The thud of Emily’s car door closing snapped him out of his useless musings and he followed her to the front door.
‘They here!’ shrieked one little voice, and the mayhem that announcement caused was instantaneous.
He was aware that Emily wisely stood aside while he allowed himself to be besieged by all those eager little recuperating bodies, carefully staging his spectacular fall so that none of the children was bumped or jostled.
As if they would care! All they were interested in was seeing how many of them could sit on his chest or any other part of his anatomy they could pin down while he pretended to struggle mightily.
And all the time he was overwhelmingly aware that Emily was watching everything that was going on.
What was she thinking?
Was her attention nothing more than concern that he might cause a setback in one of the children’s recovery? Was she dismayed that he could so easily abandon the proper gravitas of his position?
A quick glance in her direction between the flailing limbs told him that this, at least, wasn’t true, not if the wistful smile was any indication. She looked almost as if she would like to join in the mêlée, or…or what?
Suddenly he wasn’t quite so sure that he’d been making the right decisions in his life recently, and it was all the fault of this beautiful woman.
Oh, he knew that there could never be anything sexual between them, but what if she could accept…?
No! It wouldn’t be fair to ask her to condemn herself to a life without bearing children. She would be so good at loving them and taking care of them. And he already knew, from meeting her grandmother, that Emily wasn’t the sort of woman to be satisfied with anything less than the dreams she’d set her heart on.
That meant that offering her nothing more than friendship would be…
‘Impossible!’ he declared aloud, and startled the giggling children into wary silence.
‘You are all impossible,’ he said, this time with what he hoped was a wolfish grin as he pretended to take bites out of each of them. ‘And now it is time for you to get ready for bed.’
‘Not bed. Story first!’ declared an emphatic little voice, and this time his grin was genuine.
‘OK, Leela. Story it is,’ he conceded when they all joined in the demand, and sighed with relief when the last little body crawled off him.
‘Are you all right?’ That could only be Emily’s voice, filled with concern, as was the hand that she offered to help him lever himself to his feet. It was such a slender, soft little hand but already showing the skill that would make her a superb surgeon…and with enough hidden strength to counteract the weight of a full-grown man.
‘I am all right,’ he confirmed, his voice sharper than it should have been as he tried to ignore the urge to hang onto that brief connection.
‘I was only concerned that the children might have hurt you,’ she explained quietly, and he realised that even though she clearly thought he was rebuffing her concern, she was keeping her voice below the level of volume of the children’s excited chatter. ‘The children are getting stronger and fitter—and putting on weight and muscle with all the physiotherapy and special food they’re getting—and they might not realise that they were—’
‘It is all right Emily,’ he soothed, and allowed himself a brief touch of her hand. ‘I understand what you are saying, but I was not hurt. Rather, it is I who worry that I might hurt them.’
Her smile made his heart kick hard in his chest. ‘You would never hurt a child,’ she declared confidently. ‘In fact, I’ve never met a man who would make a more perfect father. Reza thinks you should have a whole houseful of children of your own.’
Her praise was like a kick to another portion of his anatomy and all the more painful for the knowledge that it wasn’t true…could never be true.
‘Not so,’ he said gruffly, the words having to be forced from his throat with the realisation that it was time for an overdue conversation.
The situation had never arisen before because he’d never allowed any of his other colleagues to get past their professional relationship, but there had been something different about Emily right from the first time he’d set eyes on her.
And just now there had been a light in her eyes and a lightening in her voice that had told him she wasn’t any more immune to it than he was, but it couldn’t go on, couldn’t go any further, not when there was no future in it for either of them.
‘I need to speak to you,’ he said, and only realised how grim he’d sounded when he saw the worried way her eyes widened, their soothing green darkening with concern.
‘Of course,’ she said, her voice calm in spite of the fact that he knew from the frantic pounding at her slender throat that her pulse rate had just doubled. ‘When? In the morning at the hospital?’
That would be the more professional choice. It would help him to put a necessary distance between them, but the morning was far too many sleepless hours away. Perhaps, once he’d told her the whole dreadful story, she would stop haunting his dreams.
‘No. Tonight,’ he decided, ‘after the children have had their story.’
He silently cursed his own cowardice, but he wanted to have one last happy memory to counteract the terrible emptiness that would be left once he’d pushed her completely out of his life.
It would be better for both of them if he could dismiss her from the unit, too, but that was impossible. Not only did he need her growing skill to achieve what he wanted for their little charges, but he wouldn’t do something so destructive to her career. She didn’t deserve it, not when any problems between them were his fault.
‘Come in,’ he invited an hour later after a story time that had been, if anything, more fun than ever before. Had that been because he knew it was probably the last?
Zayed turned to close the door behind her and surprised a look of blank shock on Emily’s face as she took her first look around his private space.
He scanned the room and only then realised just what a bleak place it was.
