LITMIR.BIZ

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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.’

      ‘And why is that?’

      ‘Well, let’s see.’ She lifted her hand as though to tick off her points one at a time. ‘First you say I’m in Delburn Bay because I thought it was far enough from Westlake for you not to know I was here. Then you declare that I’ve come because I’ve read the papers and wanted a piece of your new-found fame. So which is it to be, Zeke? Because even you can’t have it both ways.’

      It was that flash of temper, her refusal to cower, which he had fallen in love with all those years ago. And which clawed their way inside him right now. It made him want to pull her to him when he knew he should be taking things slowly.

      But it was proving impossible to hold back when she had essentially returned to him after so many years of absence. Especially when she looked at him the way she was doing right now, even if he doubted she realised it. As if she still wanted him, too.

      ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he pointed out smoothly.

      Tia merely cocked an eyebrow.

      ‘Fancy that.’

      The need to claim her as his once more swirled inside him, pounding at him, eroding him. His arms actually ached with the effort of not reaching out to touch her. To place his hands on her shoulders and draw her in. To see if her body still fitted his with as flawlessly as ever. To discover if she was every bit the Tia he remembered.

      Would she think he was still the same Zeke who she had married over fifteen years ago? She was certainly the same Tia. Despite that...edge, which he couldn’t quite pinpoint.

      ‘You haven’t changed,’ he told her, taking a step closer.

      Unable to stop himself.

      She braced herself, though he noted she didn’t try to move away.

      ‘Don’t, Zeke. I have changed, as it happens.’ And again, something shot through

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