DR ANTONIA FARRINGDALE was adroit at smelling trouble.
She had first learned it at her father’s knee, watching the oft-churning grey expanse of the Atlantic Ocean from the salt-sprayed windows of Westlake lifeboat station, as her mother piloted a boat out for a rescue. Learning to read the signs for when the crew was in for an easy night, or the omens for when they could expect an arduous night of dangerous shouts.
She had honed it as a doctor, often knowing instinctively with her patients when she was hearing horses, and those rare occasions when she was hearing zebras.
And she had perfected it as a battlefield trauma doctor working from twelve-by-twelve tents of field hospitals on missions in whichever conflict-hardened country du jour she was in.
Yes, she could certainly smell trouble.
So why, she wondered as she peered uneasily into the hallway at Delburn Bay lifeboat station—a mere hour and a half further up the coast from Westlake, and therefore the closest she’d managed to get herself to going home in over a decade—did she smell it so unnervingly strongly, right at this instant?
Immobile yet alert, she stood in her doorway. Scarcely even daring to breathe as her eyes scanned for anything out of the ordinary.
But the sea was agreeably calm beyond the launch slipway, and the corridors were quiet, most of the crew being volunteers who had day jobs but who would be at the station within minutes if they were called to be. There was nothing there which should set her chest thumping the way that it was.
Unless a guilty conscience counted.
Shaking her head as if that would be sufficient to dislodge the censorious thought, Antonia ducked back into the medical supply room, which doubled as her consultation room and office whenever she was on site as the station’s new Medical Officer, telling herself it was more likely to be just her overactive imagination.
Telling herself that she had nothing to feel guilty about.
Telling herself...what? That she’d made the right choices—as impossible as they had been—five years ago?
It was true, but it didn’t help. It never really had. She still felt like a terrible person.
But then, wasn’t that why she was back here? To set the record straight.
Spinning around on the ball of her foot, Antonia strode determinedly back into her office and consultation room even as her mind skittered down the coast to Westlake, back to the past, to the man who had finally brought her back home now. Or, at least, that mere ninety minutes up the coast from home. A man to whom she owed the two biggest apologies of her entire life. Neither of which she had any idea how to even begin to make.
Which was why she’d taken a job at Delburn Bay’s lifeboat station, rather than back at Westlake. The distance provided her with a much-needed buffer to allow her to pick the words she was going to use when she finally plucked up the courage to drive down the coast and face...him.
Ezekiel Jackson.
As though she hadn’t already had five years to work out what to say. The drumming in her head intensified, causing her to pinch the bridge of her nose. Not that it helped.
‘You’re supposed to be working,’ Antonia muttered irritably into the silent room. ‘Not looking for ghosts.’
Her heeled boots clacked harshly as she strode back to her desk, and she pulled her lips into a grim line as she selected the next file from her pile. Technically she didn’t start officially for another month, but it was a voluntary position and they were desperate for someone to settle in. And it was better than being in her father’s small house, avoiding his concerned glances and all his unspoken questions, which nonetheless echoed loudly.
Gratefully she slid down into the uncomfortable swivel chair and began to read the notes. Work had always been her salvation. Unsurprising, then, that she was absorbed within minutes.
‘So it’s true.’
The rich, smouldering, all too familiar voice seemed to charge the room, as Antonia jerked her head up so fast that a crack and a stinging sensation ripped through her neck.
She wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t ready.
If a deep chasm had opened up beneath her feet and sent her hurtling down to the earth’s dense, super-hot core, it couldn’t have made her any more frantic.
Zeke.
Had the air been sucked out of her lungs? Her body? The very room itself? It certainly felt like it. She couldn’t breathe, let alone speak, and it was all she could do to keep her mouth clamped shut rather than open and close it like a fish caught out in one of the rock pools out on the sands.
How she managed to stand—to face him—she would never know. Yet suddenly she was on her feet, her fingers braced against the cold, flat wood of her desk to stop the dizziness from winning out. She certainly had no idea how she managed to respond to him.
‘True?’
Thank goodness for the open window, which let her suck in deep lungsful of sea air—its salty, tangy taste dancing obliviously on her tongue—as she tried to quell the wave of nausea that crested in her chest.
Damn it if Zeke didn’t look every last bit as commanding, and dangerous, and male, as she remembered. His hair was longer now. At least, longer than the close-to-the-scalp cut he’d sported as a Special Forces soldier back then. Enough that she might actually be able to feel it between her fingers.
If she wanted to. Which she didn’t. Of course she didn’t...because that would be pathetic.
Desperately, urgently, Antonia reminded herself of that last night, five years ago. He’d been telling her for months that he didn’t love her, that he’d never loved her, but that had been the night when she’d finally believed him. Because it hadn’t been the words that had convinced her, rather it had been that hard, disgusted look in his cold eyes as they’d bored into her without a trace of softness or love behind them.
Even now, at the mere memory, a pain shot through her heart as though it were folding in on itself.
And