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‘Someone like you and I, you mean?’ he challenged. ‘Building that little beach shack home we always talked about building when we were kids?’
She didn’t answer, she merely pressed her lips into a thin line, as Zeke schooled himself. Restraining himself from reacting.
So what if she remembered the dreams they’d once had back in the beginning? Less than a couple of hours ago that might have meant something to him. But not now. Not after discovering he had a son who she had kept from him all this time.
Instantly Zeke shut the earlier moment of weakness out and steeled himself again.
Finding out about Seth had changed everything.
He might have spent the past five years rebuilding his life and making himself into a man worthy of Tia again—making it up to her for shutting her out immediately after the accident. Maybe even winning her back.
But that had been before.
Now he had lost out on the first four years of his son’s life. Zeke didn’t know how to begin to quell the thunder that rolled through him. He didn’t know what his next move would be. He didn’t even know how to articulate a single one of the questions powering around his head right now.
He only knew that he had no intention of missing a single week more of Seth’s life.
He didn’t choose to answer. Instead he smoothed his mouth flat and turned onto the private road and began the slight ascent to the house.
‘Zeke.’ Tia’s voice broke into his thoughts as he turned her car up onto the track to his home. ‘We can’t just wander up here.’
‘Pretty sure we can,’ he replied grimly.
‘I don’t think it’s just the old road to the lighthouse any more.’ She sounded panicked. ‘It looks like it’s the driveway now.’
‘It is. My driveway.’
There was a beat.
Then another.
‘I’m sorry, say again?’
He deliberately delayed a moment before complying.
‘I live here. This is my home now.’
‘You own it?’
‘I bought the land and had it built.’ He shrugged, deliberately sidestepping her real question. ‘So yes, I own it.’
Her confusion was evident, but still he didn’t clarify.
Let her wonder.
Let her consider how he had got himself from the mess of a man who couldn’t even walk in that rehab centre, to the multimillionaire he was now.
It might give him a moment to begin to get a handle on this racing, flip-flopping tangle of emotions.
Hadn’t Tia once called him more of a carefully crafted, honed, precious weapon than a man? A lifetime ago when he’d been about to go on a mission and she’d still been at uni, before she’d joined the army medical corps.
She’d meant it as a good-humoured jibe but it had given him some kind of perverse comfort, and he’d held onto that image for years. Right up until the bomb blast had rendered him broken. Useless. Unsalvageable.
Even now, with all this to show for himself, he was constantly clawed at by vicious nightmares. Regrets. Self-recriminations.
* * *
Her heart was hammering so brutally inside her chest that Tia was surprised he couldn’t hear it. The place looked like a millionaire’s fantasy house by the sea.
