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Each sentence was like a lash, whipping her with its polite evenness. Wholly unemotional.
‘I can be a medical advisor somewhere else. Coming back here was...a bad idea.’
‘Coming back here was brave,’ he corrected.
‘No, it was foolish.’
And desperate, not that she was about to add that last bit. Instead, she wondered if the silence that once again descended were a black cloak, would she be able to lose herself for good?
Instead, Tia forced herself to turn around. She wasn’t prepared for the way her heart slammed against her chest wall.
His voice might be inscrutable, collected, but his appearance was anything but.
Dark shadows ringed eyes that didn’t look as though they’d slept in days whilst an even darker shadow veiled his jaw; making it seem even more square, even more male, than ever. Irrationally, she ached to reach out and touch it, to let it graze her soft skin as though the abrasion could make her feel something, anything, after a month of feeling numb.
She had no idea how she pulled herself together.
‘If it wasn’t foolish, then tell me what it was, Zeke.’ She was proud of the way her voice didn’t crack and completely betray her. ‘What are you doing back here? I thought you were going for three months, not one. Or is this a couple of days’ break to check on your business?’
Without warning, he raked his hand through his hair. It was a gesture so unsure, so unfamiliar, so wholly un-Zeke-like that it made her breath catch in her throat.
‘I love you.’
‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘Just not enough.’
‘Enough that I’m not going back.’
It was so simple, so sure, so unexpected, that she felt as though she must be swaying, right there where she stood. And how she stayed upright defied belief. She had to caution her fickle heart.
‘This time. But what about next time, or the one after that?’
‘Enough that I will never leave you—or Seth—again. I will never go back into a conflict zone.’
The words tossed into the air, like the spray from the sea as it crashed wave after wave down on the shoreline outside the window, beyond where Zeke stood. And Tia found she was staring at it as though she were reading the words in the surf rather than hearing them coming from his mouth itself.
It was surreal. And perfect. And almost too much to hope for.
‘I want to believe you,’ she muttered softly, ‘so much.’
‘You should.’
Tia hesitated. She felt raw, scraped through. Emotionally wrung out like an exhausted swimmer caught in a riptide and barely able to keep their head above water whilst they prayed for help to arrive.
‘Why?’ she whispered at last.
‘Because you were right, I was pushing myself, trying to prove myself to a ghost of a man to whom I should never have even given a second thought. It gave me a battle to distract myself. Without it, I might have just given up.’
She couldn’t imagine Zeke, so ruthless, so strong, ever giving up on anything.
Except her.
And now he was telling her that he hadn’t even done that.
‘What changed?’
‘You. Telling me that I didn’t need all of that to feel alive. Showing me that I had you. And Seth. A family.’
‘I told you that a month ago. You left anyway.’
