Buch lesen: «The Army Doc's Baby Secret»

CHAPTER ONE

DR ANTONIA FARRINGDALE was adroit at smelling trouble.

She had first learned it at her father’s knee, watching the oft-churning grey expanse of the Atlantic Ocean from the salt-sprayed windows of Westlake lifeboat station, as her mother piloted a boat out for a rescue. Learning to read the signs for when the crew was in for an easy night, or the omens for when they could expect an arduous night of dangerous shouts.

She had honed it as a doctor, often knowing instinctively with her patients when she was hearing horses, and those rare occasions when she was hearing zebras.

And she had perfected it as a battlefield trauma doctor working from twelve-by-twelve tents of field hospitals on missions in whichever conflict-hardened country du jour she was in.

Yes, she could certainly smell trouble.

So why, she wondered as she peered uneasily into the hallway at Delburn Bay lifeboat station—a mere hour and a half further up the coast from Westlake, and therefore the closest she’d managed to get herself to going home in over a decade—did she smell it so unnervingly strongly, right at this instant?

Immobile yet alert, she stood in her doorway. Scarcely even daring to breathe as her eyes scanned for anything out of the ordinary.

But the sea was agreeably calm beyond the launch slipway, and the corridors were quiet, most of the crew being volunteers who had day jobs but who would be at the station within minutes if they were called to be. There was nothing there which should set her chest thumping the way that it was.

Unless a guilty conscience counted.

Shaking her head as if that would be sufficient to dislodge the censorious thought, Antonia ducked back into the medical supply room, which doubled as her consultation room and office whenever she was on site as the station’s new Medical Officer, telling herself it was more likely to be just her overactive imagination.

Telling herself that she had nothing to feel guilty about.

Telling herself...what? That she’d made the right choices—as impossible as they had been—five years ago?

It was true, but it didn’t help. It never really had. She still felt like a terrible person.

But then, wasn’t that why she was back here? To set the record straight.

Spinning around on the ball of her foot, Antonia strode determinedly back into her office and consultation room even as her mind skittered down the coast to Westlake, back to the past, to the man who had finally brought her back home now. Or, at least, that mere ninety minutes up the coast from home. A man to whom she owed the two biggest apologies of her entire life. Neither of which she had any idea how to even begin to make.

Which was why she’d taken a job at Delburn Bay’s lifeboat station, rather than back at Westlake. The distance provided her with a much-needed buffer to allow her to pick the words she was going to use when she finally plucked up the courage to drive down the coast and face...him.

Ezekiel Jackson.

As though she hadn’t already had five years to work out what to say. The drumming in her head intensified, causing her to pinch the bridge of her nose. Not that it helped.

‘You’re supposed to be working,’ Antonia muttered irritably into the silent room. ‘Not looking for ghosts.’

Her heeled boots clacked harshly as she strode back to her desk, and she pulled her lips into a grim line as she selected the next file from her pile. Technically she didn’t start officially for another month, but it was a voluntary position and they were desperate for someone to settle in. And it was better than being in her father’s small house, avoiding his concerned glances and all his unspoken questions, which nonetheless echoed loudly.

Gratefully she slid down into the uncomfortable swivel chair and began to read the notes. Work had always been her salvation. Unsurprising, then, that she was absorbed within minutes.

‘So it’s true.’

The rich, smouldering, all too familiar voice seemed to charge the room, as Antonia jerked her head up so fast that a crack and a stinging sensation ripped through her neck.

She wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t ready.

If a deep chasm had opened up beneath her feet and sent her hurtling down to the earth’s dense, super-hot core, it couldn’t have made her any more frantic.

Zeke.

Had the air been sucked out of her lungs? Her body? The very room itself? It certainly felt like it. She couldn’t breathe, let alone speak, and it was all she could do to keep her mouth clamped shut rather than open and close it like a fish caught out in one of the rock pools out on the sands.

How she managed to stand—to face him—she would never know. Yet suddenly she was on her feet, her fingers braced against the cold, flat wood of her desk to stop the dizziness from winning out. She certainly had no idea how she managed to respond to him.

‘True?’

