The Army Doc's Baby Secret
It took all he had not to reach down the leg of his leather biker gear and feel for the lower limb that was no longer there.
That hadn’t been there since Tia had cut it off five years and two months ago.
‘Are you saying that to make me feel better?’ he growled. ‘Or you?’
‘Zeke... I’m sorry,’ she choked out, taking a few stumbling steps towards him. ‘You have no idea how sorry.’
‘Stop.’ His hand flew up, halting both her advice and her words. And his own voice was harsh, razor-sharp even to his own ears. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
Not least because she wasn’t the one who should be doing any apologising. She shouldn’t be sorry for what had happened on that makeshift operating table; she’d carried out the only option left to her. And in doing so, she had saved his life.
The fact that he’d accused her of ruining it meant that any apologies were his to make. He was the one who had pushed her away. She hadn’t simply walked out on him, or cast him off faster than a Special Forces wannabe dropped his fifty-pound rucksack after his first fifteen-mile tab. He’d pushed her away. Hard. And without any show of mercy.
His only consolation had been the fact that it was the only way he could save her from feeling guilty or responsible every time she looked at him. The only way he could release her from being burdened with him.
But that had been five years ago, and a lot had changed since then. He had changed. How many times had he imagined finding her? Explaining himself to her? But not here, not like this. He needed to do it properly. To show her how he’d turned his life around.
This was the chance he’d been waiting for to get her back. And he wasn’t about to blow it.
If only he could work his tongue loose to say a damned word.
‘I heard you’ve been awarded a medal for bravery,’ Tia blurted out, clearly unable to stand the silence any longer. ‘For saving three crewmen from a sinking ship in heavy seas.’
‘I was doing my job.’ He could feel himself scowling even as he tried to stop it.
‘The newspapers don’t seem to think so,’ she babbled on but, irrationally, he was more fascinated by the way her pulse was leaping erratically at her throat. ‘They’re calling you a hero.’
He’d hated the publicity for that. The hero nonsense. The public had lauded him for that lifeboat rescue, yet all he could think was that they didn’t even know the names of the buddies he’d served with, who had died that night five years ago trying to protect their freedom.
‘I think they’re right,’ she concluded almost shyly, giving him an unexpected flashback to the day his chip-on-the-shoulder seventeen-year-old self had first met the blushing fifteen-year-old he’d had no idea would change his life so dramatically.
He clenched his fists behind his back and fought the unnerving impulse to stride across the room and close that gap between them.
And then what...kiss her? It made no sense. A confusion of questions crowded his brain, screaming for his attention. He fought against the ear-splitting ringing in his head. Strident. Throbbing.
What had he been thinking, coming here? Leaping on his motorbike and hurtling up the stretch of coast from Westlake to Delburn Bay the moment he’d heard she was here?
Like a lovesick teenager, worshipping at her altar. All these...emotions, jostling and tumbling inside him. And he had no idea what to do with them all. But then, he always had lost his head when it came to Tia, ever since he’d given into temptation and kissed her on her sixteenth birthday.
Even now he could still remember every detail as they’d stood on the beach, the moonlight glistening off the inky water whilst her party had been in full flow in the beach house a few hundred metres away. A party that he hadn’t been invited to because, let’s face it, no one nice ever invited his family anywhere, and who could blame them for not wanting any one of four boys dragged up by an alcoholic, aggressive, abusive father?
But Tia had been different.
She’d looked at him, rather than down on him. She’d told him he was nothing like them, that he was one of the best lifeguards she’d ever seen. And he’d basked in the novelty of her admiration.
The night of her birthday she’d seen him on the beach, pretending not to stare in at everyone else having fun, and she’d come to demand her birthday gift from him. When he’d told her he didn’t have one, she’d simply shrugged her shoulders and told him, Of course you do.
And then she’d stepped forward, pressing the entire length of her body against his, and she’d lifted her head and kissed him. In that instant she’d found a way past all his armour. Past every single one of the barriers that he’d been erecting for as long as he could remember.
He’d vowed, right there and then, to never let her go. And he wouldn’t have...if it hadn’t been for that night.
And now she was back. But was she here because she knew he was in Westlake, or had she just moved to be closer to her father?
Or someone else?
The unwanted thought slid through him. What if Tia had moved on? It made him answer more curtly than he had intended.
‘I don’t give a damn what the newspapers say.’
She licked her lips.
‘No... I...don’t suppose you do. You never did care what anyone thought.’
He had cared what she thought. His Tia. He cared that she was here. And he wanted her back in his life.
