met Beth’s glare without moving a muscle. ‘Not good enough for you, huh?’ he suggested casually.
Beth could feel the heat leaving her gaze but she couldn’t drag her eyes away from Luke. What would he say if he knew that her fiancé hadn’t measured up because it was Luke who had set the standard? Staying in a relationship with Brent would have been settling for second best. No, not even that close. It would have been stepping onto another emotional planet.
The thought was gone as quickly as it had come and Beth could feel her anger draining, but it was Luke who looked away first.
‘Maybe I should start a club,’ he muttered. He turned towards a black Jeep parked nearby. He took a step away from Beth then stopped again. Luke looked more than tired now. He looked…sad.
‘You’ve changed, Beth. I would never have thought you could stand up to trouble with gang members like that. Or start hating your family. Or go around dumping fiancés. I don’t feel like I even know you any more.’
The sadness in Luke’s expression was enough to bring the sting of tears to Beth’s eyes and she turned away quickly to hide them.
‘You never did, Luke,’ she said softly. ‘That was the problem, wasn’t it?’
The walk to the motel unit the hospital was providing until she found somewhere to live was not long enough to calm the spin-cycle effect Beth’s brain was having on her thoughts, and despite her exhaustion she knew she had no hope of sleeping yet. A walk on the deserted beach over the road from the motel seemed the perfect way to wait out the cycle.
Somewhere beneath the emotional roller-coaster the night had provided was a quiet pride in the fact that she had actually coped with it all. And the knowledge that she could cope again, if she had to. She wasn’t going to follow Neroli’s path and give up the work she loved because of intimidating patients.
Seeing Luke again had been just as much of a shock. But she had coped with that, too. Or had she? Somehow, it was crushingly disappointing that their conversation in the car park had ended up feeling just like one of the arguments that had marked the disintegration of their relationship. Nothing had changed.
But everything had changed. There was something different about Luke. A mystery that was never going to be solved if Beth didn’t stay in Hereford long enough to find out why Luke had chosen this quiet place to live and work.
And the tension created in the car park was never going to be resolved the way the old arguments had been. Until that last, horrible conflict, they had always made up their differences…in bed.
Any lingering tension would have been channelled into love-making that had made anything else totally insignificant. The world could have stopped turning as far as Beth was concerned when she had been in Luke’s arms like that. She wouldn’t have cared. She probably wouldn’t have even noticed.
An echo of Luke’s touch reached through the years and surfaced strongly enough for a spiral of desire to clutch something deep within Beth. A sound like a strangled groan escaped her lips and she sank onto a sun-warmed boulder.
How could she cope with this?
It was the ultimate reason to leave, wasn’t it? A very clear alarm sounding. If her body and heart were going to rebel against her head and decide they still wanted Luke, then she was going to be vulnerable. She could get hurt.
Again.
The thought was terrifying.
And exhilarating.
The spark was still there. Even if the result was a negative tension, it was better than indifference would have been, wasn’t it? When Beth had thought Luke had been ignoring her because he didn’t give a damn, she had felt astonishingly let down.
But it hadn’t been entirely negative.
He’d told her she’d been brilliant. He had looked at her—for just a fraction of a second—with an expression that had spoken of appreciation. Pride even.
And for the briefest pinpoint of time Beth had felt the sensation of pure joy that had always come from Luke being proud of her. Turning her face up to the sun, Beth closed her eyes and sighed softly. That sensation, however brief, was unforgettable. It was precisely what had been missing from her life for far too long. It was that elusive ‘x’ factor she had been searching for in all her attempts at other relationships. She had thought she might have found it more than once, only to gather enough doubts to ruin things.
And she’d been so right. Because now that she’d experienced the genuine article again, Beth knew she’d never found anything comparable. The craving to feel it again was undeniably powerful. The fear that she couldn’t protect herself if she did was equally strong.
The chance of experiencing it again if she stayed was minimal in any case. Luke hated her now. She was a stranger to him. An angry stranger who confronted people and hated her family. He was clearly bitter about their past. Did he really think that Beth had ended things because she’d thought he Luke ‘wasn’t good enough’? And how many fiancés did he think she might have had in the intervening years?
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