Thank goodness for the open window, which let her suck in deep lungsful of sea air—its salty, tangy taste dancing obliviously on her tongue—as she tried to quell the wave of nausea that crested in her chest.

Damn it if Zeke didn’t look every last bit as commanding, and dangerous, and male, as she remembered. His hair was longer now. At least, longer than the close-to-the-scalp cut he’d sported as a Special Forces soldier back then. Enough that she might actually be able to feel it between her fingers.

If she wanted to. Which she didn’t. Of course she didn’t...because that would be pathetic.

Desperately, urgently, Antonia reminded herself of that last night, five years ago. He’d been telling her for months that he didn’t love her, that he’d never loved her, but that had been the night when she’d finally believed him. Because it hadn’t been the words that had convinced her, rather it had been that hard, disgusted look in his cold eyes as they’d bored into her without a trace of softness or love behind them.

Even now, at the mere memory, a pain shot through her heart as though it were folding in on itself.

And then she looked into Zeke’s face and suddenly her heart kicked out again, straightening itself out and pounding so loudly within her chest that she was afraid it could be heard.

He was a few years older, maybe, but that face was just as sharp, and masculine, and devastating as it had always been. Those cool blue eyes could still pierce through any soul, and that strong jawline, which she had traced countless times over the years, still housed a mouth that had been her undoing more times than she cared to remember.

Without warning, desire zipped through her, horrifying and thrilling all at the same time. His beaten-up leathers moulded to every broad, muscled inch of him, reminding her of a time when—as teenagers—they had raced the length and breadth of the country on that prized motorbike of his.

Suddenly, she felt like that adoring kid again.

Had she really been so naïve as to believe that the mere passage of time would mean she would no longer be attracted to the man? Had she really told herself that she would be immune?

She’d convinced herself of it, yet now the mere idea that she wouldn’t be affected by him was laughable.

Even his silence was dark. Edgy. Lasting only a beat but feeling like an eternity.

‘That you’re back.’

Another moment of silence. So thick and heavy that she almost imagined she could wear it as a cloak. Maybe one that could chase out the sudden chill that had pervaded her very bones.

Almost against her own volition, Tia let her eyes track lower. Her heart kicked up yet another gear as she fought to control the shallow breaths that jostled inside. Zeke had once been the epitome of a deadly, dangerous, ruinous barracuda.

Something she didn’t care to identify pooled low in her belly at the memory of the SBS man with a body that had always defied belief and was worthy of any Rodin or Polycleitus sculpture.

If she didn’t know better, she might have thought that nothing had changed. He looked as fit, as honed, as lethal, as ever. And her fingers practically itched to reach out and test it for herself.

Discreetly, she moved her arms behind her back and balled her fists into each other.

And then, finally, she let her gaze travel lower. Down the snug, black motorcycle leathers, which did little to disguise impossibly muscular thighs, and down...

She froze.

For a moment, the fluttering receded as a wave of nausea threatened to close over her head. She couldn’t tear her gaze away, couldn’t even breathe. Like a swimmer caught in a riptide, fighting to stay focussed and keep their head above the surface.

What had he been saying? Asking her?

Think. Think!

Slowly, so slowly, her brain kicked back into gear. Something about her being back...?

Her tongue took a moment to work loose again.

‘It’s true,’ she confirmed stiffly.

And perhaps needlessly. After all, it was self-evident, wasn’t it? Or maybe Zeke was simply giving her the opportunity to rethink her decision and get out of there. Out of Delburn Bay. Out of his corner of the country. Out of his life.

Just as she’d done the last time he’d commanded it.

And if it weren’t for Seth, then maybe she would have done just that.

‘Although, I’d hardly say I’m back.’ She licked her dry lips even as she silently berated herself for such an outward show of nervousness. ‘I’m far enough up the coast from Westlake.’

‘I think you can call that back—’ his voice was like a hot cocoa river running through her, and warming her, even as she tried to fight it ‘—given that it’s the closest you’ve been to coming home in around fifteen years.’

Coming home. It sounded so...easy, when dropped from Zeke’s lips, and suddenly the realisation terrified her. It meant that home wasn’t Westlake where she’d grown up, or Delburn Bay where her father had moved to. Home was where Seth was.

