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Isla’s heart stopped. She must have misheard.
‘Sorry?’
‘This is your career too. I should never have asked you to transfer.’
‘Then why did you?’ She couldn’t seem to help herself.
There was a beat of silence, but it felt like a lifetime.
‘Perhaps it was an excuse to be with you again,’ Nikhil bit out suddenly.
There was no way his words should be able to worm their way inside her so easily.
‘Your excuse?’
‘I think I probably convinced myself that if you were going to the Hestia, the way you’d been intended to do, then we would no longer be immediate colleagues. We could indulge this...attraction between us.’
‘There’s bed-hopping going on every night. From the lowliest crewman right up to the senior officers. And yet you’re worried about us indulging with each other, and only each other?’
She could see the internal battle going on in Nikhil’s head. She could read it in every tautened sinew of his impossibly perfect body. But she refused to let her head go there. Not now.
‘I never indulge, Doctor. You know that.’
‘Actually, I don’t know that,’ she heard herself snap out abruptly. More because his use of Doctor made her feel things she didn’t want to be feeling. ‘I don’t know that at all. I’ve heard rumours, but that’s all they are. I don’t know the first thing about you, Nikhil.’
‘You know me probably better than anyone else on this ship.’
‘Then I find that profoundly sad. Not least because I didn’t even realise that your brother was still alive. Let alone that you’d been scheduled to meet him in Chile, the day that we met.’
Nikhil stiffened. A lesser woman might have quaked at the incandescent expression on his face. Isla had no idea how she managed to hold her ground.
‘How do you know about that?’
‘More to the point—’ she refused to answer, though it took all she had ‘—how is it that in all our conversations about my family, you never once offered anything more about yours?’
‘It wasn’t...isn’t your busines
s,’ he gritted out. ‘It’s nobody’s business.’
‘It’s a detail. A minor, insignificant detail perhaps.’ She carefully ignored the fact that her mother had told her the brothers were estranged. ‘But a detail nonetheless.’
Let Nikhil tell her that. Let him at least acknowledge the fact that Dax existed. And again, he hesitated. So long, this time, that Isla feared he wasn’t going to answer her at all.
‘Perhaps it’s self-preservation,’ he growled at last.
‘It isn’t self-preservation,’ she made herself reply. ‘It’s control. You set up these little parameters around yourself every day. That particular, irrelevant scrap of information was withheld purely because you get some kind of kick about no one knowing the slightest thing about you.’
‘And yet I told you it was my birthday,’ he reminded her.
Isla faltered. He had told her that, hadn’t he? And yet she’d assumed he was making it up.
Nikhil was quick to exploit his advantage. ‘I didn’t tell you about my brother—’ she was fairly certain he fought to keep his tone even, yet that hint of acrid rage slid through all the same ‘—because he is irrelevant to me. That is all. No great secret.’
‘It’s hardly usual,’ Isla snorted.
‘Many families part ways. Your close relationship with your former stepsister is more unusual than any fallout I may or may not have had with mine.’
‘Which, I feel obliged to point out, is you deflecting—’ she couldn’t decide whether to feel smug or sad ‘—the way you always do.’