But this wasn’t how he’d intended to do it. Any of it. He’d imagined that if Tia ever returned to his life, he would apologise to her. He would take her to the house he’d built on the plot of land by the Westlake lighthouse—just as their teenage selves had imagined one day doing together—and he would find a way to sit her down and explain what had happened five years ago. To finally find a way to open up to her.
Maybe even to win her back. In time. If he took things slowly enough.
Instead, he’d heard she was here and he’d simply reacted, jumping on his bike and racing up here. He had no idea what to say, or how to start. He could hardly expect her to just jump on the back of his bike, as she’d used to, and let him take her back to Westlake.
He was handling this all wrong. But far from the smooth reunion of his fantasies, this reunion was unravelling faster than a ball of para cord dropped down a knife-edge mountainside.
A fist of anger thrust its way back to the forefront of his brain. At himself more than at Tia. Yet still Zeke grabbed at it; he welcomed it. He could deal with that emotion far better than this unfamiliar blind panic that threatened to engulf him.
‘Anyway,’ she was still prattling on unhappily, ‘it was impressive, what you did that night. You—’
‘Why are you really here, Tia?’
He interrupted her abruptly, his question deliberately curt and jagged, zipping through the air like the verbal equivalent of a Japanese throwing star. He needed to understand what had brought her back; only then could he formulate his best tactical approach.
She blinked and fell silent for a moment.
‘My job,’ she offered shakily.
‘So I heard. Apparently, you’re back here as a medical officer for this lifeboat station. What about your career as an army doctor? Does that not appeal to you any longer?’
‘I left the army. I’m starting as a locum at the nearby hospital next month, about the same time I officially start volunteering here. I came back because...well, because... I had to.’
She lifted her shoulders helplessly, but the action also caused her chest to rise and fall, the luscious curve of breasts with which he had once been so intimately acquainted snagged his gaze and, for a long moment, he couldn’t drag his gaze away.
The hazy cloud of lust was infiltrating him all over. Slipping past his defences as though they were made of mere gauze.
‘So you aren’t an army doctor any longer. You quit?’
‘It’s...complicated.’
‘That’s pathetic.’ He snorted, hating the way she was guarded with him even as he understood exactly why she was. ‘Even you can do better than that, Tia.’
She blinked as though she wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Then, abruptly, she straightened her back and tilted her chin into the air. So Tia-like.
‘I’m back because I love lifeboats. You seem to forget that I was volunteering down here ever since I was a young teenager. Long before your seventeen-year-old backside came bouncing into town to become a beach lifeguard. Becoming a volunteer medical officer is only following in my father’s footsteps. It’s how he met my mother—’
She stopped abruptly and he had no idea how he resisted the impulse to go to her.
He knew only too well how Tia’s parents had met. He hadn’t been around at that time but it was well documented in the lifeboat community, and he’d heard the story often enough. Though never from Tia herself.
Her father had been a medical officer, her mother a coxswain. For twenty years they had volunteered alongside each other, right up until the fateful night when Celia Farringdale had been called out to a shout in heavy seas.
A trawler had lost engines several miles out. Celia’s crew had attended, assisting the rescue helicopter to winch to safety all eight men from the stricken vessel, three of whom had been seriously injured. The helicopter had made three trips over several hours, with the lifeboat waiting, protecting, in case they had needed to abandon ship. Just as the last man had been pulled aboard the heli and it had turned for shore, the sea had swelled and crashed causing the lifeboat to roll unpredictably—just as the trawler had been lifted out of the water only to slam down onto the lifeboat’s bow. Instantaneous and fatal. None of the lifeboat crew had survived.
Tia had been fourteen. The year before he’d met her for the first time. A kid who had tried so hard to be strong, and untouched by her past, and invincible.
In many ways seeing her had been like holding a mirror up to his own soul.
Was that why now, with emotions playing across her features however much she tried to fight them, Zeke felt like a heel? Enough to make his determination to take things slowly wane for a moment. Enough to let an altogether more welcome sensation invade his body.
Desire.
When refusing to acknowledge it didn’t work, he imagined crushing it under the unforgiving sole of his boots.
‘I know you have a tie to this place. Your family was part of this community since before you or I were even born,’ he offered by way of apology.
She actually gritted her teeth at him.
‘I’m not trying to play who has the greater claim, Zeke. I’m just saying that...it’s understandable why I want to be here.’
She was holding something back; he knew her well enough to be able to tell. But neither could he deny the point she was making. But whatever else either of them might say was curtailed by the sound of movement outside. Clearly an incident was going down.
‘So that’s why you’re back?’