There was a bed, of course, and a wardrobe for his clothing, and a desk for his computer, which was liberally piled with paperwork, but apart from that virtually nothing, certainly nothing decorative—no little oasis of exotic sunbaked Xandar transported to a Cornish cliff-top home or anything of a personal nature—and having seen her grandmother’s collection of family photos, he knew instinctively that those were what she’d been expecting to see.
‘Would you prefer to take the chair by the desk or sit on the bed?’ Those were the only two options in his barren private space and he cursed at the way his own pulse responded to the wash of colour that swept up her face when she glanced at the place where he slept. With difficulty, he forced himself to focus on the fact that the blush only went to confirm his initial assessment of her—that even at thirty years of age she wasn’t the sort of woman who was accustomed to spending much time in men’s bedrooms.
‘Um, the chair, please,’ she said, and scurried across to stake her claim.
He almost smiled at the way she avoided looking at his bed, but that was the only light moment there could be in this room. By the time he’d finished talking to her, he’d be surprised if she even wanted to stay on his team, no matter how much damage it would do to her career.
But where to start?
He’d never spoken to anyone in Cornwall about what had happened in Xandar and it was almost impossible now to separate the events from the terrible guilt and the pain of loss.
‘Why don’t you have any photos of your family?’ Emily asked, then bit her lip as though worried that she’d overstepped the invisible boundaries he’d set up around himself. He could have blessed her for supplying him with the perfect place to start his confession.
‘Because…they remind me,’ he said haltingly, any fluency gone as he tried to find the words to explain the inexplicable. ‘And it is already hard enough, living with the memories.’
‘But that’s what the
y’re for…so that you don’t forget all the happy times,’ she said eagerly, and he almost resented her for her naiveté.
‘Even if the memories are of guilt and loss?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Even if all they remind you of is the fact that, once upon a time, you had everything you could want and you had been so careless of it that you had lost it all?’
The memories were all around him now—no need for photographs—and he could almost hear the screams and smell the tang of blood under the choking blanket of explosives and dust.
‘It was my job to protect them,’ he said, barely aware that she was there and yet knowing that he had to continue so that she would know…would know everything. ‘I should have stopped her from being there, from bringing him with her…especially when there had been so many warnings. But she was so determined to be there for the opening ceremony…said that after all the hours it had taken me away from my family she had a right to be there…’
He shook his head, unable to continue, and to his horror felt the swift slide of tears down his face.
Embarrassed by his lack of control, he whirled away from her and dragged both hands over his face but that couldn’t stop them now that the dam had been breached.
‘I am sorry for this,’ he muttered brokenly, but he needn’t have bothered because suddenly she was there, right in front of him, and in her eyes he saw not condemnation or pity but a deep well of empathy that he would never deserve.
‘Sit down,’ she urged, guiding him to the bed she’d rejected just a few minutes ago, then stood close beside him and cradled his head against her as though he were one of the children now sleeping peacefully around them.
It took some time before the heart-wrenching sobs finally died away but Emily still hadn’t worked out the best way to approach their aftermath.
Like any proud man, Zayed would be mortified to have broken down in front of her unless she handled the situation just right.
But what was just right?
She had so little experience that she could very well make everything much worse, especially as she had little idea what had actually happened. His words had been so broken, wrenched out of the nightmare scenes playing inside his head. All she was really certain of was that he’d lost his family in some disaster and was convinced that it had been his fault that they’d died.
Well, the only way to be sure that she wasn’t going to rip open even more wounds was to wait until he’d recovered himself and ask him to explain.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely. ‘That was not supposed to happen.’ He tried to pull away from her but she deliberately tightened her arm around his shoulders.
‘There’s no need to apologise for tears,’ she said firmly. ‘They’re just a physiological fact of life, like sneezing or yawning. A manifestation of the body’s need for some sort of cathartic release that—’
‘All right, Emily, thank you for the lecture, but—’
‘But I need to know something,’ she interrupted quickly, afraid that if she gave him too much time he’d retire behind those barricades that kept the world at bay. ‘What happened? Down on the beach you said it was an explosion that caused your injuries, but you didn’t say what caused the explosion. Was it during an earthquake, or some other sort of disaster?’
‘Would that it had been something as innocent as an earthquake,’ he said, and drew in a shuddering sigh before sitting silent for so long that she began to think he’d changed his mind about talking to her.
Finally, he tipped his face up to hers and she could have cried herself when she saw the mixture of pain and guilt that dulled his eyes.
‘If you want to hear the whole depressing story, you had better sit down,’ he suggested wearily, and gestured towards the almost clinically neat bedding beside him. ‘It is not something that can be done in a moment or two.’
He seemed so reluctant that she almost offered to leave instead, but something inside her knew that he needed the relief of speaking about what had happened. And if he regretted it in the morning, he could always console himself that she would be leaving in a matter of months.
