[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

with a diffused golden light, and the vivid glowing colours of the
corals and little darting fishes made her eyes widen with delight
behind the toughened glass plate of her rubber mask. In places, the
fantastic structure of the reef was shadowy and mysterious, even
faintly sinister. Once, as they passed a deep crevice, Jake touched her
arm and indicated the malevolent yellow eyes of a moray eel keeping
watch from its dark retreat. But in the clearings among the alleys and
arches of coral, they met shoals of translucent angel fish and saw
rocks massed with anemones as brilliant as tropical flowers.
They had been rowed out to the reef by a grizzled Bermudian
boatman. And when Jake signalled that it was time to surface,
Caroline was glad of the old man's assistance in clambering back on
board the dinghy.
"It seemed so effortless down there, and yet I'm quite tired now," she
admitted, as Jake lifted off her aqua-lung. "How long were we
under?"
"How long do you think?" he asked, smiling.
"Half an hour? Forty minutes?" she suggested.
He shook his head. "Not quite a quarter of an hour. But it always
seems longer the first time down. Did you enjoy it?"
"It was fabulous," she said dreamily. "The colours ... the light... oh,
one can't describe it, can one?"
The boatman took them back to the beach where they had left their
clothes, and then rowed off round the point. There was no one else in
the cove, and as Caroline towelled her hair and watched the sparkling
wavelets advancing and slipping away on the shimmering white sand,
she knew that, far from being homesick, she was falling in love with
the islands.
After he had dried himself, Jake said he was going to nap for half an
hour. Caroline also felt drowsy, and they lay down side by side in the
shade of an outcrop of rock and were both soon asleep in the sun.
Caroline was roused by the cry of a sea-bird somewhere high
overhead. Half awake, but too lazy to stir, she lay listening to the
murmur of the waves. And then something touched her mouth for an
instant, and she opened her eyes to find Jake leaning over her. She
knew from his expression that he had kissed her.
As he bent to kiss her again, it seemed the most natural thing in the
world to put her arms round his neck and respond to his second, less
fleeting, kiss. But as she felt his heart start to pound and his fingers
tightened on her shoulder, there were stifled giggles from near by,
and they looked up to find two children peeping over the rocks at
them.
As soon as they had been spotted, the freckled faces disappeared, and
Caroline heard the children slithering down the back of the rock and
running off together, still giggling.
She sat up and shook back her tangled hair. "We used to do that when
we were kids," she said, smiling. "We always spent the summer
holidays with my uncle's family. They have a seaside cottage on the
East Coast. I remember one year my eldest cousin brought a
girl-friend down. We scouted them all over the dunes, poor things.
We thought they were so soppy to want to sit about kissing when they
could have been shrimping or playing beach cricket."
Jake did not answer. He was absently brushing the dried sand off his
legs, a look of troubled preoccupation on his face.
"What's the matter?" Caroline asked quietly. Then: "Jake... you aren't
married, are you?"
He gave her a look of apparently genuine amazement.
"Good lord, no! What on earth made you think I might be?"
"I don't know ... sometimes you seem to have some- . thing on your
mind." She hesitated, colouring slightly. "You aren't bothered about
kissing me, are you? I'm not so naive that I take one kiss as a
declaration."
He gave her one of those strange enigmatic looks, and because she
suddenly found it difficult to restrain her curiosity about him,
Caroline scrambled to her feet.
"Shall we swim?" she said lightly.
But as they walked to the water's edge, she knew a moment's disquiet.
In spite of what she had said, that kiss was bound to make a subtle
change in their so far uncomplicated relationship.
Am I falling in love with him, as well as with the islands ? she asked
herself uneasily.
At five o'clock, instead of parting company with her in the grounds of
the hotel, Jake suggested that they should go into Hamilton for the
evening.
"I'd love to - what shall I wear?" Caroline asked, both surprised and
pleased at this unexpected invitation.
For the moment of tension between them had soon passed off once [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

skierniewice.pev.pl