But Ben didn’t feel like smiling. ‘I knew her well enough. But I’m going to bed,’ he muttered. ‘Just keep the lid on the hostage situation. That’s all I ask.’
CHAPTER THREE
BEN woke at dawn, and five minutes later he was striding into the original hospital, looking for Lily.
For she was gone. The first thing he’d done had been to check her stretcher-bed and the sight of its neatly folded blanket had made him feel ill.
Hell, he’d slept six hours and he’d needed that sleep. She’d had little more than that and she’d had a lot more to catch up on.
‘Where’s Dr Lily?’ he snapped at the first person he saw. It was Pieter. The big nurse assessed Ben’s face and nodded, as if he now understood something that had been worrying him.
‘You’ll be Dr Ben Blayden?’
‘Yes.’
‘I should have realised yesterday,’ the nurse told him. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking.’
‘You should have realised what?’
‘That you’re our Lily’s Ben. That you’re our Benjy’s father.’
It took the wind out of Ben’s lungs, so much so that he felt as if he’d been punched. After seven years…
‘Where is she?’ he managed, and Pieter shook his head, troubled.
‘She came in here about four a.m. I wasn’t here. One of your men said she should go back to sleep but I doubt she followed instructions. Her son is missing.’ Pieter’s voice softened. ‘If I’m not mistaken, your son is missing.’
Ben flinched. He stood, stunned, letting the words sink in.
Last night there’d been room for doubt. Lily’s words had been almost incoherent, the desperate words of a woman who’d gone past the point of sense. But now… ‘She’s told you about me?’
‘She told me that Benjy was the son of a man she met at medical school. That you’d elected to be an emergency doctor with the SAS. That she’d chosen to come home, to raise your son alone because your worlds could never meet. And then yesterday…while Lily was scouring the island she went to my wife. She sobbed to her that you were here and how could she tell you about a son when she didn’t know if he was alive?’
‘She never told me,’ Ben whispered, trying to rid himself of this sense of unreality, not sure whether he was angry or confused or just…bereft. He should be angry, he thought. The appropriate emotion should definitely be anger, but bereft was winning.
He had a son.
Where the hell was he?
‘She’d only just learned she was pregnant when she came home,’ Pieter was saying, watching his face. ‘This island is a very easy place to raise a child without a father. In a sense we’re a huge family where parenting is done by all. She wouldn’t have seen the need…’
He had it now. Anger in spades, sweeping through him with a ferocity he found breathtaking.
‘She wouldn’t have seen the need to tell me? She didn’t think I had the right to know?’
‘She said you feared relationships,’ Pieter said, ‘But she also said you were a moral man who’d want to do the right thing by your son. She said her decision was not to load you with that responsibility.’
‘But even you know…’
‘Lily and I have worked side by side for almost seven years,’ Pieter said, reassuringly, as if Ben was a little unhinged and he had to settle him. Which maybe wasn’t far from the truth. ‘I’m the cousin of her mother. There’s little about Lily I don’t know.’
‘So she told you and she didn’t tell me.’
‘I believe she thought you wouldn’t want to know.’ Pieter looked grave. ‘This is a conversation you should be having with Lily, but this is maybe not the time for considering feelings. Lily’s in desperate trouble. She needs all the help she can get.’
‘Where is she now?’
The big man’s face clouded. ‘I don’t know. Maybe that’s why I’m telling you this. I should be out looking for her. She should be here helping with our wounded. As I need to be. There are shoulds everywhere.’
‘There’s been no word about the hostages?’
‘No.’
‘And this Jacques?’
‘He will be fine, that one,’ Pieter said, and his expression grew even more grim. ‘He must be a hostage but if he is…maybe he’ll be the first one to talk his way out. He is not an islander, you understand. Jacques came here when the oil was found. He helps us with our administration.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘He’s not one of us.’
And there it was, Ben thought grimly. The reason Lily had said she could never leave the island. The islanders were family.
But even though Jacques was an outsider, Lily had agreed to marry him. He must have something.
If I’d come to her island maybe she would have married me, he thought suddenly, but it was a dumb thought. He’d never have wanted to come here, and he had a lot more to think about right now than a seven-year-old romance that had gone astray.
‘Ben,’ a voice called from the end of the corridor, and it was Sam, wearing theatre gear again.
‘Yes?’
‘They’ve released three of the hostages,’ he said. ‘Or at least they opened the front doors and shoved them out. Each of them has gunshot wounds. We need all hands in Theatre and that means you.’
Which meant another six hours operating. Six hours where they somehow managed to stabilise the injured islanders.
‘But things have settled,’ Ben was told by the sergeant in charge when, with surgery completed, he’d made his way to temporary headquarters. ‘We’ve done a comprehensive sweep of the island. There are no more injured.’
‘Have you seen the island doctor?’
‘Lily,’ the sergeant said. ‘Yes. She’s working in the original hospital. She knows you guys are thorough, but most of the families want to talk to her.’ He hesitated. ‘They’ve had a succession of English teachers on the island and English is spoken by everyone. But maybe if my kin had been shot I’d want my family doctor to talk me through it.’
Damn. Ben had just come from the field hospital which was next door to the original building. He turned to leave but then he remembered. It wasn’t just Lily he was concerned about.
‘The hostage situation?’
‘We’re negotiating,’ the sergeant told him. ‘They want transport out of here.’
‘Do we know who’s in there?’
‘Ten islanders. The most badly injured they’ve tossed out. Ten fits with the number of islanders who remain missing. We don’t know how many rebels.’
‘Is Lily’s son there?’
‘Yes,’ the sergeant said, and Ben felt suddenly light-headed.
‘We know he’s alive?’ he demanded.
‘One of the injured men saw him. Yes.’
‘And you’ve told Lily?’
‘She was here when we heard. She’d been everywhere on the island, checking with each search team as they came in, checking herself. We were almost as glad as she was when we heard the kid was alive.’
‘And…Jacques someone?’ he ventured, and there was a nod.
‘We assume so. He wasn’t seen by the guy we talked to but he said he heard him talking.’
