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‘You were never a monster,?
? Nikhil managed, lifting his own hand to grab the back of his brother’s head too. Like the biggest, most important of all the pacts they’d ever made. ‘Though if you were I’d forgive you. I’d always forgive you.’
And despite the fact that he knew one conversation couldn’t undo decades of self-loathing and recrimination, it somehow felt as though they’d made that first crucial step. The one that was always the hardest to make.
As if some healing process had begun—just as Isla had predicted. And it never would have happened without her. She’d already begun to change him. To help him take that step out of his past.
How had he failed to see that before? Or had he just been denying it to himself?
He was an idiot.
‘I spent years thinking I had left it too long for us to ever stand a chance of healing the rift between us. I’m glad it wasn’t too late.’
‘It’s going to take time.’ The words were out before Nikhil had time to think about them. ‘But it isn’t too late after all.’
Was there such a thing as too late? he wondered suddenly.
What about Isla? Was it too late with her?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘WHAT ARE YOU doing here, Nikhil?’
Her heart was hammering so loudly, so wildly, inside her ribcage. But she couldn’t allow him to see it. She wouldn’t.
‘I owe you an apology, Isla.’
Isla. Not Little Doc. She should feel triumphant.
She didn’t. She just felt shaky. Edgy. Her eyes were drinking him in greedily, when she shouldn’t have cared at all. It was galling the way she noticed the fit of his clothing, black jeans and a rock band tee, far more casual than the uniform he had practically lived in—unless they’d been naked in each other’s beds, of course.
She swallowed hard and his eyes caught hers immediately. They darkened, and in that moment she hated herself for her weakness, and hated him for noticing.
Except that this thing humming and coursing through her wasn’t hate, not even close. It took her all the way back to that beachside bar, when she’d sat with Leo and they’d argued good-naturedly about whether the honeymoon couple frolicking in the waves had really been in love.
Even now, she could hear her stepsister asking if that would ever be her, and she could hear herself scoffing, No chance.
But she didn’t feel like scoffing any more.
It took everything Isla had to shake her head and get back to her paperwork.
As if he didn’t matter to her.
‘That isn’t necessary,’ she managed.
‘On the contrary,’ he gritted out. ‘It’s long overdue.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it.’
‘I went to speak with Dax,’ he shocked her by saying suddenly. ‘Just as you told me that I should.’
Isla wasn’t sure what hit her hardest, the fact that he’d been to see his brother, or the fact that he’d said it was because she had told him to do so. Was it foolish to believe that she really had that much influence on him?
As much as her head was screaming at her not to turn back to him, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t want to hear it any longer.
Swinging around, almost in slow motion, she perched her bottom on the edge of the desk. Her arms dropped straight down each side, surreptitiously clutching the edge of the wood. Gripping it white-knuckle-tight, until she feared her fingernails would be damaged beyond all recognition.
But what was that compared to the way he’d damaged her heart?