But it was also where Zeke was.

And that absolutely, positively, was not acceptable.

‘I disagree,’ she lied, aware that folding her arms across her chest was a defensive, negative gesture, yet wholly unable to stop herself.

‘No, you don’t. You might be here, but you desperately wanted to come all the way to Westlake. You just couldn’t bring yourself. It’s obvious. You were never very good at lying to me, Tia.’

God, she’d made a monumental mistake coming back here.

It was too soon. She wasn’t ready.

‘I’m not lying,’ she lied, desperation reverberating through every syllable.

Zeke’s mouth curled up at one corner, making it seem as if that were actually a bad thing. But she had to concede that he had a point. Which only made it all the more ironic that he’d never realised she’d told him the biggest lie of all.

Before she could answer, he moved into the room—or maybe prowled was more accurate—and she couldn’t drag her gaze away for even a second. Every bit the most virile, red-blooded, lethally powerful man she’d ever known. Something fluttered low in her belly, like a thousand butterflies all taking flight at once.

She couldn’t still want him, still ache for him, after all this time. Surely? It was ridiculous. Unconscionable. She couldn’t allow it.

She wouldn’t.

‘Then why Delburn Bay, Tia?’

Was she really ready to answer that?

Anyway, Tia was the naïve fifteen-year-old girl who had fallen for the handsome, charismatic seventeen-year-old boy the moment they’d volunteered together at Westlake lifeboat station a lifetime ago. Tia was the twenty-eight-year-old whose life had changed in a single instant and everything had been turned on its head.

She hadn’t been Tia for five years.

‘It’s Antonia now.’

Whether she’d intended it as a distraction or a feeble attempt to take control of the situation, she couldn’t be sure. Either way, it fell about as heavily as an anchor on a freight ship.

‘The truth, Tia,’ he pressed her, with deliberate emphasis.

The truth was something she wasn’t ready for. But, just like that, just because Zeke had spoken, she was Tia again. As though the last five years had never happened.

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘The lifeboat community is tight-knit. People talk. You should know that.’

She ignored the voice in the back of her head whispering that was precisely why she’d come to Delburn Bay. She’d banked on that same tight-knit community to relay the news to Zeke that she had returned.

Just...not so unbelievably quickly.

‘Did my father tell you I was here?’

The bark of laughter—if that was what it could be called—was less amused and more incredulous.

‘Your father?’

‘I’m staying with him. At least, until I find a place of my own.’

‘And here I was thinking you were as much persona non grata as I am. The man who warned you that I couldn’t love you, that I didn’t even know what love was, and that we’d never last. Did you tell him you were only too happy to leave, or does he think it was all me?’

She had no idea whether he intended to wound her with the offhand remarks, or not. Probably the former. Then again, she deserved it, even if not for the reason Zeke could have known about. Another surge of guilt coursed through her.

She hadn’t exactly been fair to Zeke when she’d reached out to her father—after several years of rebuffing his attempts at offering the proverbial olive branch to her—in order to make amends. Yet another complication of her own making that would, at some point, need resolving. But not today. Today there were more important concerns to address.

Such as, if it hadn’t been her father who had contacted him, then Zeke wouldn’t know about Seth. Right?

An image stole into her head and a wide smile leapt instantly to her lips. It was all she could do to stamp it out.

Her precious Seth.

The happy, funny, in-love-with-life four-year-old boy who really mattered in all this, and the one person she would give her life to protect.

Seth—the little boy who had deserved not to be born into the tumultuous aftermath of Zeke’s black ops mission gone so harrowingly wrong, and her own part in what had happened that night.

Seth, who deserved to know his father now that Zeke had finally managed to find some peace.

But not yet. Not like this. Not dropping it on Zeke like some kind of bombshell. She had one chance to get this right. Her son deserved for her to get it right. Hell, even Zeke deserved for her to get it right. She would not blurt it out now like some kind of weapon against him. Hadn’t she done them both enough harm already?

Her entire insides shook at the mere idea of it whilst his intense gaze, pinning her to the spot, seemed to confirm it.

