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If Zeke had intended to unsettle her, he had certainly succeeded. With a shaky arm, she reached out and opened the car door. Getting out and standing up was going to take even more effort.
Toying with her. Leaving her off-balance.
Biting her lip, she followed him across the gravel to the sleek metal and glass door. The place didn’t even have a normal lock or key like her house. Instead, he had to have some kind of key fob or pin, because the door opened automatically as he approached.
Not just moneyed, then. But serious money.
Her stomach twisted tightly. With money came contacts, and power. What if he decided to use those resources to get custody of Seth? To provide for him in a way that she couldn’t?
Hadn’t some former work colleague, Jane, from a few years ago lost joint custody of her two children to her ex-husband? He’d successfully argued something about Jane’s career as an A & E doctor meaning long, unpredictable hours whilst he himself had just been promoted in his dependable nine-to-five city job. Plus he’d had a new partner who had cared for a child of her own around the same age.
Tia’s mind raced, leaving a plume of fear in its wake.
‘Do you live here alone?’
The question was out before she could bite it back, not helped by the way Zeke cast her a look over his shoulder but didn’t immediately answer.
On autopilot she followed him as he stepped through a hallway to the lightest, most expansive living room she had ever been in, sleek windows curving from one wall to the other, and from floor to ceiling. Then he spoke.
‘There’s no one else here, Tia. There never has been. No one who mattered enough to move them in, anyway.’
And she told herself that her heart didn’t leap a little. Instead, she forced her legs to carry her across the room to stand in front of those stunning windows and take in the might of Mother Nature at her most volatile.
‘There are going to be a lot of shouts in that weather.’
‘It has been a force nine gale several miles out there for the past twenty-four hours. The last few teams have been bested.’
She shouldn’t say anything. She couldn’t give herself away. Tia opened her mouth.
‘Be safe out there,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t do anything...typically heroic, Zeke.’
The silence whooshed in on them, like an invisible flood, filling the space and sending them both reeling.
It could have been minutes before they spoke again. It felt like an age.
‘You make it sound like you actually care,’ he ground out.
‘I always cared,’ Tia muttered before she could stop herself. ‘You were the one who pushed me away, Zeke.’
‘Oh, trust me, Tia, it didn’t take much pushing.’
Whether it was the coldness of his tone, the injustice of what he was saying, or the fear jostling around inside over her precious son, Tia couldn’t be sure, but her temper flared suddenly.
‘Oh, no. That’s totally unfair. You were the one who said that if I amputated then I would be killing the only life you had ever known as a soldier. You were the one who, for six weeks, told me over and over that you couldn’t forgive me. And you were the one who, in that rehab centre, told me that you couldn’t bear to look at me and would never, never, forgive me.’
‘I did it to protect you,’ he roared before falling into abrupt silence.
Spinning brusquely, he strode to the couch. She got the sense it was as much to put space between them as anything else, and she was grateful for it. She could barely breathe, let alone think.
The moments ticked by. The silence turning black.
‘I did it to release you from the burden of having to be responsible for a cripple. All I’d ever wanted from being a kid was to be a soldier. A marine. I couldn’t even get myself out of bed without help.’
‘You didn’t do it to release me from any burden.’ Her heart ached to comfort him, but this was Zeke and she knew him too well. Comforting wouldn’t help. She needed to stay strong and meet his accusations head-on. ‘You did it because your pride wouldn’t let you accept help from me. You didn’t trust me enough to let me be there for you. That’s why you pushed me away, Zeke. No more, no less.’
‘You were my wife,’ he spat out. ‘Who else would I trust?’
Tia was determined to stand fast.
