The Army Doc's Baby Secret

by Charlotte Hawkes

  ‘Well, I can hardly ride on the back of that with you,’ she’d muttered awkwardly.

  ‘Because?’ he’d demanded irritably, knowing it was irrational to take it as a personal criticism, but unable to do anything else.

  And she’d levelled a calm gaze at him, her voice quiet but firm.

  ‘Because we’re not kids any more, Zeke. That bike represents my years as a rebel, and a thrill-seeker. Now I’m... I have other responsibilities.’

  But it was the words she didn’t say that had scraped at him the hardest. That, and the fact that the idea of her body pressed so tightly to his for an hour and a half had been simply unimaginable. Although perhaps it would have given him enough distractions to keep his mind off the all too frequent nightmares that he still endured. The screams, the smell, the sights.

  How could he have gone from what had happened between them in her office less than half an hour earlier, from such intense desire then, to such burning anger now? And yet, a part of him couldn’t seem to regret how intimate they’d been in that lifeboat station.

  So what did that say about him?

  Yet for the last ninety minutes, they had sat in a tense, unhappy, charged silence. The same images and questions spinning around in his head, more and more insistent as each minute ticked by. His only comfort was that the closer they came to Westlake—to where she had once lived—the more pent-up she was obviously becoming.

  Good. He gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. He wanted her uneasy, off-balance. He suspected it was the only way he was going to get answers to questions she might otherwise deflect all too easily.

  But was he imagining it to think that she might possibly have returned to Delburn Bay because she’d felt she owed it to him to tell him about his son?

  No.

  Tia had had years to find him. To tell him. But she hadn’t, so he couldn’t afford to let sentiment creep in, or to go soft on her. She had betrayed him. Kept him out of his own child’s life for years.

  Except that you pushed her away.

  Zeke struggled to silence the traitorous voice.

  And you wouldn’t have been much of a role model for the first few years, would you?

  And so he merely kept driving until eventually he was nearing Westlake. First passing the terraced row of tiny fishermen cottages where he had endured years of squalor with the cruel, vindictive, bad-tempered hulk of a man who had spent as much time working hard to avoid getting a job as he had actually going out to do whatever menial job he’d been forced to take.

  Then down to the promenade with the larger, more impressive detached houses, which boasted glorious sea views, where Tia had lived with her own kind and protective doctor father. Finally, to the lifeboat station where he was due on call in a matter of hours, and where they had first met when he’d been seventeen and she’d been fifteen. He might have held himself back from going anywhere near her that first year, but she had nonetheless burned too wonderfully brightly for anyone to pretend they didn’t notice her.

  Becoming a volunteer lifeguard had been Zeke’s saving grace as a kid. A stop-gap until he turned eighteen and could join the military, since his old man wouldn’t agree to sign papers allowing his kid to join up any earlier. After all, the more Zeke had earned, the less his so-called father had decided he had to work.

  Even now Zeke could remember the urgency, the desperation, he’d felt, waiting to turn eighteen and swearing to himself that he would never, ever return to this part of the country, let alone Westlake.

  And then he’d met Tia. Sweet and innocent, but with the kind of steely core and heart of courage that men years older than her hadn’t possessed. Especially when it came to being out on a rough sea. The attraction had been instantaneous but he had refused to allow himself to succumb. His respect for the crew—and for Tia’s father—had been too great.

  When his eighteenth birthday had come, he’d joined up just as he’d always planned. But it was the lure of Tia that had had him returning eighteen months later during a month of leave, a trade in hand and well on his way to his first military promotion.

  By the time he’d left they had eloped, marrying in secret, before Tia had embarked on her first year of university, following her father’s footsteps in studying for a medical degree.

  Now Zeke was deliberately driving her past their very history and it was all too easy to map out. Designed to unsettle her before they even got to his home. The problem was that it was also unsettling him, too.

  ‘Why are we going this way?’ she snapped out, as though she couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Is this some kind of trip down memory lane intended to make me feel guiltier than I already do?’

  ‘Do you?’ he challenged, wishing that a part of him didn’t revel in the fact that his Tia was still as astute as ever. ‘Feel guilty?’

  ‘What kind of a question is that, Zeke? Of course I do. I never wanted you to find out like this. And I certainly never intended...what happened between us in the lifeboat station this afternoon.’

  Any thawing he’d begun feeling towards her disappeared in an instant.

  So she didn’t regret hiding the truth about his son from him all these years. Just the fact that he’d found out. And that he and Tia had been intimate again.

  When the hell was he ever going to learn to stay away from this woman?

  ‘But instead of raking up the past, don’t you think we should be looking to the future? Working out where we go from here?’

  He battled to harden his heart against her.

  ‘You’ve had over four years with our son,’ he ground out bitterly. ‘Forgive me if I need a few more minutes to adjust to this revelation.’

  ‘Right,’ she murmured, lapsing back into silence.

  Along the promenade the grey seas churned and frothed, every now and then smashing against the sea wall and showering their vehicle with a loud, heavy salt shower.