The hesitation was brief. Blink and you’d miss it.
‘Yes.’
He couldn’t explain why it crept through him as it did.
Was she back for someone else?
But then there was the sound of footsteps and he knew that someone was coming down the corridor. Maybe for Tia.
He’d waited five years for a conversation he’d never been sure would ever take place—and now it was about to be interrupted. Exactly as he’d feared.
Frustration swamped him, making his words harsher, his voice edgier, than he’d intended them to be.
‘I don’t know, Tia. Maybe I thought you’d returned because you’d read about me in the papers and finally remembered that you were still my wife.’
CHAPTER TWO
TIA HURRIED DOWN the hallway, the emergency somehow grounding her.
She’d never been so happy for an interruption as she had been when one of the lifeguards had knocked on the door to tell her that they were dragging a struggling dog walker out of the surf and she might be needed.
Technically, she hadn’t started yet but, until they knew what it was or whether the emergency services would need to be called, she could certainly take a look.
The confrontation with Zeke had been harder, so much harder, than she’d imagined it would be. He’d brought her to her knees with just a few curt words. So any further, awkward conversations with Zeke could—mercifully—wait.
Turning the corner, Tia spotted one of the lifeguards guiding a disorientated-looking woman up the steps, a dog leaping around behind them. The woman was moving under her own steam but looked weak.
‘This is Marie,’ the lifeguard was saying as they approached. ‘About forty minutes ago she was walking her dog when it ran into the water a bit too far and got into difficulties. She went into the water to rescue it but got a bit stuck herself so we ran in. We brought her back here for a warm drink and change of clothes and then she seemed okay. Then about five minutes ago, she started to take a turn.’
‘So she wasn’t this disorientated when you pulled her out?’
‘No,’ the lifeguard replied. ‘She complained of feeling faint about ten minutes later but nothing more. This has got progressively worse since she’s been here.’
Tia watched as Zeke moved quickly to the fainting woman’s other side, putting her arm around his shoulders.
‘She’s going to go, Billy,’ he warned. ‘Put your hand under her thigh and we’ll carry her through. Quickly.’
The two men had barely got her to the consulting bed when she stopped breathing.
‘Zeke, get her on the bed and get me a defib. Billy—’ Tia turned to the lifeguard as he was dropping the woman’s rucksack and coat from his shoulder ‘—call treble nine.’
‘Heart attack?’ Zeke asked, yanking the cupboard open and producing the defibrillator that Tia hadn’t yet had a chance to locate.
‘Could be.’ Tia ripped open a mechanical ventilating kit and began to administer oxygen to help the woman start breathing again. ‘But it may be drug related. Her skin is clammy and I don’t like that purple colour.’
‘Look there, it’s like a rash,’ Zeke noted, peering at the woman’s arm.
Tia nodded, but her attention turned straight back to her casualty as she saw the woman begin to blink.
‘Marie? Marie, are you with me? Good girl. Okay, my name is Tia, I’m a doctor. Have you got any medical conditions?’
‘Where’s Badge?’
‘Is Badge your dog?’ Tia guessed, as the woman nodded. ‘Badge is fine, he’s with our lifeguards now, probably being spoiled rotten.’
As she’d hoped, Marie began to relax.
‘So, do you have any medical conditions?’
‘None.’ She shook her head as best she could with the ventilating mask still over her mouth and nose.
‘Has anything like this ever happened to you before?’
Again, Marie shook her head.
‘What about this rash?’ Tia asked, as Zeke gently lifted the woman’s arm to show her.
‘Yeah, I get that on my arms or feet sometimes when I’ve been walking the dog here. It feels itchy and swollen.’
‘When you go in the water?’ Tia asked, her mind racing.
‘I guess. But it goes pretty quickly usually.’
‘Okay, I think we might need to run a few tests. An ambulance should be arriving fairly quickly to get you checked out at hospital.’
‘Badge...?’
‘Is there anyone we can call to get him picked up? He can stay here with us until they get here.’
‘My dad. But you really think I need to go to hospital?’
‘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.
And if that was true, then surely it meant she still felt something for him?
There was still hope.
‘I see you aren’t denying it.’ He grinned, enjoying the way her eyes sparked with anger.
‘Denying what?’ she challenged. ‘Denying wanting to appear in the newspapers with you as your desperate ex-wife?’
‘Not ex,’ he gritted out. ‘We’re still married.’
‘Fine.’ She exhaled deeply, but her voice was that bit tighter, thicker than before. ‘Estranged for the last five years, then. Either way, I’m confused.’