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‘You could always take it,’ she heard herself saying. Boldly—if she was being honest. ‘You said yourself that any number of surgeons would cut off their own limbs with a scalpel just to get to work here. So what’s stopping you? You could easily stay.’
He only hesitated for a beat.
‘Why would I do that?’
She wanted to say her. But that sounded too arrogant.
‘Because I would want you to.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘And I thought you might want that as well.’
The silence swirled around them, just like the grey mist that crept in over the jungle part of the island and usually heralded the start of the hurricane season. She could imagine that this storm would be no less brutal.
‘I don’t.’ He spoke at last.
And what did it say about her that she didn’t believe him?
‘Liam—’
‘You don’t love me.’ He cut her off, his voice abrading her. Almost from the inside out. ‘And you don’t want me to stay.’
Carefully, she sat up in the bed, pulling the sheet around her, unsure whether to go or to stay. But far from sounding as though he was trying to convince her, it seemed as though he was trying to convince himself.
The thought lent her courage.
‘I know what I want, Liam.’ She thought she even sounded a touch snippy.
‘Really?’ he challenged instantly. ‘So you want your family to hate you?’
He was warming to the topic now, she could tell by the way he threw the words at her with that hatefully impassive green-eyed stare.
‘That’s what you’re saying you want, is it, Talia?’ he pushed her when she didn’t answer.
‘What? No, of course not, but—’
‘Only that’s what would happen,’ he continued ruthlessly. He was disengaging, she could read it in the set of his jaw and the turn of his body, and she thought it might kill her to see him like this.
‘You told me yourself,’ he pointed out, and a wiser woman would surely have heeded that tone to his voice. Too controlled and even to be anything other than wholly dangerous.
But she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
‘No...’ she cried. ‘Liam, you’ve got it all wrong.’
‘I don’t believe I have anything wrong,’ he countered quietly.
And whatever emotions she had felt coursing through him these last couple of days had clearly been stuffed firmly back down. Now he was pulling on that armour of detachment that he always wore.
And Talia hated it. Hated it. Even though, more and more, she was beginning to think it had never suited him at all.
‘That night after going to Auntie Zinia’s, you avoided the parade and you told me that you didn’t want your brothers to see you with me. You said that they had only just forgiven you for being with me three years when you should have been home with your family. With your mother.’
‘But—’
‘You said that to me, did you not?’
‘Yes, but...’ she faltered, flustered. ‘They’re still teenagers, they haven’t met someone they love yet. They don’t understand.’
‘What about your father, Talia? Is he a teenager?’
‘Of course not.’
