on the eastern slopes of the low volcanic ridge that divided the island. However, it wasn’t the view that Elizabeth was after. A quick glance over her shoulder reassured her that there was only one person in sight, quite a long way behind her, a jogger who appeared to be struggling to maintain a laggardly pace.
Hitching her soft-sided beach bag more securely over her shoulder, Elizabeth stepped on to the track, breathing more easily as she moved out of sight of the road. She walked briskly, suddenly feeling energetic and adventurous.
The track rose quite steeply for the first twenty minutes and Elizabeth was breathing hard by the time she came to the expected fork. She ignored the 'Summit' sign and took the smaller, unmarked, almost overgrown path to the right.
It was slow going. After another twenty minutes of ducking and shoving at stray branches and several times veering off the crushed-shell pathway by mistake, Elizabeth was beginning to worry. She stopped and twisted the top of the bottle of Perrier water that she had tucked in her bag. The water was only slightly chilled, but it fizzled and stung refreshingly on her tongue. She was sweating freely and she took off the pink scarf that she had used as a belt for her shorts and tied it around her head to keep the moisture from running down into her eyes. For a moment she just stood and enjoyed the quiet. She couldn’t even hear any birds, only the soft sigh of the breeze in the upper leaves of the trees that towered above the thick shrubs lining the path, the wild sub-tropical lushness which sprang from the volcanic soil a contrast to the carefully landscaped growth on the sandy flatlands below.
She was replacing the half-empty bottle in her bag when she heard a soft rustle of bushes on the path behind her and whirled around, her heart hammering. She knew there were no large animals on the island, let alone predatory ones, but still she was frightened.
He e
merged from the overgrowth at a run, almost knocking down the unexpected stationary object in his path.
It was the jogger from the roadway and he came to an abrupt halt as Elizabeth staggered backwards against the press of leaves.
She felt like screaming when she saw who it was.
'Lost again, Beth?' In running-shorts and a singlet, his taut muscles oiled with sweat, and breathing only slightly hard, Jack Hawkwood made her feel soft and weak. In spite of the laggardly gait that had earlier deceived her he was evidently in the peak of condition, his injured leg notwithstanding.
The lie stuck in her throat. 'Uh-'
'Because if you want the look-out you're on the wrong track. The path to the summit is quite a way back. Well marked, too, I would have thought.'
'Oh.' It was her unaccustomed exertion and the elevation that was making her breathless, Elizabeth decided, not his unexpected presence. 'Then where are you going?' Her mind seethed with suspicion.
'Jogging the same route all the time can get boring,' he said smoothly.
He hadn’t really answered her question, Elizabeth realised, and yet he had.
'Are you following me?' she demanded bluntly.
'Now, why would I want to do that?' he countered mildly, but there was an amused gleam in his eye that parodied his surprise.
'To annoy me,' she said furiously.
'Do I annoy you?'
'Will you stop answering a question with a question?' she seethed.
'Sorry. Old habit. Interrogation technique.'
‘Interrogation?' The very word sent shivers down Elizabeth's spine.
'Mmm. For a while I was part of an army intelligence unit.'
'A spy?' Another shiver.
His half-smile acknowledged her unease. 'Spies don’t wear uniforms. I was a career officer in the French military from the time I left school.'
Elizabeth was diverted. 'What happened—did you get invalided out?' She found it hard to believe, considering the feat of endurance he had just demonstrated, chasing her up a hillside.
'No, I just realised I would prefer to be at the top of a chain of command rather than somewhere in the middle, answerable to people I neither liked nor particularly respected. But the longer you stay in the army and the further you move up in military rank, the greater your chance of being "promoted" out of active service into a desk job. I hate sitting at a desk—that's why I didn’t go on to university as my family expected. So I resigned my commission to go into business for myself.'
'Managing one of your brother's hotels?' She would hardly have called that being top of a chain of command.
His smile became a grin. 'No. As a security consultant, offering anti-terrorist protection to companies and businessmen dealing with the hot-beds of the Middle East.'
He paused, studying her struggle to look uninterested when in reality curiosity was eating her up.