He withdrew and rolled onto his back. They were both sticky with sweat and breathing hard. The sensitive flesh between her legs throbbed with satisfaction. She could feel the hairiness of his calf against hers, smell the citrus tang of his aftershave.
“Say something,” he said after a long silence.
She turned her head to look at him.
“Wow.”
The corners of his mouth tilted up into a smile. Then his gaze dipped below her face to scan her breasts and her belly, finally focusing on her mound.
“You have to be anywhere tonight?” he asked, his gaze never leaving her thighs.
“No.”
“Want to stay for dinner?”
“What are we having?”
He met her eyes and grinned.
“You.”
She laughed.
“Is there dessert, too?” she asked.
But he wasn’t smiling anymore. His focus had shifted to her belly. To her tattoo, to be exact.
Everything inside her went cold as he reached out to trace the neat line of her scar where it ran across the top of her pubic bone. They made them a lot smaller these days but her surgery had been an emergency procedure and the line was nearly seven inches long. Only the expert shading of her tattoo had hidden it from him until now.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Tell him. Tell him and get it out of the way.
She opened her mouth, but no words came out. She didn’t want to see his eyes fill with pity. She didn’t want him to look at her and see nothing but an empty vessel. Liam had known her before.
For some reason, that meant something.
“Nothing,” she said.
She’d hesitated too long. He frowned.
“It’s a freaking great scar, Zoe. It’s not nothing,” he said.
“I had appendicitis,” she lied.
He rolled onto his back and patted his belly. Too late she saw the thin white line of an old appendix scar. “Nope. Try again.”
He was watching her, waiting for her to lay herself out in front of him. The thought of telling him made bile rise up the back of her throat.
So maybe she wasn’t as resigned to her fate as she’d convinced herself she was. Something she could deal with later, when she wasn’t being asked to bare her soul.
“Ever think that maybe I don’t want to tell you because maybe it’s none of your business?”
His gaze remained steady.
“Tell me what happened, Zoe,” he said quietly.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows and wriggled to the edge of the bed.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Home, where nobody hassles me.” She reached for her clothes, but Liam was suddenly on his feet, kicking them away from her.
She tried to get past him but he grabbed her and pushed her back onto the bed. Before she could recover he was on top of her, his superior weight and strength pinning her to the mattress.
“I might just be a glorified grease monkey, but I know this is important. Talk to me, Zoe.”
She glared at him. He wasn’t going to give up. She pushed at his shoulders.
“Get off me,” she said.
“I knew a woman once who had a scar like that,” he said, his gaze holding hers. “She’d had a cesarean. Did you have a baby, Zoe? Is that what happened?”
God, the irony. His guess was almost funny. Almost.
“Get. Off. Me.”
Slowly he rolled to one side. She stared at the ceiling and took a deep breath.
“You want to know what happened? Fine. I had an ectopic pregnancy. I lost my right ovary and my uterus. I can’t ever have children. Happy now?”
7
ZOE’S WORDS HUNG in the air. Liam didn’t know what to do, what to say. He didn’t know what he’d expected her to reveal, but not this.
“Jesus. I’m sorry, Zoe.”
She shrugged a shoulder. “It was a long time ago.”
Like it was no big deal.
“Some things never get easier.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the ceiling. “It is what it is. No point getting all cut up over something that’s never going to be any different.”
Her jaw was clenched, her hands curled into fists.
“You’re allowed to be pissed off,” he said.
“Like I said, it was so long ago, I can’t remember things being any different.”
He frowned. That was the second time she’d referred to her pregnancy happening some time ago.
“How old were you?”
“Nearly sixteen. Just another stupid drunk kid at a party doing stupid drunk things.”
Nearly sixteen. She’d gotten pregnant right after he’d left. Tom’s words from the other day flashed across his mind. She took your leaving hard. Really hard.
He swore and sat up. There was no way the timing was a coincidence.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, dragging both hands through his hair.
The Zoe he’d known back then would never have gotten drunk at a party. He knew exactly the kind of demons that drove kids to drink to excess, and she hadn’t had it in her.
Not until he’d come into her life.
“It happens every day,” she said. “Kids get carried away, don’t think about the consequences.
I’m a walking cautionary tale.”
He looked at her. He knew the truth.
“It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been around.”
“You’re psychic now, are you?” she asked.
“It wouldn’t have happened.”
She broke eye contact and shrugged. “I was just unlucky, that’s all. Maybe if Marty Johannsen hadn’t walked me home—”
“Marty Johannsen!”
Marty was a weak bully and exactly the kind of sleazy prick who’d take advantage of Zoe when she was drunk. The thought of him being her first, of him pushing himself inside her and destroying all her sweetness made Liam want to hurt something.
“Tell me Tom beat the shit out of him afterward,” he asked grimly. “Tell me he rearranged his face.”
“It wasn’t rape, Liam. I knew exactly what I was doing.”
