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Alex felt frustration surge through his system. ‘You knew I was keen to talk to you.’
Attack. Attack.‘I didn’t want to talk toyou .’
‘Not even after the other night?’ Hadn’t they shared something special? Something meaningful? It hadn’t just been sex. They both knew it.
Attack. Attack.‘You think because I slept with you I owe you my life story?’
Alex’s jaw clenched. She made it sound cheap. ‘I told you mine.’ He had laid himself bare in a way that he hadn’t in years. And to a woman too. He didn’t do that. He wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t felt some connection with her. A level of trust that he’d never experienced with another woman. Not even Sonya.
Isobella couldn’t refute his words. His candour had surprised her. Humbled her, even. She’d known it hadn’t been easy for him to open up to her that way. ‘This isn’t a competition.’
He ignored her. ‘Was that what the nightmare was about? Do you have bad dreams about the day it happened to you?’ He remembered how frightened she’d been, how she had trembled against him as fragile as a newborn kitten.
‘I’m fine,’ she dismissed evasively.
One thing he knew for sure—she wasn’t fine. And he knew that somewhere deep in her heart of hearts she must know it too. She was hiding herself away. Shying away from life. Why else was she pushinghim away so hard? She’d let him catch a glimpse of the woman she really was. Passionate and sexy and unguarded. He couldn’t bear to think of her going back to being a lab recluse.
‘You’re not fine. You’re a mess. Hiding your body and your beauty in baggy clothes and ugly glasses, shutting yourself away in the secluded environment of a lab.’
‘Hey, I’ll deal with my issues my way.’
‘By avoiding them?’ he asked incredulously.
No one had ever called her on the way she had coped. Not even her sister. Isobella wasn’t about to hear it from someone who up until a week ago had been a long-distance crush, a sexy voice down the telephone line. ‘I don’t think people who live in glass houses should throw stones,’ she said acidly. ‘At least I’m hurting no one but myself. You? You’re branding the entire female sex as untrustworthy because one woman screwed you over.’
She made a fair point. ‘Maybe not any more. What happened between us the other night…and this…’ he gestured to her stomach ‘…it changes everything. Maybe I want more now.’
Isobella couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Suddenly his faith in women had been restored because he’d slept with an employee and found a long-lost link to some valuable data? Or was it simpler than that?
‘Why?’ she demanded.
Because her scars had shown him how vulnerable she really was and he just couldn’t bear it. She worked her butt off trying to prove her competence, prove her detachment, when underneath it all she was flesh and blood. A real woman. As susceptible to destiny and life’s rocky road as everyone else.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ He didn’t know. He just knew he didn’t want to go to back to Melbourne and never see her again. ‘I can’t explain…The thought of what you’ve been through…the pain and the fear…I feel like I need to…want to look after…protect…’
Isobella couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Alex was standing before her, saying words she doubted he’d ever said to a woman. She let herself wallow in a brief fantasy that it was actually something other than a by-product of disbelief and misplaced macho paternalism.
‘Why? Because you pity me? What’s wrong? You can’t catch-kiss-and-throw-back poor maimed Isobella?’ she said scornfully. ‘Well, let me tell you, Alexander Zaphirides, I was doing just fine before you came along, and I’ll do just fine when you leave. I don’t need your charity. I liked my life. I knew what I was doing. All you’ve done is mess it up.’
‘Right then, let’s get you folks to Temora,’ Mike interrupted, his head and then the rest of his body appearing from the cabin.
He handed them each a large beach towel, obviously still too preoccupied with Sam’s near-death episode to pay any heed to the knife-edge tension on deck. ‘Theresa thought you might need to dry off.’
Alex could have strangled Mike for choosing that particular moment to come back, and he watched Isobella withdraw, wrapping the thick towel around her, cloaking herself from his questions, shielding herself from the world again. He hadn’t meant to insult her by implying that she couldn’t fend for herself. But something was happening inside him. Something was twisting in his gut. And it was telling him she wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known.
