WEST HAD made a decision he did his best to move on it. Over the hours between Lia’s arrival and the dragged-out end of his shift, he’d decided the only way to handle things was to tackle his Lia problem head-on, as brutally as his conscience would allow.
The circumstances of his shift only served to wrench up his irritation—two of his three assigned physicals had showed up, but the third, a recalcitrant astrophysicist, had ignored multiple calls to the telescope. Then, five minutes before the end of his shift, an emergency bone-setting had dragged his shift out an extra hour.
By the time he made it to her cabin door, some of his gut-swirling panic had settled into annoyance, and he let it. Was glad for it. Annoyance helped keep fond memories at bay. He didn’t need anything making him want to go to her, talk to her, make her smile. Kiss her. Even if he could drum up anger for her, he doubted he’d still want to be outside of her presence. Ever.
The only way to handle this was to make sure she didn’t want him, make sure she hadn’t come all the way to Antarctica to try and reconcile. Make sure she understood they were done.
Remove temptation.
He had to, harsh and quick, like a battlefield surgeon removing a gangrenous limb so the person would live. Only he was also the limb.
He took a deep breath to wrest control back from the willful, stubborn and half-wild, survival-focused part of his personality, and knocked.
Get the words out, move on. If she didn’t want him, he wouldn’t have to fight his own impulses for the next ten days. Not the best plan, but the only one he had.
He listened for signs of movement within. If she was there, he’d hear her.
Seconds ticked on, but no sound came from inside the tiny room. He knocked again, louder.
Then he heard the sound of bedclothes rustling, and when the door opened, her sleepy, confused face appeared in the frame. Four hours of frustration, but when he looked at her, memories of their mornings together and that old affection wrapped around him, making him want to wrap around her. Pretend now was then, and at any second, the sleepy confusion would warm to one of those soft-eyed smiles he’d so adored. The glimpses she’d reserved for him, past her strength, competency or expectations, to see the woman within.
But when her confusion cleared, there was nothing soft in her eyes for him.
Good. He did his best to ignore the exhaustion in her eyes, in her whole body.
“I’ll make it quick,” he said, gesturing inside with a nod.
“Tomorrow.”
He finally noticed in the dim light that she was wearing pink from head to toe. Some fluffy pink thing. Pajamas, maybe. It had a hood and feet built in. His annoyance had already started to fade.
Why was she wearing pink everywhere? She hated pink. Lord, he wanted to ask. But that would be showing an interest, the opposite of what he was trying to do. So would touching her, even though the urge to feel her skin against his boomed through him like a foghorn.
“Now or never, Lia.” He curled his fingers to his palms with the control it took not to push the door in, haul her to him. Just looking at her hurt.
Hell.
“Speak now, or forever hold your peace?” She spoke softly, like the effort to utter every word shaved a year off her life.
The ceremonial words sailed straight and true, and hit harder than a sledgehammer. Despite his determination to be a stone, he couldn’t hide the shock rippling through him, but grit his teeth, nodded once, and she stepped back to let him in.
This was why he didn’t stick around to watch the destruction after whatever life catastrophe had triggered. He couldn’t stand there, inside the bubble of pain he could almost see around her, warping reality. As if this cabin were some awful place that existed between two universes, the one where he’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted, and this one, where the last gift he could give her was walking away.
He closed the door behind him and leaned there, while she tracked the measly few feet that made up the whole of the walking space, getting as far from one another as was possible in the tiny space.
In his mind, all afternoon, when he’d pictured himself coming, acting it out, he’d dialed his performance to eleven. Shouted. Said ugly, awful things. Lied. Everything he could think of to make her angry, to make her hate him. But there with her, breathing the same air, feeling the pain written all over her, from the tilt of her eyebrows to the way she shifted from foot to foot, fidgeting, her hands hidden in her cuffs, he couldn’t do it.
He couldn’t do it, more proof that he had to make her want to stay away.
He forced himself to look her in the eye, but kept his voice quiet, and more sympathetic than he wanted. “I don’t know what you’re wantin’, lass, but you’re wastin’ your time comin’. It’s done between us. Over. Say what you want to say, and let’s have done with it.”
He heard his accent thicker than it had been in years, not just the shifting pronunciation, but the words, the cadence. Further proof this was scrambling his eggs.
“I didn’t come to say anything. I wanted to see with my own eyes that you were alive and well.” Her voice wobbled, like it had to pass through bubbles of emotion in her throat. This would be easier if she would just shout.
“And now you see.”
“Alive. And I need to understand why the man who said he loved me, the only—” She stopped midthought, and closed her eyes, hands slipping from her sleeves enough to fidget before her as she struggled for composure. “Why would you just leave without word, three days before our wedding? I deserve to know what I did wrong.”
There it was, her taking the blame for it. An example of exactly what she would do if he told her the whole damned story, try to take his guilt away or at least share the load. She’d probably say his brother had committed suicide because she’d taken too much of West’s time, or that it was her fault because she was the subject of West’s ultimatum. He couldn’t have an addict around his new family, and he’d picked Lia over Charlie. And Charlie had picked drugs over rehab and family. A choice Charlie obviously wasn’t ready to make, and he should’ve seen that. If he’d listened…
He lifted one hand to mash against his forehead, trying to rub away the tension headache already starting to drill in.
Don’t think about Charlie.
He didn’t need to explain. He wasn’t going to explain. But if he wanted her to believe him, not take the blame, he had to give some excuse. Pinning some action on her would be an even greater sin than the lie he was about to tell. He couldn’t make her take the blame. He’d take it. He deserved it.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” The muscles all seemed to have tightened, and making his mouth form words was harder than running in water. “Something happened, and I needed to go. So I left.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about any of this, and you know that.”
Her shoulders bobbed quickly under the fluffy pink onesie
