The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

She felt his fingers against her skin as he unbuttoned her shirt and peeled it off. He did the same with her trousers too, unlacing her boots and pulling off her socks so that she was in only her underwear. Yesterday, Jed. Today, she was the patient.

‘You have a guest,’ she heard him murmur and she glanced for long enough to see him detach a leech from her calf. ‘. . . They get in everywhere. It’ll itch for a bit, but don’t worry, I know something for that.’

She didn’t respond. He quickly unbuttoned his own shirt and pulled it on over her, bending her arms through the armholes, buttoning the buttons; she seemed unable to help herself. ‘There, that’ll keep you covered. Sunburn is the last thing you need right now.’

‘I’m okay,’ she mumbled, her voice just a faint shadow, surprising even her.

‘No. You’re in shock.’ His hands ran over her head, smoothing her hair as he gazed down at her. She felt little again. He looked back to the falls as if magnetically drawn, his despair silent but tangible, like a dog’s mournful melancholy. She sensed he didn’t know what to do. He looked around them, stiffened suddenly. ‘Hang on . . . Wait there.’

She wasn’t going anywhere. Where was there to go anyway? They had no provisions, no shelter. She could hear him in the water, his legs wading in long, slow, powerful strides. They receded and then, after an absence, drew near again.

Something red came into her field of vision. Slowly, she looked up. He was dragging the rucksack – one of them.

‘It got caught on that branch!’ he said, his voice infused with an incredulous wonder. She watched on blankly as he took it to the shore and unpacked it. Litres of water spilled onto the stones, staining them dark as slowly, methodically, he began opening everything out and laying it all in the sun.

Hammock. Tarp. Lines. Stove. Sheathed knife. Collapsible buckets. A few packets of dried noodles. Even the strange package Don Carlos had given her, which she hadn’t had enough time to open, her curiosity going unanswered. He sat on the stones beside the river, next to their worldly belongings, his elbows on his knees as he waited for everything to dry. He watched her in silence. She curled back into her foetal position on the rock – still shivering but less than before, still wearing his shirt – and watched him back. Neither one said a word, her blinks steadily becoming longer, her heart rate slowing. The river had become a tranquil place again, a beauty spot where dragonflies danced and toucans squabbled for fruit in the trees. It was an idyll, a tropical paradise. Nothing bad could ever happen here. It was a beautiful day. The last thing she thought, as her eyes closed again, was that the sun wasn’t even yet at its highest point in the sky.

Chapter Twenty-Two

They set off when there were still two hours of light left. Alex was sure they could make it. Their morning’s speed-hike, coupled with her runaway ride and his riverside sprint, meant they had covered far more ground than he had anticipated and he was confident they could get to the village before nightfall, even though they were walking at half the speed of the morning leg.

He kept turning back every few paces to check she was still there, still okay. She saw now, as she followed in his footsteps, that his clothes were torn and ripped in places, that he had some nasty cuts to his forearms, a vivid grass and mud stain along the seat of his trousers as though he’d gone sledging without a sledge. He looked like he’d been in a fight with something a lot bigger and more vicious than him. She wondered again what he’d been through, getting to her.

Everything had dried now, including her clothes, which were stiff and crackly, and her second sleep had been powerfully restorative, somehow effecting a profound change. Perhaps knowing she was protected, her mind had been able to relax, but when she had woken – under his watchful gaze for a second time today – she found her nervous system had calmed, her strength had returned, her body was responding to cues once more and the fizzing bitterness between them had dissipated. If they weren’t exactly friends, they were no longer enemies either.

They talked easily as they went, feasting on fruit for lunch – fresh mangoes he harvested from some trees as they walked, some bananas. ‘There’s more bananas in this country than there are stars in the sky,’ he declared, using his belt as a strap to help him shimmy up the tree trunk, the way she’d seen Jed do when she was a little girl.

‘You’ve gone native,’ she said, as he climbed down with ease and offered her one.

‘No, I always was more feral than civilized,’ he shrugged.

The statement puzzled her. ‘That’s not true.’

‘Sure it is. You just chose not to see it.’

‘You weren’t feral,’ she argued. ‘Just because you grew up on farms, it didn’t mean you were—’

‘I wasn’t ever going to fit into your world, Tara,’ he said simply. He stared at her with an inscrutable expression, before setting off again and leaving her watching him in confusion.

They walked like they were strolling in the park, the tense hurry of last night and this morning now replaced by something softer, kinder.

‘Don’t lick that,’ he said at one point, pointing out a tiny red frog perched on the underside of a giant palm leaf.

‘I hadn’t planned on it. I’ll have you know my frog-licking days are behind me.’

His laughter rolled through her. He pointed out birds – scarlet macaws of course, but also kiskadees, orioles, woodpeckers; and her favourite, the toucans, who made a wonderful clacking noise as they tried not to bump into trees with their oversized beaks. He identified plants. ‘This one’s called the anaesthetic tree,’ he said, getting out his knife and hacking away