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Not running away this time.
‘It is so,’ she confirmed at length. ‘Zeke, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.’
If she’d kicked him in the guts she didn’t think he could look more shocked.
‘You have nothing, nothing, to be sorry about,’ he ground out.
God, if only that were true.
Where did she even start? Her mind spun as she hurried through the lifeboat station and back to her soon-to-be office, needing just a moment alone to compose herself.
As if she hadn’t had five years.
As if meeting Zeke, and telling the truth, hadn’t been one of the main reasons she’d come so close to home. To finally tell him about her son—their son—because it was the right thing to do.
However terrified she might be.
And then they were back in her office, the door closed, and the rest of the world shut out. Tia crossed to the desk, not turning around until she was on the other side of it, using it like some kind of defensive barrier, not that Zeke appeared to have any intention of coming any nearer to her anyway.
They met each other’s gaze for a few moments—maybe an eternity—neither of them wanting to be the first to break the silence.
But one of them was going to have to, and, after everything, Tia knew it had to be her. She owed him that much.
‘You’ve changed,’ she managed.
‘You already said that.’ He scowled. ‘I believe your words were that I look better than well.’
‘Right,’ she muttered, shaking her head lightly, almost imperceptibly. But he did look well. And changed. Beyond all recognition.
Oh, not in the physical way, of course. Now that the initial shock of their first encounter was behind her, that much was evident. But in terms of the broken man he’d been when she’d last seen and spoken to him. The bleak, black pit he had been in back then. The pit into which—a part of her had never been able to shake the feeling—she’d helped to push him.
Tia’s heart pounded so hard in her chest that she was half surprised it didn’t batter its way out. Because the truth was that she didn’t know Zeke any better than she had as a naïve, adoring kid. This reunion was so much more unpleasant than anything she had feared.
And with what she was about to tell him, it was about to get that much worse.
* * *
The storm that raged through Zeke was so much more powerful than that force ten gale that had been blowing all day at sea, so destructive that it threatened to rip him apart. To tear down every last piece of his once broken self that it had taken almost half a decade to put back together.
This wasn’t anything like he’d expected today to go.
Meeting Tia again had completely, unexpectedly, unbalanced him. For the last three years he’d been slowly starting to feel more human again. More real. Yet one conversation with Tia and she’d seen through him in an instant.
Without a word she seemed to call him out for being the sham that he was.
He could feel the ground rolling beneath him like the treacherous, shifting sands that lay further out from the bay. Something else roiled inside him. Hope? Uncertainty? Both?
Without warning, the burning, twisting, phantom limb pain that hadn’t troubled him for years now threatened to rear itself again. It took everything he had not to reach his hand down and touch his leg.
Where his past met his present. Innocence and reality. Destructible human flesh and the bionics of the future.
He truly was a million-dollar man these days
. In more ways than one. A man with whom plenty of women were only too eager to be. But not a single one of them could ever have hoped to come close to the incomparable Antonia Farringdale.
Which was why he’d never bothered with anyone else. Not once.
It was why he was determined to win her back. But he couldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she had that kind of advantage over him. He wouldn’t.