He swore again and paced to the bedroom door and back again. He understood what she was saying. She’d slept with Marty to forget him, to get over him. Because he’d walked out on her, refused to take what she’d so generously, innocently offered.
Life’s great irony: he’d left to save her from himself and she’d thrown herself away on a dumb asshole who hadn’t cared enough to protect her.
Zoe stood and began collecting her clothes.
“You wanted to know. That’s the only reason I told you. It’s my business, nobody else’s,” she said. She held her bundled clothes against her belly.
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” he said, glaring at her. “This is my business. This is absolutely my business.”
“No, Liam, it isn’t. You weren’t there.”
She walked out the door without another word. He was so angry he doubled his hand into a fist and slammed it into the wall. Plaster gave and the wall shook. He stared at the hole he’d made and forced himself to take deep breaths down into his belly.
A minute later he heard Zoe’s car start up in the driveway.
He didn’t know where to put himself. He was furious, the discipline of years the only thing keeping him from losing it completely. He pushed his feet into his gym shoes and pulled on underwear, a pair of shorts and a tank. He grabbed his boxing gloves and jogged the short distance to the local gym.
He sweated it out on the long bag for over an hour, throwing punches until his shoulders and chest burned and his legs ached. No one approached him or said a word. Finally he let his fists fall to his sides. His breathing was ragged, his clothes plastered to him with sweat. He sank down onto a nearby bench and drank deeply from his water bottle.
His anger was gone, burned out. All he had left was heavy regret and bone-deep sympathy for Zoe. She’d ma
de one mistake, one choice, and it had changed her life. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, he was part of that decision. He knew in his gut that there was no way she would have thrown herself away on a guy like Marty Johannsen if Liam hadn’t hurt her. And he would have to live with that knowledge, just as Zoe lived with the scar on her belly and the reality of her inability to have children.
He remembered what she’d said to him in his office yesterday afternoon: I’m not the girl you knew twelve years ago.
Now that he could see straight, he wanted to go to her and hold her and say all the reassuring things he should have said when she told him her secret. He wanted to tell her she was beautiful and brave. He wanted to tell her that she was worth so much more than the price she put on herself. He wanted to tell her that she was special and amazing and that she always had been—
and that nothing would ever change that, no matter what she thought or believed.
But he couldn’t. Now, more than ever, he had to keep his distance. She was a woman who needed to be adored, nurtured, cherished, a woman who needed to understand exactly how loved she was. And he was a man who could only offer a few nights of sex and nothing more. He was only going to hurt her and mess himself up if he kept giving in to the need to be with her.
His jaw set, Liam left the gym and slowly walked home. He had a shower then spent a restless hour watching the weekend football highlights. He didn’t give a toss who had won or who was looking good to make the finals.
He couldn’t shake the image of Zoe sitting at home alone in her apartment, brooding over what had happened between them today. He couldn’t forget the dead, flat sound of her voice as she matter-of-factly told him about what had happened to her.
Out of desperation, he picked up the phone. He called Jacinta and set up a time to see her the next evening. Then he called Tom Ford for the second time in a week.
Zoe was going to be angry when she found out, but she couldn’t stop him from helping her. It was either this, or give in to the urge to find her and hold her and be a part of her life.
In other words, no choice. But he’d never had a lot of choices where Zoe was concerned.
ZOE WAS TEMPTED to get wasted again that night. But it hadn’t escaped her attention that alcohol had become her refuge of choice over the past week or so. She knew from past experience that she was only setting herself up for an almighty fall if she kept numbing herself with vodka and bourbon.
Hands clasped tightly around her knees, she sat in the middle of her bed and tried to think of something other than drink to help get rid of the ache in her chest.
This was why she hadn’t wanted to tell Liam her secret. No good ever came of dredging up the past, talking about stuff that was done and dusted.
And now he knew. Every time he looked at her, he would think about what had happened, about her scar, about her…emptiness. It would always be there between them.
She wished she could forget the look on his face when he’d understood what had happened and who it had happened with. He’d been so angry. She’d felt it radiating off him like heat. Useless to pretend some of that anger hadn’t been for her. She’d made a stupid choice. And, yes, she’d suffered the consequences. But the fact remained, she’d chosen to lie down with Marty Johannsen. Everything else had spun out from that one foolish, reckless choice.
Of course Liam was angry with her. Why wouldn’t he be? She’d been angry with herself for years.
One thing was for sure—their fling was over before it had ever really started. Which was just as well. She’d kidded herself that it was only about sex, that the heat between her and Liam was all desire and unrequited lust. There was too much of the past mixed up in her attraction to him. It would be very easy to let herself start to believe in something that would never be.
She knew exactly how much she had to offer a man—not enough. Certainly not enough for a man like Liam, a man who had the world at his feet. He might say he wasn’t interested in a relationship, that he wasn’t “good relationship material” but he wasn’t even thirty yet. He’d change. They all did. And when he did decide to commit to someone, it wouldn’t be to a messed-up, angry, half woman who brought nothing to the table except a tattoo gun and a stray cat.