* * *

Zeke stared at the ghost in front of him, not wanting to even blink in case she disappeared in that fleeting tenth of a second.

It was incredible.

How many times had he planned on tracking her down this past year? Now that he was finally on track. Now that he could be sure he wouldn’t be a burden for her. Now that he finally had something to offer her again.

How Herculean it had been to resist that temptation. After all that had happened between them, and all that he’d said to her, he knew he had no right just to walk back into her life. He couldn’t expect to pick back up where they’d left off.

But it hadn’t stopped him imagining that maybe, just maybe, there would have been no one else for her but him. The way that there had never been—never would be—anyone else for him but Tia. His Tia.

He had no right to any of that. He’d lost that right five years ago when he’d sent her away, and then, when that hadn’t worked, had said all those things to her in order to get her to leave him. Harsh, cruel words chosen for maximum wounding, for devastating effect. Words that made him blanch when he thought back to them, even now.

And yet a nonsensical part of him was still galled that she’d bought any of it. That she’d left.

Those five years felt like a lifetime ago, now. So much had changed. He had changed. He had healed, mentally and physically, and he had moved on with his life. But he’d never moved on from Tia. He’d carried her with him this whole time, like his private talisman, even her memory enough to galvanise him into action, to try to walk, on days when he might otherwise have curled up in a ball and imagined dying on his black ops mission that fateful night.

Just as two of his buddies had.

Every time he’d wondered why he was still here when they weren’t, whether he deserved to still be here when they weren’t, he’d thought of Tia, and known he had to try.

Which was why, when he’d finally turned his life around several years ago, he’d come back to Westlake, where they’d first met as kids. A foolish part of him hoping that somehow it would get back to her that he was here. A selfish part of him imagining that she might turn up, on whatever pretext she liked, just to see him.

He’d never really expected it to happen, and yet now here she was. Looking as glorious, as tempting, as Tia, as ever.

It was all he could do not to cross the space between them and haul her to him. To hold her and prove he wasn’t simply imagining it.

‘You look...well,’ she faltered and flushed, her eyes skimming straight down his legs. ‘Better than well.’

Had he really been so simple-minded to think she would look at him again without seeing...that?

He wasn’t prepared for the familiar pain that shattered through him. A pain he’d thought he had finally beaten into submission eighteen months ago, but which eighteen minutes in this one woman’s company seemed to have resurrected with brutal efficiency.

It took all he had not to reach down the leg of his leather biker gear and feel for the lower limb that was no longer there.

That hadn’t been there since Tia had cut it off five years and two months ago.

‘Are you saying that to make me feel better?’ he growled. ‘Or you?’

‘Zeke... I’m sorry,’ she choked out, taking a few stumbling steps towards him. ‘You have no idea how sorry.’

‘Stop.’ His hand flew up, halting both her advice and her words. And his own voice was harsh, razor-sharp even to his own ears. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

Not least because she wasn’t the one who should be doing any apologising. She shouldn’t be sorry for what had happened on that makeshift operating table; she’d carried out the only option left to her. And in doing so, she had saved his life.

The fact that he’d accused her of ruining it meant that any apologies were his to make. He was the one who had pushed her away. She hadn’t simply walked out on him, or cast him off faster than a Special Forces wannabe dropped his fifty-pound rucksack after his first fifteen-mile tab. He’d pushed her away. Hard. And without any show of mercy.

His only consolation had been the fact that it was the only way he could save her from feeling guilty or responsible every time she looked at him. The only way he could release her from being burdened with him.

But that had been five years ago, and a lot had changed since then. He had changed. How many times had he imagined finding her? Explaining himself to her? But not here, not like this. He needed to do it properly. To show her how he’d turned his life around.

This was the chance he’d been waiting for to get her back. And he wasn’t about to blow it.

If only he could work his tongue loose to say a damned word.

‘I heard you’ve been awarded a medal for bravery,’ Tia blurted out, clearly unable to stand the silence any longer. ‘For saving three crewmen from a sinking ship in heavy seas.’

‘I was doing my job.’ He could feel himself scowling even as he tried to stop it.

