LITMIR.BIZ

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disillusionment and abandonment.

      She lifted a shaking hand to wipe away the sweat she hadn’t known was breaking out on her face until that moment. “There’s nothing to understand. Casey and I are a double package, and that’s all—and we both stay in Sydney.”

      She could see his gaze on her, searching her face; she forced her eyes to remain calm as she faced him down.

      Eventually he sighed. “I’ll play your game for now, but the playing field could shift sides without warning. I want to know my daughter.”

      “I wouldn’t prevent you if I could.” She’d take what advantage she could get, for as long as she could, but Brett was far too much a take-charge man to sit in the backseat for long. “You’ll love her, I know you will. She’s such a little imp at times, but so loving. You barely know she’s blind half the time, she’s so able and smart.”

      His eyes grew dark, shadowed again. “I’m sure I will love her—she’s from both of us,” he agreed. “As sure as I am that my family will love her just as she is. As sure as I am that having Casey to love would have helped my parents during the time they thought I was dead.”

      She’d expected a frontal attack, but at his words the world seemed to go elliptical, swaying around her in strange arcs. She reached out behind her to a chair, the closest thing she could find as an anchor. I can’t tell him, I can’t!

      Silence seemed the only option. To vindicate herself at the cost of Brett’s family, his stability and security, was too selfish.

      As selfish as you’ve been all these years in keeping Casey from all the rights and privileges of being a Glennon?

      The pain was too great to bear. Every way she looked, her choices, both past and present, hurt someone she cared about.

      But all those other people at least have someone else to love. Casey is all I have.

      “I’m sorry,” she whispered, praying he would leave it at that, knowing he wouldn’t.

      He stared at her, frowning. “Even if you couldn’t handle living with Mum and Dad, why didn’t you at least stay in Melbourne? Then you’d have known I was alive the past two years.” His voice came out raw and scraped with intense emotion. “You’re my wife, Sam. I went through hell in Mbuka—but the real nightmare began when I came home and found out I could be a father to a child I’d never seen. I lay awake night after night, wondering if you were all right, if I had a son or daughter. Wondering why you’d run—and if you’d run from me.” His lips pressed together and she knew he was in pain that was as much physical as it was emotional. “I needed you, Sam,” he managed to get out through gritted teeth.

      Her eyes closed as she prayed for strength. He was hitting her right in the heart with every word he spoke, because they came from his heart. “You needed me?” Her throat scratched on the words. “I was in hospital for weeks after you left, bleeding and in constant danger of miscarriage. I called you from the hospital, trying to talk as if nothing happened because I didn’t want to upset you when you couldn’t do anything about it! I needed you, Brett—”

      “Is that where you were? When I called and my parents said you were out?” His voice was dark and strained. “And why you sounded so distracted when you called me.”

      She drew a deep breath and nodded. “We all agreed to act like normal. We didn’t want to upset you when you had so many lives dependent on your skills and ability to concentrate. But I obviously failed. I’m sorry. It must have worried you.”

      The silence was broken by a pounding boom of deep thunder, the wildness of a summer storm in Sydney. Lightning hit moments later, just to the right of the house. The lights flickered off and on, and in the flash of light she saw the stillness of remembered pain on his face and the deep relief of a worst fear unrealised.

      “There was no one else, Brett,” she said quietly. “If I sounded strange, it was because I was alone and scared. I needed you with me, but you were off saving the world. I didn’t blame you, but abandonment goes both ways. You left for Mbuka within two months of our wedding—”

      His voice was full of stress. “You knew I’d signed the contract with Doctors for Africa before we met. I was locked into two years’ service. The people at the refugee camp were relying on me for their lives. But if you wanted me home, all you had to do was tell me you were pregnant and bleeding. I’d have come home on the first flight.”

      “But you’d have resented me for forcing you to turn your back on your lifelong dream,” she insisted wearily. “You were so passionate and eloquent about meeting the desperate need in Mbuka. Casey’s existence, then her blindness, would have kept you here. There are few good facilities for a blind child in a war zone, Brett.”

      In the silence, a clock ticked…and the next rumble of thunder came.

      “You didn’t give me the chance—or a choice, Sam. You didn’t tell me.” Brett’s voice was harsh. “You talked so movingly about the plight of the refugees when we met. You said you understood why I had to go…you said you’d come soon. Do you know how hard it was just being there, day after day? I lost more people than I saved and saw the most horrific injuries I’ll ever see, knowing they were inflicted by the guy in the next bed half the time. Desperate people poured in to the camp day and night. I worked around the clock without a break except to eat and snatch an hour’s sleep.” As if in agreement, lightning forked across the sky, almost right over the house. “Do you know how often I ached for my wife to be with me? If I’d have known why, I’d have felt less abandoned by the time I was kidnapped by the rebels.”

      By the time I was out of hospital, I was on the run from your parents and their threats to take Casey from me, to have me proven an unfit mother by any means they could. “You never mentioned to me how bad it was there when we talked,” she said, giving him some sort of answer. “Would it have been a safe place for Casey to be born?”

      “Maybe not—but you didn’t know that, so that can’t be the reason.”

      The first patter of rain on the roof was normally a sound she welcomed, but tonight she barely noticed. The bulldog in Brett hadn’t changed; he grabbed on to what he wanted to know and hung on with a tenacity that outlasted every other objection—and got him his way in the end.

      “The doctors said I couldn’t stress myself in any way—I had to rest to keep Casey alive,” she said, knowing this much she could say. “Handling your upset and fear, frantically trying to get home because I was sick—” She left it there, knowing she’d said enough. “And then—”

      “Yes, we keep coming back to it, don’t we?” His tone was grim, as dark as the eyes boring into hers. So sure he was right in his belief that she’d abandoned his family. Yes, he was the same old Brett. What he thought, wanted or believed had to be the best thing for everyone.

      “And then, when it was time to tell you,” she went on inexorably, “the official at Doctors for Africa told us you were dead.” She forced the word out, dragging in a breath so harsh he could probably hear it over the sounds of the storm finally hitting above them. “They told us there was no room for hope. I—I had to get out. I couldn’t take all the memories.”

      She gulped down the ball of burning pain in her throat.

      She hadn’t heard him move, didn’t know he’d moved until she felt his hand on hers. “You could have stayed with the family. You wouldn’t have been alone then.”

      You have no idea how alone I would have been.

      She sighed and rubbed her aching forehead, feeling as if she had taken a sudden fever. “I feel like I’m stuck on a whirligig, just with you being here. I had to accept your death, to put you behind me. I had to forget to stay sane.”

      “Did you manage it, Sam? Did you forget me?” His fingers moved up her wrist and arm, soft and slow, and she shuddered in longing. Oh, the heady delight, not just of sensuality but of touch. Not a child’s wonderful hugs but the touch of

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