‘But you did,’ he pointed out and she sighed, and smiled, steering the big vehicle carefully up over the dune and onto the road.
She put her foot on the brake and turned towards him.
‘You win,’ she said, then was sorry she’d turned, for he was smiling at her again, not the quirky smile this time but one in which she could read understanding and, yes, the empathy she’d guessed at.
‘Your sister?’
He asked the question—well, said the two words—so quietly, she knew she could ignore them if she wanted to, but deep down she knew it might help to talk about it.
Another sigh.
‘You’ll hear about it soon enough—someone in town will tell you. Yes, my sister was injured in a surfing accident.
When the waves were big we’d get a friend with a powerful jet ski to tow us out beyond the breakers. Jill was being towed out when the rope broke and she was caught by a wave and flung onto the rocks beneath the headland.’
Jo hesitated then found she needed to tell him more.
‘What the town doesn’t know is that it was my fault. I was the one who wanted to surf that day, although the tail end of the cyclone further north had produced waves far bigger than Jilly liked to tackle. Surfing was my passion—the pro tour my ambition.’
The words died on her lips, fading into the silence that filled the vehicle.
‘And you gave up your dream? Because you felt guilty?’
The question shocked Jo so much that at first it didn’t make sense, then she realised the track his thoughts had taken.
‘But I didn’t give up my dream—not in a, well, now-I-can’t-be-a-pro-surfer kind of way. All I wanted to do was be with her—there was no time for surfing,’ she told him. ‘Then, because she was so badly injured, because she spent so long in hospitals and rehab centres, and I spent so much time with her, studying medicine seemed a natural thing to do.’
She stared out to sea, replaying her answer in her head then adding, ‘I think,’ in such a worried, pathetic voice that Cam couldn’t help himself.
He reached out and put his arm around her shoulders, shifting so when he drew her closer her head could rest against his chest.
‘Sometimes stuff we have shoved into the deep recesses of our minds needs dredging out,’ he said quietly, and felt her head nod against his body. Then his other arm snaked around her, and he held her close, dropping a kiss onto the wet red snarls of hair on the top of her head.
‘Salty,’ he mused then he sniffed, ‘and you smell like the sea. It’s a good smell, healthy, you should get your hair ocean wet again before too long.’
He was talking to calm her, to reassure her. There was nothing beyond comfort in the hug he was giving her, and if his body didn’t agree with that, then too bad.
The warmth of his body crept into Jo’s cold one, right into the frozen places that even hot summer weather had failed to warm since Jilly’s death. The inner warmth whispered danger, but it whispered—no, shouted—other things as well. Things like desire …
Far harder to handle, desire, than lust. Lust could be put down as a base animal instinct but desire—well, surely that was about softer feelings.
She pushed away from the warmth, and her thoughts.
‘Thanks for the hug,’ she said, in as matter-of-fact voice as she could summon up. ‘I needed it. I didn’t realise just how much emotion would come dredging up—to use your words—on the back of one wave. But that’s twice I’ve dredged stuff up to you—now it’s your turn.’
He looked startled, but she wasn’t relenting.
‘Is it just your memories from the army or more than that you’re escaping?’
‘Escaping?’ he echoed, and she had to laugh.
‘Of course you’re escaping—surfing your way along the coast. Not that it isn’t a good way to escape, but can you do it for ever?’
Cam stared at her.
Okay, he was attracted to her, and there was an element of danger in that attraction, but this—this questioning, that was different, disturbing.
‘Probably not,’ he admitted, and she laughed again.
‘That’s not nearly enough,’ she insisted, touching him on the arm, something she had done before—something he enjoyed her doing. ‘I can understand there are probably things you can’t talk about—things people who haven’t experienced being a doctor in a war zone could never imagine—but you must have known you’d come out of the army one day and had maybe not a dream but an idea of what you wanted to do. Just as Jilly’s death changed my career path, was it just the army experience that changed yours?’
It isn’t her business, one part of him insisted.
She’s impertinent for asking, it added.
But deep inside a longing to share just a little of his turmoil was growing stronger and stronger, and as he looked into her eyes and saw the depth of compassion and understanding there, he knew that this was a woman he could tell.
‘I came home remote, detached, even morose—or so my ex-fiancée told me. The psychologist I saw—they run us all past one of them from time to time—dismissed PTSD but pointed out I was pretty close to suffering it, with flashbacks and nightmares. He suggested drugs but surfing is my drug of choice, hence the coastal odyssey.’
He blurted out the words then heard their echo in his head and realised how ridiculous they sounded.
He shouldn’t have mentioned the morose part!
How pathetic.
Heaven help him.
‘I’d have been way beyond morose.’
How had she picked up on the one thing he regretted? he thought, then tuned back in to what Jo was saying.
‘Though I can’t imagine anyone the description fits less than you. As for remote and detached—well, sometimes those are places we all need to be at times.’ She squeezed his arm with her slender fingers, sending an electric arc of desire fizzing through his body.
Talk about inappropriate.
He covered her hand with his, hoping, really, to stop the reaction, but touching her while she was touching him seemed to make it worse—far worse.
‘And what about this ex-fiancée? Did she dump you because you were remote?’
The zinging in his body was so extreme it took him a moment to compute Jo’s words and when he did, and heard the sympathy behind the question, he had to smile.
‘Not really,’ he told Jo. ‘It was more a mutual thing. We’d grown apart even before I went away. Our lives diverged.’
He was about to add that it wasn’t a broken heart he was escaping but the gentle tightening of her hand on his arm was so pleasurable he decided to accept a little extra sympathy.
Pathetic, that’s what he was …
‘Perhaps we should go home,’ he finally managed, then immediately regretted it when her hand slid from beneath his and she started the car.
Squinting against the setting sun, Jo turned the car for home, her heart thudding in her chest as she considered how easy it would be to fall if not in love with this man then certainly into bed with him.
No, surely the surge of sympathy she’d felt when he’d mentioned his ex-fiancée was more than lust?
Attraction,