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‘You have a responsibility to yourself as well. And those who love you.’
‘Now you really do sound like Enrico.’
She could actually feel the air around her turning frosty. Taut.
‘Is that so?’
His tone was silky, and quiet. But she knew she didn’t mistake the edge to it. And still she kept pushing the invisible boundaries.
‘He didn’t like me putting myself in danger, either. He always wanted me to give up the sanctuary part of my life and focus on working full-time from the research lab. As if the lab isn’t the bit of my job that I endure until I can get back to the forest and escape the city.’
‘Sounds very much as though he loved you,’ he gritted out, scowling at her for so long that Flávia wondered if time had stood still.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she offered at length. ‘At the time I didn’t think so. I thought that if he really loved me, then he could never have asked me to choose.’
‘And now you realised he cared and you regret your decision,’ he scorned.
‘No.’ She pulled her lips together ruefully. And the way Jake’s eyes followed the movement heated up her whole body. ‘I guess the truth is that I just didn’t love him back. At least not enough to want to give up my life for him.’
Something flickered across those morpho-blue pools. Too fast for her to follow.
‘Maybe you just haven’t met the right person yet,’ he suggested.
‘Is that an offer?’ The wry question slipped off her lips before she could bite it back.
‘That night was a one-off,’ he answered hastily. ‘I have Brady. My career is in the UK...’
‘Relax.’ She forced a laugh, and prayed it didn’t sound as hollow to Jake’s ears. ‘I know you’re not in the market for a relationship.’
‘Evidently, neither are you.’
He paused, as though waiting to hear her response.
‘No,’ she answered, quelling the voice inside which taunted otherwise. Assuring herself that the voice was wrong.
‘I love my job. It’s who I am. Surely, if someone loved me enough, he wouldn’t ask me to change that?’
Jake didn’t answer, though she wanted him to. More than she would have cared to admit.
She could imagine he was thinking about Brady, and how much the boy had already lost. And then, though she tried to pretend otherwise, she tried to imagine how he might feel if she and Jake were together and something happened to her.
And suddenly, she wondered if he’d lost more than he’d realised when Helen had died. She knew the rumours. She knew he’d always had a reputation for avoiding relationships, but now she’d gleaned the little she had about his parents, she couldn’t help wondering if it had been a means of self-defence rather than anything else.
And had his sister’s death affected him more than even he had realised?
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he murmured, as if feeling he ought to put an end to the conversation, but was unable to. ‘But you’re working on a venom-based therapy that could stop cancer cells from metastasising. That’s incredible, Flávia. And you can still have that. You can still save all those lives. But do you have to be the one at the sanctuary risking your life to do it?’
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘Why?’
‘Because, for me, it isn’t just about the research to save human lives, Jake. It’s about the protected habitats we’re creating to save the snakes. It’s about education for people not to club them to death—which you can understand when they know the snake could kill their kid within hours.’
Neither of them looked at each other, both of them appearing equally distracted by the to-ing and fro-ing of the barbecue guests. She wondered if his was as much of an act as hers.
‘I need those snakes, Jake. I need to see them grow older, bigger, healthier, instead of seeing their numbers dwindle year on year. It’s the only tangible reward I receive. I don’t get to see the results in a patient, right there in front of me, telling me how I’ve changed their life.’
‘But they’re out there. More and more as each trial is successful.’
