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Kat could remember but hadn’t understood at the time the glances the policewomen had exchanged when she’d given her name and address. Though pretty gentrified now, at that time it was not a nice area.
‘She had left a note. I have it. I had access to my files after I decided to look for her,’ she explained. The decision had not been made lightly. She’d known there were risks, most importantly the risk of being rejected all over again. ‘I thought she might have another family and I might be a reminder of a past she wanted to forget.’
‘You went ahead anyway.’ They had both retraced their pasts, but with very different aims. He had wanted closure and, if he was honest, to rub his success in their faces, show them what he had achieved despite them. And she, as far as he could tell, had simply wanted to reconnect, to satisfy her craving for family.
She had forgiven, he never would. This would always set them apart.
She gave a little shrug. ‘It took longer than I thought. She seemed to have dropped off the grid after she...left. It never even occurred to me that she might be...not alive.’
He watched as she lowered her eyes so he couldn’t see the tears and waited as she speared a prawn onto her fork and slowly chewed it, cursing himself for asking for an answer that he knew was going to make him feel emotions that had no purpose, and yet he was being controlled by something stronger than logic—a primal need to protect.
He might have been able to fight his reaction to her beauty, but when that beauty came attached to a vulnerability not masked by her air of independent fighting spirit, it awoke something in him that he had never felt before. He didn’t want to feel it.
‘The note she left said...’ Kat stared at her plate as she began to recite, ‘“He made me choose, and Katina is a good girl, and I’m no good for her anyway. PS: She’s allergic to nuts.”’ Her flat delivery did not disguise the fact that reciting the words hurt her.
The fingers around his heart tightened as she lifted her head and said defiantly, ‘She wanted me to be safe.’
If she ever had a child, Kat thought, he or she would know they were safe. She would never leave them, not for a man, not for anything.
Zach bit back the retort on his tongue. Maybe she needed to think that her mother had cared about her. What did he know? Maybe the woman had. Why was he worrying one way or the other? he asked himself, resenting how she had intruded into the emotional isolation. Yet when he looked at her, he couldn’t be angry. He felt empathy; like a limb deprived of blood flow, the reawakening of this dormant emotion was painful.
‘And were you?’
Deliberately misunderstanding him, she grinned and patted a pocket. ‘I always carry my EpiPen just in case.’ She speared another prawn. ‘This is delicious.’
‘I’ll let the kitchens know about the nut allergy.’
‘Don’t worry, if in doubt I don’t eat it. The allergy is not as serious as some. I know someone who went into anaphylactic shock because she kissed her boyfriend and he’d just eaten a curry with nuts in.’
‘So your boyfriends have to swear off nuts?’
The way he was looking at her mouth made the heat climb into her cheeks, and other places. She shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘I’m not that bad.’ She pushed aside her plate and took a sip of the champagne. It seemed a good time to change the subject. ‘So it sounds like Selene has known you for a long time.’
He arched a satiric brow. ‘You mean she doesn’t treat me with sufficient deference.’
The fact that he could mock himself was a pleasant surprise.
‘I was quite young when I first visited the island.’
It frequently seemed to him that Selene still saw him as the young truculent teen with a massive chip on his shoulder and on more than one occasion the family silver in his pockets. His convalescence had been eventful for the new housekeeper, as Selene had been back then.
Kat, trying to imagine what young Zach had looked like, wondered if Selene had some photos of him too. She laid her napkin down on her side plate and decided against another sip of the fizz. The first had gone to her head after the long day. Her appetite after the first few bites had vanished too. She lifted a hand to hide a yawn.
‘You’re tired.’ Of course she was—how could she not be after the day she’d had? He felt the painful twisting sensation in his chest as he watched her stifle another yawn, realising she’d been running on adrenaline all evening.
She shook her head. ‘No, not really.’
‘You are,’ he said, laying down his napkin. ‘You need your rest. Tomorrow is another long day. We’ll go over the guest list in the morning.’ The morning made him think of the night that preceded it. Waking up together, her head on his chest, their limbs tangled. Tangled—the word jolted him free of the images flickering through his head.
He did not do tangled—emotionally or in any other way. He liked clean-cut defined lines, minus entanglements, which were far more likely to occur if a man spent the entire night in a woman’s bed. Any woman, let alone the granddaughter of his mentor!
Her brows twitched. ‘Guest list?’
‘I’ve compiled a who’s who list of the guests for tomorrow along with a bio.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Is there an exam...?’
Her comment wrenched a bark of deep laughter from his throat. Then, as their eyes connected, dark on amber, the amusement faded first from his, and then hers.