But what was new about that? Every serious adult relationship she’d had had foundered on her inability to have children. She’d learned that it was only when the option to have children wasn’t there that most men understood how important it was to them. They might not want kids tomorrow, they might not even want them at all, but they wanted the choice to be theirs, not a foregone conclusion.
But the really stupid, stupid thing was that despite knowing the score, despite telling herself that she’d been playing with fire every time she slept with Liam and that it was just sex at the end of the day, just body parts bumping in the night, her chest still ached with loss and misplaced grief.
What did she have to grieve, for Pete’s sake? An almost fling with an old crush? It meant nothing, less than nothing.
Sick of herself, she went to bed early and tossed and turned all night. She woke feeling gritty-eyed and exhausted. It wasn’t until she was in the shower that she remembered her brother’s message from earlier in the week.
She’d never actually got around to returning Tom’s phone call to discuss his invitation to lunch today. No accident there. If she didn’t call, she wasn’t committed either way.
But as she shampooed her hair, she was hit with a sudden, piercing desire to be surrounded by family. Her brother infuriated her at times with his misguided attempts to help her, but he loved her and she loved him. And Jane was a gem, the kind of woman she would have chosen for her brother if she’d been asked to go wife shopping for him. Then there were the kids—Danny, Caleb and Rachel. Zoe smiled as she remembered the elaborate handshake they’d invented between them the last time she’d visited: their secret, aunty shake, a special greeting reserved just for her.
She would go. She’d been foolish to stay away for so long. Pride had played a part. And—if she was being honest—fear. She’d already screwed up so much of her life, she didn’t want to lose her brother. Equally, she refused to give up the things that made her who she was. Her tattooing, the band. Somehow Tom was going to have to come to terms with that if they were going to see each other more than once or twice a year.
She dressed in her least-provocative jeans, boots and T-shirt and went next door to ask her elderly neighbour, Nola, if she would mind keeping an eye on Lucky and the kittens. Then she hit the road.
Her stomach danced with nerves as she turned onto the leafy, gracious Hawthorn Street where her brother and his family lived. She should have called to confirm she was coming. Of course she should have. Tom would just assume she wasn’t, since she hadn’t responded to his message.
She’d effectively be turning up on his doorstep unannounced and unexpected.
Zoe made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat, annoyed with her own dithering.
This was her brother. He could deal with a semiunexpected visit from his sister.
She found a parking spot on the street and made her way up the front path. The doorbell echoed loudly in the house and she heard the thump of little feet running up the hallway. Then Rachel was squealing with delight as she opened the door.
“Aunty Zoe, Aunty Zoe!” she said in her high little girl’s voice, jumping up and down with excitement. She began struggling with the lock on the security door, standing on tiptoes to reach it. Through the security mesh Zoe could see she was wearing a fairy outfit, complete with wings.
Zoe’s heart squeezed in her chest.
“Hey, sweetheart. Don’t you look pretty,” she said.
“Wait up, honey.” Her brother’s voice came from down the hallway. “You know you’re supposed to wait for one of us to open the door with you.”
“But it’s Aunty Zoe!” Rachel said, as if that excused all sins.
Tom reached the door and she saw the surpri
se in his eyes as he registered that his wayward sister really was standing on the doorstep.
“Zoe,” he said. He shook his head as if to clear it, then flicked the door open and held it wide.
“God. It’s good to see you. We didn’t think you were coming.”
He stepped forward and hauled her into his arms, squeezing her tight. Zoe squeezed him back, resting her cheek on his shoulder.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was going to call. I just never got around to it.”
“Forget it. It’s good to see you.”
They stepped back from their embrace and eyed each other. He’d put on a little weight, she noticed. He looked happy. She wondered what changes he saw in her.
“Come on in,” he said. “I was just about to fire up the barbecue. As usual, Jane has enough food to feed a small army. She must have sensed something.”
He was leading her to the family room at the back of the house.
“She’ll be in heaven—two extra mouths to feed,” he said.
Zoe frowned. Did Tom mean she wasn’t the only guest? She’d kind of been counting on this being a private reunion.
Then her step faltered as she entered the living room and saw the broad-shouldered figure leaning casually against the kitchen counter. Liam’s dark gaze seemed to pin her from across the room.
“What are you doing here?” she asked rudely.
8
LIAM TOSSED A NUT into his mouth and crunched down on it, supremely at his ease.
“Visiting. Same as you,” he said.
Her brother’s hand landed on the small of her back and urged her forward, almost as though he understood that her first impulse upon seeing Liam was to turn tail and run.
“Zoe. It’s so good to see you. Wow, your hair has grown so long,” Jane said, rounding the counter to embrace Zoe.
Tom moved to the back door and hollered into the yard.
“Guys, guess who’s come to visit?”
Zoe tore her gaze from Liam’s unreadable face as her nephews came barreling into the house.
She could feel Liam watching her as she greeted her two nephews.
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