AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘No, I’m not. And you can growl at me all you want to, Nikhil, but it won’t change the facts,’ she pressed on, inching her way further and further inside the hollow cavern that was his chest.
Only he had the oddest sensation that she was shining light and warmth into the corners of it as she went.
‘I don’t do intimacy. Or commitment.’
‘You didn’t, no,’ she agreed. ‘But you can’t pretend that things haven’t changed between us over the last few weeks. You’re more open, and compassionate. It isn’t a weakness.’
He had a terrible, wonderful feeling that she was right.
But she couldn’t be right. Because even if what she said was true, even if he’d started to try to become a different person, the truth was that he couldn’t. He was who he was. His past had made sure of that. Pretending to be someone different—the kind of man who deserved a woman like Isla—wasn’t going to make him different.
It would be like papering over the cracks. His flaws would still be there, hidden temporarily beneath. And when they finally began to show again, when they finally broke through the surface, they would be all the uglier.
But the worst part of it was that he wanted to believe her.
So damned much.
A part of him thought this might be love—or the closest thing he could ever get to it.
It felt like giving a kid a detonation device and then stepping back to see what happened. It couldn’t end well. If he cared for Isla at all, he wouldn’t put them in that position. And if that wasn’t a reason to keep his distance...
‘You’re seeing what you want to see,’ he practically snarled at her, as if to remind her—remind them both—of the monster that he truly was.
Instead of cowering, however, his beautiful, powerful Isla merely smiled, making everything inside him begin to shatter.
‘I’m acknowledging what you pretend isn’t there. I see you for who you really are, Nikhil, and, no matter what you try to tell yourself, I know you’re a good man.’
‘You haven’t listened to anything I’ve told you,’ he roared. ‘I’m not a good man, Isla, and, no matter that you want to pretend differently, it won’t make it true.’
‘You’re wrong, Nikhil. You have this one awful image of yourself locked in your brain, I suspect because you think that’s what your brother saw when he was at that funeral. But the Nikhil you hold onto isn’t the man I have ever seen. Not once. You need to meet Daksh and listen to what he has to say.’
And in that moment he realised he would give anything to be the man that Isla thought he was.
But that wasn’t him. She was wrong. And so the only thing he could do was protect her from himself. The only way he knew how.
Snatching up his uniform, he stalked out of the room. He had to go and speak to the Captain now, before he thought better of what he was about to do.
‘Lock the door when you leave, Isla,’ he managed. ‘And don’t return.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IT WAS ALMOST a week later, when Isla was in the middle of tending to her latest patient, that she was summoned by the Captain.
‘Thank you, Gerd.’ She pasted on a bright smile, turning back to her rather glamorously dressed patient, who Isla had initially guessed to be in her mid-to-late sixties, but who had turned out to be a sprightly seventy-four.
Mrs Berridge-Jones had tripped down the last steps of the staircase in the Grand Lobby and been brought to the surgery because she’d been unable to put any weight on her ankle.
‘I’m not disembarking,’ the woman had declared imperiously. ‘I’ve been waiting two years for this cruise. I refuse to be sent home just because I caught my heel in the hem of my wretched dress on the last step of your perfectly easy-to-see staircase. It would just ruin the entire cruise.’
She’d rolled the r of ruin, and Isla had seen flashes of her mother in Mrs Berridge-Jones.
Now, Isla helped the older woman swing around on the examination table, taking note of the wince of pain.
‘Good news, Mrs Berridge-Jones.’ Isla grinned as she presented the images to her patient. ‘Your X-ray doesn’t show any fractures; I’m confident that you’ve got a sprained ankle rather than a break, so I can say that I have absolutely no intention of ruining your cruise.’
‘Jolly glad to hear it. So you’ll patch me up in a jiffy and I can get back to my welcome drink? I’d just ordered a rather decent port.’
