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And whose fault was that? a little voice whispered snidely in her head. She thrust it aside roughly.
‘All right. I’m listening.’
‘I should have told you what the Captain had advised me. I should have mentioned that appearing to be in a stable relationship with someone like you—an officer, a ship’s doctor—would have enhanced my chances of promotion.’
‘Yes,’ she managed. ‘You should have. But you didn’t. Because you wanted it to look convincing, you wanted to make sure everyone was fooled, and what better way to achieve that than by ensuring that even I was fooled?’
‘Yes,’ he ground out, and her heart stalled. It faltered.
And in that moment Isla realised there was a part of herself that had hoped he would say something different. Something more palatable.
She’d been used. Lesson learned. She sucked in a breath and tried to make herself stand. Her very soul felt as though it was splintering, tearing apart, and if she was going to shatter into pieces then the least she wanted was to do it in private. Where he couldn’t see her.
But her legs felt like jelly and all she could do was grip the desk tighter.
‘Well...’ She had no idea how she managed to sound so crisp. So cool. ‘Thank you for finally being honest, if nothing else.’
‘That’s what I initially told myself I was doing, anyway,’ Nikhil continued, taking a step closer to her, making every inch of her skin prickle with awareness. ‘Yet who else knows about us? If I had honestly wanted to do that, then what was the point in us being so discreet?’
‘You were playing the game,’ she choked out.
‘Only there was no game, not really. What we had felt too precious, too private, too significant to feed to the rumour mill. So maybe I initially told myself that getting into a relationship with you would be excusable if I could pretend to myself that it was a strategic career move, but I’m not sure the truth is that simple.’
The roaring sound in her ears was almost deafening. She didn’t want to believe him. She didn’t want to hope.
And yet...hope poured through her.
Nikhil sounded as though he was rolling the words around his head before he spoke them. Testing them out, seeing how they fitted. As though this wasn’t easy for him. As though this was a truth with which even Nikhil himself was only just coming to terms.
‘I don’t have relationships with colleagues.’
‘I’m know that.’ She tried not to sound so bitter. Or hurt. ‘You’re too dedicated. Too career-driven to be distracted.’
‘I never wanted to be in maritime,’ Nikhil countered unexpectedly, and it wasn’t so much an answer, Isla felt, as a tangent. ‘In fact, it was the last thing I ever wanted to do. My father was a sailor; he worked in the boiler room, and I never wanted to do anything, be anything, remotely like him. For obvious reasons.’
No, she could understand that. Why would anyone want to follow in the footsteps of a violent, abusive drunkard who had caused so much pain? Mentally and physically.
‘Then why join?’ Isla asked, unable to help herself.
‘Because there were scant other opportunities where I came from.’ He shrugged. ‘And so I decided that even if I had no other real option but to follow in his footsteps to join the profession, then at least I could make myself into the kind of man, the kind of sailor, that he’d never been. I could be the one thing he could never have even dreamed of—an officer.’
Which explained why he was dedicated, Isla supposed. Along with the way he had seemed to blame himself for how his father had died. Her mind raced. What had his brother said to him? Whatever it was, it must have been significant to bring Nikhil back here now.
Back to her.
‘You never escaped him though, did you?’ she asked quietly. ‘You say you wanted to make yourself into an officer—something that your father could never have been—and yet you still let him haunt you all these years.’
‘I did, but not because of him. More because of Dax.’
She wanted to speak, to answer, but she found she couldn’t. Her mouth felt too dry, her tongue too thick. Even her body felt too tight in her own skin.
‘I could say that I went to meet with him because of you, pyar. And perhaps I did. But I also went to meet with him because I needed to. I’ve needed to for probably twenty years, but I never had the courage before.’
‘Before?’ she croaked, as he nodded slowly and took a step closer to her.
‘I didn’t have it in me before you, Isla. But you have changed everything. You’ve changed me. And I don’t want to go back to the man I was before you came along.’
The kick in her chest was ferocious. And savage. And yet it was more breathtaking than brutal.