‘In Xandar, my family is…powerful,’ he began, and as ever when he spoke of his home country she noticed that his accent grew stronger, the syllables flowing like exotic honey from his tongue. ‘Even before I started my medical training it was obvious that the poorer people did not have access to the medical services they needed for their children. So I was determined to build a place where specialist doctors could come from many countries to treat the children who had no help and teach us what we needed to know about their care.’
‘Like the one at St Piran’s? A special unit that can call on all the different specialties within the hospital, depending on the needs of a particular patient?’
‘Exactly so. It was the unit I planned in Xandar on which my department at St Piran’s is based. Unfortunately,’ he continued, with a visible darkening of his expression, ‘there are in my country some who would keep things as they have always been and who refuse to accept that modern medicine—even when it is delivered by women—is a good thing.’
‘And your unit was actually built?’ He’d said something about an opening ceremony, so…
‘Not only the unit,’ he said with a hint of pride, ‘but also the start of a series of clinics throughout the country so that little ones could be seen more quickly and easily than having to travel all the way to the capital. Then only if an operation was necessary would the family have the expense of that journey.’
‘And the explosion?’ She hated to push him to recall such distressing events, but she was discovering that she needed to know what had happened to the man she loved every bit as much as he needed to tell her.
‘The world believes that it was caused by a group of rabid fundamentalists—those who object to all things that come from outside the traditions of our country.’
‘But?’ It was anger she had heard in his voice just then, fierce and raw.
‘None of these groups claimed responsibility for the atrocity, the way they usually do, and there were other people who had their own reasons…’ He shook his head. ‘It is complicated…politics…but I believe that it was someone who used the threats by the fundamentalists to hide their own agenda. And they almost succeeded…except I didn’t die. It was my wife and son who were destroyed because I didn’t protect them.’
‘Didn’t protect them or couldn’t protect them?’ she asked, remembering the fact that he’d been badly injured, too.
‘There can be no difference because I failed them. They died that day and I lived,’ he said, voicing the torment that sounded as if it would never leave him.
It was almost as though a light bulb switched on inside her head.
‘And is this why you hold yourself aloof from everyone…why you won’t let anyone get close to you?’
‘Why would anyone want to?’ he asked, those broad shoulders slumping in the closest she’d ever seen him come to defeat. ‘I am a man who has nothing to give…who deserves nothing…because I have not proved myself worthy.’
Those lean fingers she’d watched, mesmerised while they’d performed their magic for his little patients, were knotted into white-knuckled fists now.
Emily wanted so very much to reach across and soothe those fists with gentle fingers, but she knew he was in no mood to accept such a gesture from her.
‘So, in Xandar there’s no such thing as someone being granted a second chance?’ she asked quietly, knowing he was intelligent enough to get her point.
‘Of course there is, if the person deserves a second chance,’ he retorted. ‘But how can I have a second chance when they never will?’ His dark eyes almost burned her with their intensity as he continued.
‘Leika was twenty-four when she died, young and beautiful and with so much life in her.’
‘Leika?’ Jealousy sank its claws deep into her soul.
‘Zuleika,’ he clarified. ‘She was my wife, chosen for me by my family t
o cement a political alliance, and the price I had to pay for agreement to my plan for the specialist unit.’
The fact that Zayed was important enough to Xandar that he could be coerced into such a match was almost irrelevant to Emily when all she felt was a selfish relief that it hadn’t been a love match between them.
‘Neither of us really wanted to marry,’ he continued in a low voice full of regret. ‘Leika wanted to pursue a career in law, specialising in what are called women’s issues, so when Kashif was born a year later, she almost resented him because everyone expected her to do the traditional thing…the right thing…and give up her work to stay home with him.’
‘So when the unit was going to open—the unit that her marriage had allowed—she was determined to be there,’ Emily said, reading between the lines.
‘And when the explosion came, I couldn’t save them.’ His dark eyes were full of torment as they stared right through her, and she knew that he was seeing the horrors in his memory instead. ‘I’m a doctor but I couldn’t do anything for them. I just…just lay there and watched them die, right in front of me.’
Probably because you were too badly injured to get to them, she reflected, knowing with absolute certainty that he would have done everything in his power to help them if he’d been able.
Not that she could say any of that, she knew as she allowed her eyes to drift around his room again.
The barrenness of his surroundings was still a shock. When he’d invited her into his private space, she’d been expecting to see a little bit of Xandar transported to Penhally. Fabrics with a rich variety of textures and colours, perhaps even the luxury of silk on his bed. She certainly hadn’t imagined this…this monk’s cell.
And when she’d mentioned the lack of family photos, she’d actually seen him shut down to avoid the pain, but hadn’t known why until now.
Except…she didn’t really understand.
‘Why did you decide to travel so far away…to cut yourself off from the rest of your family?’ she demanded. ‘When Beabea…when the time comes…I’ll be completely alone in the world. I’d give anything to know that there were other people who were going to be there for me…uncles and aunts and cousins who would be feeling the same loss when she’s not there any more.’
Caroline Anderson, Josie Metcalfe, Maggie Kingsley, Margaret McDonagh Page 27
