‘What?’ he asked without looking up, and Sam poured himself coffee and hiked his frame onto the bench where Ben was sorting drugs.

‘Lily,’ he repeated patiently. ‘Cute as a button. Half islander, half French. We all thought she looked like Audrey Hepburn, only curvier. Sexiest thing on two legs. She went through med school, then went home to work on the little island where she’d been raised. Wasn’t that Kapua?’ He paused, sorting old memories. ‘Hey, weren’t you two an item? I was a couple of years above you but I seem to remember… I’m right, aren’t I?’

Ben’s hands stilled. For a moment-just for a moment-a surge of remembered pain washed through him. Lily.

Then he regrouped. ‘We’re talking about seven years ago,’ he snapped. ‘The trivia you keep in that tiny mind of yours…’

‘But Kapua is Lily’s island?’

‘Yeah,’ Ben said, remembering. He’d been so caught up in the urgency of the job that until now he hadn’t thought of the link between Kapua and Lily. But, yes, Kapua was definitely the place Lily called home.

‘Is she still there?’

‘How would I know? I haven’t heard from her for years.’

‘It’d be a joke if she was among the insurgents.’

‘A great joke,’ he said dryly, starting to pack again.

They were moving fast. News had hit that morning of an insurgent attack in Kapua. The islanders needed help, desperately.

Kapua was the biggest of a small group of Pacific islands. Its population was an interracial mix of the original Polynesians and the Spaniards who’d decided to colonise the place centuries ago. There was little sign of that colonisation now. The Spaniards had obviously decided the Polynesian lifestyle suited them much better than their own, and the island’s laid-back lifestyle continued to this day.

But things were changing. Ignored by the rest of the world for centuries, the island had recently been made more interesting to other countries by the discovery of oil. The island’s rulers had shown minimal interest in selling it. To sell the oil could change their lifestyle, but it would leave their descendants without resources when it was finished. The islanders had therefore decided to make the oil last maybe a hundred years or more, and so far they’d sold nothing.