The two men had barely got her to the consulting bed when she stopped breathing.
‘Zeke, get her on the bed and get me a defib. Billy—’ Tia turned to the lifeguard as he was dropping the woman’s rucksack and coat from his shoulder ‘—call treble nine.’
‘Heart attack?’ Zeke asked, yanking the cupboard open and producing the defibrillator that Tia hadn’t yet had a chance to locate.
‘Could be.’ Tia ripped open a mechanical ventilating kit and began to administer oxygen to help the woman start breathing again. ‘But it may be drug related. Her skin is clammy and I don’t like that purple colour.’
‘Look there, it’s like a rash,’ Zeke noted, peering at the woman’s arm.
Tia nodded, but her attention turned straight back to her casualty as she saw the woman begin to blink.
‘Marie? Marie, are you with me? Good girl. Okay, my name is Tia, I’m a doctor. Have you got any medical conditions?’
‘Where’s Badge?’
‘Is Badge your dog?’ Tia guessed, as the woman nodded. ‘Badge is fine, he’s with our lifeguards now, probably being spoiled rotten.’
As she’d hoped, Marie began to relax.
‘So, do you have any medical conditions?’
‘None.’ She shook her head as best she could with the ventilating mask still over her mouth and nose.
‘Has anything like this ever happened to you before?’
Again, Marie shook her head.
‘What about this rash?’ Tia asked, as Zeke gently lifted the woman’s arm to show her.
‘Yeah, I get that on my arms or feet sometimes when I’ve been walking the dog here. It feels itchy and swollen.’
‘When you go in the water?’ Tia asked, her mind racing.
‘I guess. But it goes pretty quickly usually.’
‘Okay, I think we might need to run a few tests. An ambulance should be arriving fairly quickly to get you checked out at hospital.’
‘Badge...?’
‘Is there anyone we can call to get him picked up? He can stay here with us until they get here.’
‘My dad. But you really think I need to go to hospital?’
‘I suspect you might be suffering from cold urticaria, where your skin has a reaction either to the cold, or to cold water. Given that this is your first serious reaction, I’m guessing it was triggered by plunging into the sea after your dog. Technically, it was most likely the warming phase when you got here and changed clothes. But you do need to get checked out.’
The sound of the ambulance siren reached Tia’s ears.
‘Zeke...’
‘I’ll go and bring them,’ he pre-empted, already heading out of the door and leaving her alone with her thoughts, which would no doubt be banging down the proverbial door once her patient was safely handed over to the ambulance crew.
Such as the fact that they had fallen into working together with such ease, despite their earlier confrontation.
And the fact that—aside from the reality that he had sought her out first—she had actually returned to the area with the intention of finding Zeke and finally being able to tell him that he had a son.
So far, she had done neither.
‘Don’t think our earlier conversation is over, Tia,’ he warned softly as they turned away from the ambulance. ‘You aren’t running away from me this time.’
‘I thought I heard Albert mention that you’re due on call tonight, at Westlake. That’s a ninety-minute drive from here.’
‘Don’t test me, Tia.’ Her skin goosebumped at his grim tone. ‘You might have thought Delburn Bay was far enough away from Westlake that I wouldn’t know you were here, but you should have known better. And I still want to talk to you.’
She forced herself to meet his eye. She could do this. For Seth.
‘And I need to talk to you, too,’ she echoed. ‘Properly. Like the adults we now are, instead of somehow regressing to those naïve, idealistic, opinionated kids we once were.’
‘Is that so?’
If her heart hadn’t been lodged somewhere in her throat, the threads of her thoughts threatening to unravel at any moment, she might have laughed at the surprise on his face.
She knew what was coming, and yet somehow she was still here. Still breathing. In and out. In and out.
Not running away this time.
‘It is so,’ she confirmed at length. ‘Zeke, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.’
If she’d kicked him in the guts she didn’t think he could look more shocked.
‘You have nothing, nothing, to be sorry about,’ he ground out.
God, if only that were true.
Where did she even start? Her mind spun as she hurried through the lifeboat station and back to her soon-to-be office, needing just a moment alone to compose herself.
As if she hadn’t had five years.
As if meeting Zeke, and telling the truth, hadn’t been one of the main reasons she’d come so close to home. To finally tell him about her son—their son—because it was the right thing to do.
However terrified she might be.
And then they were back in her office, the door closed, and the rest of the world shut out. Tia crossed to the desk, not turning around until she was on the other side of it, using it like some kind of defensive barrier, not that Zeke appeared to have any intention of coming any nearer to her anyway.
They met each other’s gaze for a few moments—maybe an eternity—neither of them wanting to be the first to break the silence.
But one of them was going to have to, and, after everything, Tia knew it had to be her. She owed him that much.
‘You’ve changed,’ she managed.
‘You already said that.’ He scowled. ‘I believe your words were that I look better than well.’
‘Right,’ she muttered, shaking her head lightly, almost imperceptibly. But he did look well. And changed. Beyond all recognition.
