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Yep, forget the dulled memory. If anything, he seemed even more chiselled than ever and his face looked as though it had been hewn from pure granite as he glowered at her. She pretended it didn’t feel like a tight fist closing around her already fragile heart.
‘Is that all you have to say?’ His tone was too neutral, his expression giving nothing away. ‘My name? You’re not even going to explain what I’m doing out here?’
Panic shot through her in an instant, and it was all Talia could do not to show it.
He doesn’t know, she reminded herself feverishly. He can’t possibly know.
She tried to dredge up another smile but it was impossible, she’d have to content herself with a controlled tone. One that didn’t betray just how crazily she was shaking inside.
‘You’re here to take over one of Isak’s clinical trial surgeries, I believe,’ she managed. ‘I’m sure that’s what the rumour mill said, anyway.’
His already cold expression changed abruptly, becoming even more closed off than ever. The fist around her heart squeezed tighter. He’d gone from talking to her to shutting her out in an instant. A stark reminder of why she’d made that impossible decision, three years ago, to walk away from the only man she had ever loved.
Three years, two months, two weeks and four days, if she was going to be precise.
Shamefully, she knew it to pretty much the hour, too.
‘“That’s what the rumour mill said”?’ he echoed. ‘Is this some game you’re now playing?’
The question rasped over her skin, scraping against old wounds she’d told herself were long since healed. Yet now, with a few words from Liam, they felt as raw as they had three years ago.
Leaving Duke’s—leaving him—had been the most agonising decision of her life. Who, in their right mind, would ever leave a man like Liam Miller? He had earned his nickname around Duke’s hospital as the Heart Whisperer for his incredible skill as a cardiothoracic surgeon, but it was equally fitting for the fact that colleagues, patients and relatives alike all fell head over heels for him.
Practically the whole single, female contingent of the place had wanted to be the one woman to catch Liam’s eye. The one woman who could reach the distant and seemingly lonely surgeon. The one woman who could heal his apparently damaged soul.
The fact that he’d never dated any of them had only made Liam all the more coveted. It was one of the first things she’d learned from her fellow scrub nurses the moment she’d arrived at Duke’s. The last thing she’d expected, then, had been for Liam to apparently break all his own rules when he’d asked her out on a date.
And then another.
She’d felt special. And perhaps she’d let that fact go to her head because she’d fallen in love with him, hard and fast. Moreover, she’d been foolish enough—naïve enough—to let herself believe he actually loved her too. That she had, actually, healed him. That was how much of a fool she’d been.
Which was why, when her father had called her with the dreadful news, that last day at Duke’s, she’d known that moving away from North Carolina—away from Liam—was the healthiest move all round.
Yet even though, deep down, she’d understood the logic, it had nonetheless been the most torturous and agonising decision of her life. Especially for a girl who’d once believed in happily-ever-afters, and soulmates, and love conquering all.
But she was no longer that young, naïve kid. Liam had taught her that real life wasn’t like that, and the simple truth had been that her love—she herself—hadn’t been enough. Not for Liam, anyway.
Tilting her head back and jerking her chin out a fraction, Talia summoned a glare of her own.
‘I don’t play games. I never did.’
But, Lord, it was hard when he looked more beautiful, more dangerous than ever. So arresting that she was sure her perfidious heart stuttered and stumbled in her chest.
‘I used to think that,’ he stated flatly. ‘Just as I used to think that I knew you.’
Never mind the icy rivers that his dispassionate tone sent coursing through her, it was the way he looked straight through her that sheared off an entire glacier inside her, sending it—and almost her—crashing down to stain the highly polished, ultra-hygienic, stunning marble floor of the painfully opulent, intimidatingly high-tech Island Clinic.
She wanted to rail and argue. But what would be the point?
‘It turns out that I never really knew you at all, did I?’ Liam added, his acerbic smile so biting she could almost taste the sharp, unpleasant tang of it for herself.
The same bitterness she’d tasted when she’d finally realised that the future she had begun to imagine—one that included Duke’s, and Liam—was definitely not the same future he’d envisaged in his own mind. And it never would be.
He might have cared for her, in his odd strange way, but she still hadn’t been enough.
There was a part of Liam that he had always kept locked away, not just from her but from the world. He’d never truly let her close to him—he’d never let her in. If anything, he’d once condemned everything she believed in—love, marriage, family—as whimsical fantasies that had no place in the real world and would never for him.
And, still, the warning signs hadn’t been enough to allow her to cut her losses and run. She’d been tied to him. Loving him. Hoping that would be enough to encourage him to open up to her.