‘The newspapers don’t seem to think so,’ she babbled on but, irrationally, he was more fascinated by the way her pulse was leaping erratically at her throat. ‘They’re calling you a hero.’

He’d hated the publicity for that. The hero nonsense. The public had lauded him for that lifeboat rescue, yet all he could think was that they didn’t even know the names of the buddies he’d served with, who had died that night five years ago trying to protect their freedom.

‘I think they’re right,’ she concluded almost shyly, giving him an unexpected flashback to the day his chip-on-the-shoulder seventeen-year-old self had first met the blushing fifteen-year-old he’d had no idea would change his life so dramatically.

He clenched his fists behind his back and fought the unnerving impulse to stride across the room and close that gap between them.

And then what...kiss her? It made no sense. A confusion of questions crowded his brain, screaming for his attention. He fought against the ear-splitting ringing in his head. Strident. Throbbing.

What had he been thinking, coming here? Leaping on his motorbike and hurtling up the stretch of coast from Westlake to Delburn Bay the moment he’d heard she was here?

Like a lovesick teenager, worshipping at her altar. All these...emotions, jostling and tumbling inside him. And he had no idea what to do with them all. But then, he always had lost his head when it came to Tia, ever since he’d given into temptation and kissed her on her sixteenth birthday.

Even now he could still remember every detail as they’d stood on the beach, the moonlight glistening off the inky water whilst her party had been in full flow in the beach house a few hundred metres away. A party that he hadn’t been invited to because, let’s face it, no one nice ever invited his family anywhere, and who could blame them for not wanting any one of four boys dragged up by an alcoholic, aggressive, abusive father?

But Tia had been different.

She’d looked at him, rather than down on him. She’d told him he was nothing like them, that he was one of the best lifeguards she’d ever seen. And he’d basked in the novelty of her admiration.

The night of her birthday she’d seen him on the beach, pretending not to stare in at everyone else having fun, and she’d come to demand her birthday gift from him. When he’d told her he didn’t have one, she’d simply shrugged her shoulders and told him, Of course you do.

And then she’d stepped forward, pressing the entire length of her body against his, and she’d lifted her head and kissed him. In that instant she’d found a way past all his armour. Past every single one of the barriers that he’d been erecting for as long as he could remember.

He’d vowed, right there and then, to never let her go. And he wouldn’t have...if it hadn’t been for that night.

And now she was back. But was she here because she knew he was in Westlake, or had she just moved to be closer to her father?

Or someone else?

The unwanted thought slid through him. What if Tia had moved on? It made him answer more curtly than he had intended.

‘I don’t give a damn what the newspapers say.’

She licked her lips.

‘No... I...don’t suppose you do. You never did care what anyone thought.’

He had cared what she thought. His Tia. He cared that she was here. And he wanted her back in his life.

But this wasn’t how he’d intended to do it. Any of it. He’d imagined that if Tia ever returned to his life, he would apologise to her. He would take her to the house he’d built on the plot of land by the Westlake lighthouse—just as their teenage selves had imagined one day doing together—and he would find a way to sit her down and explain what had happened five years ago. To finally find a way to open up to her.

Maybe even to win her back. In time. If he took things slowly enough.

Instead, he’d heard she was here and he’d simply reacted, jumping on his bike and racing up here. He had no idea what to say, or how to start. He could hardly expect her to just jump on the back of his bike, as she’d used to, and let him take her back to Westlake.

He was handling this all wrong. But far from the smooth reunion of his fantasies, this reunion was unravelling faster than a ball of para cord dropped down a knife-edge mountainside.

A fist of anger thrust its way back to the forefront of his brain. At himself more than at Tia. Yet still Zeke grabbed at it; he welcomed it. He could deal with that emotion far better than this unfamiliar blind panic that threatened to engulf him.

‘Anyway,’ she was still prattling on unhappily, ‘it was impressive, what you did that night. You—’

‘Why are you really here, Tia?’

He interrupted her abruptly, his question deliberately curt and jagged, zipping through the air like the verbal equivalent of a Japanese throwing star. He needed to understand what had brought her back; only then could he formulate his best tactical approach.