Oh, not in the physical way, of course. Now that the initial shock of their first encounter was behind her, that much was evident. But in terms of the broken man he’d been when she’d last seen and spoken to him. The bleak, black pit he had been in back then. The pit into which—a part of her had never been able to shake the feeling—she’d helped to push him.
Tia’s heart pounded so hard in her chest that she was half surprised it didn’t batter its way out. Because the truth was that she didn’t know Zeke any better than she had as a naïve, adoring kid. This reunion was so much more unpleasant than anything she had feared.
And with what she was about to tell him, it was about to get that much worse.
* * *
The storm that raged through Zeke was so much more powerful than that force ten gale that had been blowing all day at sea, so destructive that it threatened to rip him apart. To tear down every last piece of his once broken self that it had taken almost half a decade to put back together.
This wasn’t anything like he’d expected today to go.
Meeting Tia again had completely, unexpectedly, unbalanced him. For the last three years he’d been slowly starting to feel more human again. More real. Yet one conversation with Tia and she’d seen through him in an instant.
Without a word she seemed to call him out for being the sham that he was.
He could feel the ground rolling beneath him like the treacherous, shifting sands that lay further out from the bay. Something else roiled inside him. Hope? Uncertainty? Both?
Without warning, the burning, twisting, phantom limb pain that hadn’t troubled him for years now threatened to rear itself again. It took everything he had not to reach his hand down and touch his leg.
Where his past met his present. Innocence and reality. Destructible human flesh and the bionics of the future.
He truly was a million-dollar man these days
. In more ways than one. A man with whom plenty of women were only too eager to be. But not a single one of them could ever have hoped to come close to the incomparable Antonia Farringdale.
Which was why he’d never bothered with anyone else. Not once.
It was why he was determined to win her back. But he couldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she had that kind of advantage over him. He wouldn’t.
Pushing the phantom pain back, Zeke held eye contact and stared her down. It was all in his head. A mere manifestation of all that he had lost—so much more than just the leg itself—the night what remained of his black ops team had flown him into the single-man makeshift clinic in the middle of no man’s land.
And his white-faced wife had been given no choice but to perform an emergency amputation on him.
‘So, are the newspapers the real reason you’re back? You read about my so-called heroics?’
He hated saying the words; he’d never much cared for public veneration. Not as a young seventeen-year-old lifeguard who had just happened to be on the beach when the mayor’s daughter had got caught out by a riptide. Not as a twenty-something decorated marine when he’d made it out of that mission with a limb missing but alive, when two of his buddies had been brought out in body bags. And not in this latest award, as a coxswain who’d just happened to get lucky on a horrible, stormy night.
And yet, as he watched the battle waging within Tia as she fought to keep her cool in the face of his outrageous accusations, a little punch of victory vibrated through his bones. As pathetic as it might be that he took such triumph from the fact that he could still read her, he would take whatever he could right at this moment.
Because little else about her seemed the same. At least, not when he got past the physical similarities. Those brown eyes with the flecks of green, that light brown hair now highlighted with pure gold, that body that made his whole body tighten and his mouth water.
‘You heard I was here, and you couldn’t stop yourself from racing home to be with me again?’ he pushed on, not missing the way her nostrils flared. As though he wasn’t entirely wrong and she hated herself for it.
And if that was true, then surely it meant she still felt something for him?
There was still hope.
‘I see you aren’t denying it.’ He grinned, enjoying the way her eyes sparked with anger.
‘Denying what?’ she challenged. ‘Denying wanting to appear in the newspapers with you as your desperate ex-wife?’
‘Not ex,’ he gritted out. ‘We’re still married.’
‘Fine.’ She exhaled deeply, but her voice was that bit tighter, thicker than before. ‘Estranged for the last five years, then. Either way, I’m confused.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Well, let’s see.’ She lifted her hand as though to tick off her points one at a time. ‘First you say I’m in Delburn Bay because I thought it was far enough from Westlake for you not to know I was here. Then you declare that I’ve come because I’ve read the papers and wanted a piece of your new-found fame. So which is it to be, Zeke? Because even you can’t have it both ways.’
It was that flash of temper, her refusal to cower, which he had fallen in love with all those years ago. And which clawed their way inside him right now. It made him want to pull her to him when he knew he should be taking things slowly.
But it was proving impossible to hold back when she had essentially returned to him after so many years of absence. Especially when she looked at him the way she was doing right now, even if he doubted she realised it. As if she still wanted him, too.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he pointed out smoothly.
Tia merely cocked an eyebrow.
‘Fancy that.’
The need to claim her as his once more swirled inside him, pounding at him, eroding him. His arms actually ached with the effort of not reaching out to touch her. To place his hands on her shoulders and draw her in. To see if her body still fitted his with as flawlessly as ever. To discover if she was every bit the Tia he remembered.
Would she think he was still the same Zeke who she had married over fifteen years ago? She was certainly the same Tia. Despite that...edge, which he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
‘You haven’t changed,’ he told her, taking a step closer.
