Charlotte Hawkes - The Army Doc's Baby Secret

‘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.