powerful man she’d ever known. Something fluttered low in her belly, like a thousand butterflies all taking flight at once.
She couldn’t still want him, still ache for him, after all this time. Surely? It was ridiculous. Unconscionable. She couldn’t allow it.
She wouldn’t.
‘Then why Delburn Bay, Tia?’
Was she really ready to answer that?
Anyway, Tia was the naïve fifteen-year-old girl who had fallen for the handsome, charismatic seventeen-year-old boy the moment they’d volunteered together at Westlake lifeboat station a lifetime ago. Tia was the twenty-eight-year-old whose life had changed in a single instant and everything had been turned on its head.
She hadn’t been Tia for five years.
‘It’s Antonia now.’
Whether she’d intended it as a distraction or a feeble attempt to take control of the situation, she couldn’t be sure. Either way, it fell about as heavily as an anchor on a freight ship.
‘The truth, Tia,’ he pressed her, with deliberate emphasis.
The truth was something she wasn’t ready for. But, just like that, just because Zeke had spoken, she was Tia again. As though the last five years had never happened.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘The lifeboat community is tight-knit. People talk. You should know that.’
She ignored the voice in the back of her head whispering that was precisely why she’d come to Delburn Bay. She’d banked on that same tight-knit community to relay the news to Zeke that she had returned.
Just...not so unbelievably quickly.
‘Did my father tell you I was here?’
The bark of laughter—if that was what it could be called—was less amused and more incredulous.
‘Your father?’
‘I’m staying with him. At least, until I find a place of my own.’
‘And here I was thinking you were as much persona non grata as I am. The man who warned you that I couldn’t love you, that I didn’t even know what love was, and that we’d never last. Did you tell him you were only too happy to leave, or does he think it was all me?’
She had no idea whether he intended to wound her with the offhand remarks, or not. Probably the former. Then again, she deserved it, even if not for the reason Zeke could have known about. Another surge of guilt coursed through her.
She hadn’t exactly been fair to Zeke when she’d reached out to her father—after several years of rebuffing his attempts at offering the proverbial olive branch to her—in order to make amends. Yet another complication of her own making that would, at some point, need resolving. But not today. Today there were more important concerns to address.
Such as, if it hadn’t been her father who had contacted him, then Zeke wouldn’t know about Seth. Right?
An image stole into her head and a wide smile leapt instantly to her lips. It was all she could do to stamp it out.
Her precious Seth.
The happy, funny, in-love-with-life four-year-old boy who really mattered in all this, and the one person she would give her life to protect.
Seth—the little boy who had deserved not to be born into the tumultuous aftermath of Zeke’s black ops mission gone so harrowingly wrong, and her own part in what had happened that night.
Seth, who deserved to know his father now that Zeke had finally managed to find some peace.
But not yet. Not like this. Not dropping it on Zeke like some kind of bombshell. She had one chance to get this right. Her son deserved for her to get it right. Hell, even Zeke deserved for her to get it right. She would not blurt it out now like some kind of weapon against him. Hadn’t she done them both enough harm already?
Her entire insides shook at the mere idea of it whilst his intense gaze, pinning her to the spot, seemed to confirm it.
* * *
Zeke stared at the ghost in front of him, not wanting to even blink in case she disappeared in that fleeting tenth of a second.
It was incredible.
How many times had he planned on tracking her down this past year? Now that he was finally on track. Now that he could be sure he wouldn’t be a burden for her. Now that he finally had something to offer her again.
How Herculean it had been to resist that temptation. After all that had happened between them, and all that he’d said to her, he knew he had no right just to walk back into her life. He couldn’t expect to pick back up where they’d left off.
But it hadn’t stopped him imagining that maybe, just maybe, there would have been no one else for her but him. The way that there had never been—never would be—anyone else for him but Tia. His Tia.
He had no right to any of that. He’d lost that right five years ago when he’d sent her away, and then, when that hadn’t worked, had said all those things to her in order to get her to leave him. Harsh, cruel words chosen for maximum wounding, for devastating effect. Words that made him blanch when he thought back to them, even now.
And yet a nonsensical part of him was still galled that she’d bought any of it. That she’d left.
Those five years felt like a lifetime ago, now. So much had changed. He had changed. He had healed, mentally and physically, and he had moved on with his life. But he’d never moved on from Tia. He’d carried her with him this whole time, like his private talisman, even her memory enough to galvanise him into action, to try to walk, on days when he might otherwise have curled up in a ball and imagined dying on his black ops mission that fateful night.
Just as two of his buddies had.
Every time he’d wondered why he was still here when they weren’t, whether he deserved to still be here when they weren’t, he’d thought of Tia, and known he had to try.
Which was why, when he’d finally turned his life around several years ago, he’d come back to Westlake, where they’d first met as kids. A foolish part of him hoping that somehow it would get back to her that he was here. A selfish part of him imagining that she might turn up, on whatever pretext she liked, just to see him.
He’d never really expected it to happen, and yet now here she was. Looking as glorious, as tempting, as Tia, as ever.
It was all he could do not to cross the space between them and haul her to him. To hold her and prove he wasn’t simply imagining it.
‘You look...well,’ she faltered and flushed, her eyes skimming straight down his legs. ‘Better than well.’
Had he really been so simple-minded to think she would look at him again without seeing...that?
He