Unable to stop himself.
She braced herself, though he noted she didn’t try to move away.
‘Don’t, Zeke. I have changed, as it happens.’ And again, something shot through him too fast for him to grasp. ‘More than you can imagine. As, I’ve no doubt, have you.’
Zeke faltered for a moment, then caught himself. She couldn’t be back for the money. Tia couldn’t know that he was now a multimillionaire thanks to his company, Z-Black, along with Zane—another of his former marine brothers-in-arms—and Zane’s investment mogul brother, Frazer.
He took another step towards her.
‘Meaning?’
This time, she did edge away, if only a fraction. And as though her body didn’t want to but her head was telling her she had to. She squeezed her eyes shut.
‘Meaning, you can’t drop me, like you did, and now pick me back up again and expect me to just fall into your arms.’
‘I didn’t drop you.’
‘As good as,’ she argued shakily. ‘We were meant to be partners, Zeke. Husband and wife. But you pushed me away. You didn’t trust me.’
He resisted the urge to squeeze his eyes shut; it only made the memories all the more vivid. Real. Even now, very occasionally, he would still wake up in a sweat, reliving that final mission. A mission that had gone south so quickly that his team had had no chance to extract themselves.
The torpedo. The explosion. Then blood in the water all around him, just before everything had gone black. He hadn’t even felt the pain at that point.
‘I lost everything that night,’ he growled, abruptly.
‘Yes.’ Tia tilted her head up determinedly and met his gaze for the very first time. ‘And so did I.’
‘Don’t go there, Tia.’
Anyone else would have heeded the warning note in his voice. Tia merely swallowed hard, but she stood her ground.
‘Why not? Because only you get to own that pain? You don’t think I carried it, too?’
‘Why do you think I told you to leave?’ he bit out. This was insane. It wasn’t how he’d imagined things going in any version of meeting up with Tia again. ‘I wanted you to be free of it. I released you so that you could walk away and never look back. I’ve carried it with me for these past five years so that you didn’t have to.’
‘And yet I have,’ she matched him, her eyes shimmering unexpectedly.
Deep within him alarm bells rang, but he couldn’t heed them. Couldn’t stop himself.
‘What? What have you carried, Tia?’
She stopped. Glowering. Emotions charging all over her face. And then, just as suddenly as her temper had flared, she reined it in. The loss was unbearable. He felt her withdrawing and he had no idea how to stop it from happening.
It hurt. Far more than it had any right to.
‘I’m sorry,’ she choked out, as though she knew how his chest was tightening excruciatingly.
Zeke didn’t realise he’d crossed the room to her until she tilted her head to look up at him, her eyes growing darker, her mouth opening just a fraction, her breathing quickening.
And still, Zeke didn’t stop himself.
‘This can’t be why you came home, Tia. It certainly isn’t why I drove up here tonight.’
His voice was huskier than it had any right to be. He needed to leave. Now. Tia needed space to think, and he needed to get out of there before he broke all his rules about taking things slowly if they were to stand a chance of piecing their relationship back together.
So why, instead of mov
ing away, was he reaching to take her chin in his fingers, his entire body revelling in the way her breath caught sharply?
CHAPTER THREE
THE URGE TO kiss her pressed in all around Zeke.
He leaned in closer. So close that he could feel her warm breath brushing over his skin. The energy waves bouncing off her and onto him made his entire body goosebump in anticipation.
The whole world had fallen away, and he could see no one—nothing—else, but Tia.
‘It’s been too long,’ he murmured.
She lifted her hands to his sides, then a tiny frown settled over her forehead.
‘Your T-shirt’s wet.’
‘It’s from carrying that woman’s stuff. It was soaking.’
He felt so on fire right at that moment that it had barely registered.
‘It’s cold.’ Tia sounded concerned, but he couldn’t have cared less.
‘It’s just a T-shirt. You’re stalling. But there’s nothing to be nervous about. It’s just me.’
He dipped his head again.
‘Please.’ Her voice was a fragile whisper. ‘Don’t do this, Zeke.’
A token protestation at best.
‘Tell me you don’t want me to kiss you,’ he murmured, his lips closing the gap to hers.
‘I...’ The sound might as well have been ripped from her throat. And she still didn’t move. ‘I can’t.’
And then, as if suddenly galvanised into action, Tia stumbled backwards. Away from him.
He was an idiot.
He’d frightened her off. Exactly as he’d cautioned himself not to do.
‘You can’t just expect...’ she prattled on. ‘I mean...after five years...things have changed.’
‘But not the way you feel about me,’ he countered smoothly.
She eyed him balefully.
‘You’re wrong. The way I feel about you has changed.’
‘Mmm...’ He wasn’t in the least perturbed. ‘You say that, but your body is telling me something quite different.’
‘My body evidently doesn’t know when to shut up, then,’ she snapped.
The Army Doc's Baby Secret Page 3
