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But this wasn’t how he’d intended to do it. Any of it. He’d imagined that if Tia ever returned to his life, he would apologise to her. He would take her to the house he’d built on the plot of land by the Westlake lighthouse—just as their teenage selves had imagined one day doing together—and he would find a way to sit her down and explain what had happened five years ago. To finally find a way to open up to her.
Maybe even to win her back. In time. If he took things slowly enough.
Instead, he’d heard she was here and he’d simply reacted, jumping on his bike and racing up here. He had no idea what to say, or how to start. He could hardly expect her to just jump on the back of his bike, as she’d used to, and let him take her back to Westlake.
He was handling this all wrong. But far from the smooth reunion of his fantasies, this reunion was unravelling faster than a ball of para cord dropped down a knife-edge mountainside.
A fist of anger thrust its way back to the forefront of his brain. At himself more than at Tia. Yet still Zeke grabbed at it; he welcomed it. He could deal with that emotion far better than this unfamiliar blind panic that threatened to engulf him.
‘Anyway,’ she was still prattling on unhappily, ‘it was impressive, what you did that night. You—’
‘Why are you really here, Tia?’
He interrupted her abruptly, his question deliberately curt and jagged, zipping through the air like the verbal equivalent of a Japanese throwing star. He needed to understand what had brought her back; only then could he formulate his best tactical approach.
She blinked and fell silent for a moment.
‘My job,’ she offered shakily.
‘So I heard. Apparently, you’re back here as a medical officer for this lifeboat station. What about your career as an army doctor? Does that not appeal to you any longer?’
‘I left the army. I’m starting as a locum at the nearby hospital next month, about the same time I officially start volunteering here. I came back because...well, because... I had to.’
She lifted her shoulders helplessly, but the action also caused her chest to rise and fall, the luscious curve of breasts with which he had once been so intimately acquainted snagged his gaze and, for a long moment, he couldn’t drag his gaze away.
The hazy cloud of lust was infiltrating him all over. Slipping past his defences as though they were made of mere gauze.
‘So you aren’t an army doctor any longer. You quit?’
‘It’s...complicated.’
‘That’s pathetic.’ He snorted, hating the way she was guarded with him even as he understood exactly why she was. ‘Even you can do better than that, Tia.’
She blinked as though she wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Then, abruptly, she straightened her back and tilted her chin into the air. So Tia-like.
‘I’m back because I love lifeboats. You seem to forget that I was volunteering down here ever since I was a young teenager. Long before your seventeen-year-old backside came bouncing into town to become a beach lifeguard. Becoming a volunteer medical officer is only following in my father’s footsteps. It’s how he met my mother—’
She stopped abruptly and he had no idea how he resisted the impulse to go to her.
He knew only too well how Tia’s parents had met. He hadn’t been around at that time but it was well documented in the lifeboat community, and he’d heard the story often enough. Though never from Tia herself.
Her father had been a medical officer, her mother a coxswain. For twenty years they had volunteered alongside each other, right up until the fateful night when Celia Farringdale had been called out to a shout in heavy seas.
A trawler had lost engines several miles out. Celia’s crew had attended, assisting the rescue helicopter to winch to safety all eight men from the stricken vessel, three of whom had been seriously injured. The helicopter had made three trips over several hours, with the lifeboat waiting, protecting, in case they had needed to abandon ship. Just as the last man had been pulled aboard the heli and it had turned for shore, the sea had swelled and crashed causing the lifeboat to roll unpredictably—just as the trawler had been lifted out of the water only to slam down onto the lifeboat’s bow. Instantaneous and fatal. None of the lifeboat crew had survived.
Tia had been fourteen. The year before he’d met her for the first time. A kid who had tried so hard to be strong, and untouched by her past, and invincible.
In many ways seeing her had been like holding a mirror up to his own soul.
Was that why now, with emotions playing across her features however much she tried to fight them, Zeke felt like a heel? Enough to make his determination to take things slowly wane for a moment. Enough to let an altogether more welcome sensation invade his body.
Desire.
When refusing to acknowledge it didn’t work, he imagined crushing it under the unforgiving sole of his boots.
‘I know you have a tie to this place. Your family was part of this community since before you or I were even born,’ he offered by way of apology.
She actually gritted her teeth at him.
