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‘Too late.’ His lips nipped hers with sly butterfly kisses.
She braced trembling elbows, shoved harder. ‘No, it’s not.’
He dragged out a tortured breath. ‘OK, OK. You’re right.’ His laboured breathing echoed in her sternum as he searched her face, his eyes glassy with lust. ‘Bloody hell, I can’t believe it.’
She clenched her fingers, taking fistfuls of wet T-shirt—barely resisting the urge to pull him in for another round. ‘What can’t you believe?’
That the heat’s still there after all this time? That we’re making out like a couple of horny teenagers, soaking wet on a riverbank in the middle of Nowheresville, North Carolina?
She needed specifics, because right now there were too many unbelievables to pick just one.
He groaned. ‘That I’m supposed to be a grown-up, but right now I’d give my left nut to be able to fuck you again with no repercussions.’
The hot, hazy fog of nostalgia froze as if she’d just done the ice bucket challenge at the North Pole.
‘Get off me.’ She slammed her palms against his chest. ‘You prick.’
He climbed off her and she scrambled up. She was soaked and exhausted. She didn’t have a spot of make-up on. Her chin felt tender where she’d bumped it on the hull, and her lips and jaw stung from the ferocity of his kiss—but the anger was flowing through her like molten magma, ready to incinerate everything in its path.
‘No repercussions? No fucking repercussions? Excuse me, but what repercussions did you ever suffer from? I’m the one who ended up having to bring up our child on my own because you got me pregnant at eighteen.’
He got slowly to his feet, looking impossibly sexy even with his shorts covered in sand and wet to the waist, his T-shirt ripped at the neck—the rat. ‘I wasn’t talking about getting you pregnant again.’
‘Then what were you talking about? What repercussions?’ The word cracked into the air, crass and irrational and selfish.
How dare he talk about repercussions when he’d sailed off to a new life in Paris without having to suffer a single one.
‘I’m sorry, Halle, OK? I’m sorry.’ He tried to take her arm, but she yanked it out of his grasp, the tears stinging her eyes making her even madder.
You’re over him. Remember.
But she knew however much she tried to tell herself that, it wasn’t true. Could never be true, until she knew the truth.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. As if repetition would make it right. ‘I’m sorry I left without a word. I’m sorry you had to survive in that stinking crap hole without me. That I ran out on you and Lizzie. And I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you that a long time ago. And what I’m sorry for most of all is that you still hate me because of it.’
‘I don’t hate you.’ I wish I did. ‘And I don’t want a bloody apology. What I want—and what I think you owe me—is an explanation.’
He dropped his chin, perched his hands on his hips, and she could almost hear his mind working, trying to find a way to dodge and evade and escape the request again.
‘What’s the matter, Luke? Can’t you admit it, even now? That the reason you left us was because you didn’t want me to have Lizzie?’
She’d always known it. And the reality of that still tortured her.
‘You dragged me all the way out here, to the middle of bloody nowhere to talk about her, and put us both in this pressure-cooker situation, and yet you still can’t face the truth, can you?’
She wanted to hear him say it. To own up to it.
He’d bonded with Lizzie, had been unable to resist his baby daughter once she was born, but there had always been that unspoken truth between them. That she hadn’t given him a choice.
‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated. I told you, it wasn’t to do with you or Lizzie. It was me. It was something I had to deal with that you couldn’t be a part of.’
‘Bullshit, Luke.’ Not that again. ‘Don’t talk in bloody platitudes and don’t patronise me. I’m thirty-six years old. I’ve been a single mother for sixteen years. I’ve weathered destitution, your desertion, that prick Claudio deciding he didn’t fancy being a dad, Lizzie’s epic sulks, Aldo’s anger management issues, God knows how many hours of family therapy feeling like a total failure. I’ve iced about a billion cupcakes, finger-mixed pastry until my hands cramped and built a career while juggling two menial jobs. And I’ve even managed to survive horse riding, hiking, near death in a kayak and eight never-ending days stuck in a cabin with the only man to give me a multiple orgasm sleeping upstairs after a year-long dry spell and forgetting to pack my bloody vibrator.’
His head shot up, the muscles in his jaw twitching as the flash of lust leaped towards her. ‘You’re not putting that on me. I’m not the one who initiated that bloody kiss at the waterfall. And I’m also not the one who put a stop to what could have been a perfectly good way to let off steam a minute ago.’
‘Oh, grow up, Luke. We’re not becoming bonk buddies when we still have enough baggage to fill the Millennium Dome.’
‘Why not? It’s just sex, for Chrissake.’