  He might have known she wouldn’t be able to stay quiet for long.

  ‘It’s just that the only thing at this end of the parade is the old lighthouse and...that old piece of waste ground.’

  The old waste ground set up from a section of quiet, rocky beach, where the two of them had often gone to be alone when they had finally got together. Where they’d often imagined buying and building a dream home of their own. When we grow up.

  Well, they’d grown up now. It was just a shame they had never grown up when they’d still been together.

  Zeke didn’t answer. He just kept going, waiting for the moment when she would be able to see it for herself. The extent of the new life he had managed to build for himself these past few years. His unexpected success—as hollow as it had felt at times, without her to share it with.

  The anticipation clung to him like a sodden T-shirt.

  And then, beside him, he could sense her sit forward, taking note.

  ‘What the heck is that?’ she whispered at length.

  The indignation in her tone was only half supressed. He couldn’t help but smile, despite everything.

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘It’s...’ She scowled as though the right adjective wouldn’t come. Finally she was forced to concede the truth. ‘It’s stunning. Gallingly so, really. But still, someone really built here?’

  ‘Someone did,’ he agreed.

  The sheets of curved, tinted glass that made up the entire frontage of the house mirrored the foaming seas and rolling grey clouds flawlessly. The renovated lighthouse just behind.

  ‘Someone who has a lot of money, by the looks of it.’ Tia sniffed.

  Was it fanciful to imagine he knew exactly what was running through her head right at this moment?

  ‘You begrudge them living here?’

  She paused.

  ‘I don’t begrudge them, exactly. It’s just that...a location this special deserv
ed to have gone to someone who would really love it and cherish it, not just someone with enough money to have bought off our historically entrenched council.’

  ‘Someone like you and I, you mean?’ he challenged. ‘Building that little beach shack home we always talked about building when we were kids?’

  She didn’t answer, she merely pressed her lips into a thin line, as Zeke schooled himself. Restraining himself from reacting.

  So what if she remembered the dreams they’d once had back in the beginning? Less than a couple of hours ago that might have meant something to him. But not now. Not after discovering he had a son who she had kept from him all this time.

  Instantly Zeke shut the earlier moment of weakness out and steeled himself again.

  Finding out about Seth had changed everything.

  He might have spent the past five years rebuilding his life and making himself into a man worthy of Tia again—making it up to her for shutting her out immediately after the accident. Maybe even winning her back.

  But that had been before.

  Now he had lost out on the first four years of his son’s life. Zeke didn’t know how to begin to quell the thunder that rolled through him. He didn’t know what his next move would be. He didn’t even know how to articulate a single one of the questions powering around his head right now.

  He only knew that he had no intention of missing a single week more of Seth’s life.

  He didn’t choose to answer. Instead he smoothed his mouth flat and turned onto the private road and began the slight ascent to the house.

  ‘Zeke.’ Tia’s voice broke into his thoughts as he turned her car up onto the track to his home. ‘We can’t just wander up here.’

  ‘Pretty sure we can,’ he replied grimly.

  ‘I don’t think it’s just the old road to the lighthouse any more.’ She sounded panicked. ‘It looks like it’s the driveway now.’

  ‘It is. My driveway.’

  There was a beat.

  Then another.

  ‘I’m sorry, say again?’

  He deliberately delayed a moment before complying.

  ‘I live here. This is my home now.’

  ‘You own it?’

  ‘I bought the land and had it built.’ He shrugged, deliberately sidestepping her real question. ‘So yes, I own it.’

  Her confusion was evident, but still he didn’t clarify.

  Let her wonder.

  Let her consider how he had got himself from the mess of a man who couldn’t even walk in that rehab centre, to the multimillionaire he was now.

  It might give him a moment to begin to get a handle on this racing, flip-flopping tangle of emotions.

  Hadn’t Tia once called him more of a carefully crafted, honed, precious weapon than a man? A lifetime ago when he’d been about to go on a mission and she’d still been at uni, before she’d joined the army medical corps.

  She’d meant it as a good-humoured jibe but it had given him some kind of perverse comfort, and he’d held onto that image for years. Right up until the bomb blast had rendered him broken. Useless. Unsalvageable.

  Even now, with all this to show for himself, he was constantly clawed at by vicious nightmares. Regrets. Self-recriminations.

  * * *

  Her heart was hammering so brutally inside her chest that Tia was surprised he couldn’t hear it. The place looked like a millionaire’s fantasy house by the sea.

  If Zeke had intended to unsettle her, he had certainly succeeded. With a shaky arm, she reached out and opened the car door. Getting out and standing up was going to take even more effort.

  Toying with her. Leaving her off-balance.

  Biting her lip, she followed him across the gravel to the sleek metal and glass door. The place didn’t even have a normal lock or key like her house. Instead, he had to have some kind of key fob or pin, because the door opened automatically as he approached.

  Not just moneyed, then. But serious money.

  Her stomach twisted tightly. With money came contacts, and power. What if he decided to use those resources to get custody of Seth? To provide for him in a way that she couldn’t?

  Hadn’t some former work colleague, Jane, from a few years ago lost joint custody of her two children to her ex-husband? He’d successfully argued something about Jane’s career as an A & E doctor meaning long, unpredictable hours whilst he himself had just been promoted in his dependable nine-to-five city job. Plus he’d had a new partner who had cared for a child of her own around the same age.

  Tia’s mind raced, leaving a plume of fear in its wake.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’

  The question was out before she could bite it back, not helped by the way Zeke cast her a look over his shoulder but didn’t immediately answer.

  On autopilot she followed him as he stepped through a hallway to the lightest, most expansive living room she had ever been in, sleek windows curving from one wall to the other, and from floor to ceiling. Then he spoke.

  ‘There’s no one else here, Tia. There never has been. No one who mattered enough to move them in, anyway.’

  And she told herself that her heart didn’t leap a little. Instead, she forced her legs to carry her across the room to stand in front of those stunning windows and take in the might of Mother Nature at her most volatile.

  ‘There are going to be a lot of shouts in that weather.’

  ‘It has been a force nine gale several miles out there for the past twenty-four hours. The last few teams have been bested.’

  She shouldn’t say anything. She couldn’t give herself away. Tia opened her mouth.

  ‘Be safe out there,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t do anything...typically heroic, Zeke.’

  The silence whooshed in on them, like an invisible flood, filling the space and sending them both reeling.

  It could have been minutes before they spoke again. It felt like an age.

  ‘You make it sound like you actually care,’ he ground out.

  ‘I always cared,’ Tia muttered before she could stop herself. ‘You were the one who pushed me away, Zeke.’

  ‘Oh, trust me, Tia, it didn’t take much pushing.’

  Whether it was the coldness of his tone, the injustice of what he was saying, or the fear jostling around inside over her precious son, Tia couldn’t be sure, but her temper flared suddenly.

  ‘Oh, no. That’s totally unfair. You were the one who said that if I amputated then I would be killing the only life you had ever known as a soldier. You were the one who, for six weeks, told me over and over that you couldn’t forgive me. And you were the one who, in that rehab centre, told me that you couldn’t bear to look at me and would never, never, forgive me.’

  ‘I did it to protect you,’ he roared before falling into abrupt silence.

  Spinning brusquely, he strode to the couch. She got the sense it was as much to put space between them as anything else, and she was grateful for it. She could barely breathe, let alone think.

  The moments ticked by. The silence turning black.

  ‘I did it to release you from the burden of having to be responsible for a cripple. All I’d ever wanted from being a kid was to be a soldier. A marine. I couldn’t even get myself out of bed without help.’

  ‘You didn’t do it to release me from any burden.’ Her heart ached to comfort him, but this was Zeke and she knew him too well. Comforting wouldn’t help. She needed to stay strong and meet his accusations head-on. ‘You did it because your pride wouldn’t let you accept help from me. You didn’t trust me enough to let me be there for you. That’s why you pushed me away, Zeke. No more, no less.’

  ‘You were my wife,’ he spat out. ‘Who else would I trust?’

  Tia was determined to stand fast.

  ‘Which makes it all the more hurtful that you couldn’t turn to me, but no
less true. If I had been the one injured, you would have insisted on never leaving my side. But because it was you, you couldn’t bear to have me around. You even told the nursing staff they had to keep me away.’

  ‘You didn’t need to see me at that time.’

  ‘Why, Zeke? Because you felt vulnerable and at your lowest? We were married—we should have been a team. We could have been the strongest team. Instead, you never learned to let me in.’

  ‘Of course I let you in. We were married for ten years, for pity’s sake. You knew things about me that no one else has ever known.’

  ‘Such as?’

  He glowered, clearly hating every second of this line of argument.

  ‘You knew about where I grew up. My old man.’

  ‘Facts, Zeke.’ She blew out a deep breath. ‘I knew where you lived because Westlake is a small town and everyone knows everyone. I knew that your dad was a violent, abusive drunk, who took his anger out on you after your mum left, again because everyone knows everyone else’s business. But I never knew anything because you told me. I never knew how you felt inside, because you never told me.’

  She wasn’t prepared for the profound sadness that settled inside her, like old dust disturbed from a furniture cover suddenly lifted in a long-abandoned house.

  ‘It was irrelevant,’ he gritted out.

  ‘It wasn’t.’ Tia shook her head. ‘That kind of thing makes us who we are. And you never gave me a chance to know that part of you. In truth, Zeke, I don’t think we really know each other. We barely ever did.’

  ‘We’ve known each other for eighteen years,’ he snorted.

  ‘You didn’t come near me at the beginning because I was fifteen and you decided I was too young,’ she pointed out. ‘Even though, I hasten to point out, that you were only seventeen back then.’

  ‘Well, we’ve still been married for the past fifteen years.’

  ‘You can’t count the last five of those fifteen years,’ Tia argued. ‘We’ve basically spent them apart. The point is that we’ve never truly understood each other. You never let me in to understand what you thought, or felt, or what made you tick.’