by Lucy Ryder
Not yet.
‘Were they lying?’ he demanded.
As if her answer mattered to him.
And how she wanted it to matter to him. But she couldn’t afford for it to matter that way because she wasn’t ready to explain herself. She didn’t want to make some throw-away remark as though calling it off four years ago, on the eve of her wedding to gentle, loving George, hadn’t been the hardest decision she’d ever had to make.
She waited for the familiar punch of guilt that she’d always felt when she thought of her ex-fiancé but, for once, it didn’t come. Instead, her body was blazing. Singing. A veritable orchestra playing with all the fanfare of the Last Night of the Proms. All because of the man standing right in front of her now. Which could only say something deeply worrying about herself as a woman.
‘Were they lying, Mattie?’ Kane ground out.
‘No. They weren’t lying.’
That had been her intention. It just hadn’t happened. But she didn’t say that.
‘Why would you give up the career you’d dreamt of all your life for a wedding?’ he demanded. ‘Just because your husband is an earl?’
Without warning, he plucked her hand from his arm as if he couldn’t bear her to be touching him a moment longer. Then his palm stilled as it held her fingers and he lifted her hand to examine it. Deep furrows pulled between his eyes for a fraction of a second before he quickly smoothed them out. His eyes raked over her face, leaving it feel as though a fire was raging under every inch of her skin.
‘No ring?’ Was it her imagination or was his voice deliberately neutral? ‘Why not?’
A thousand little detonations went off inside Mattie at the unexpected contact, yet she couldn’t pretend it was an intrusion. Still, it was easier to tell herself that her body was reacting out of shock, rather than anything else. Certainly not some kind of chemistry. Just as she told herself that she wasn’t leaving her hand in his because she liked it, but rather that snatching it back would only have proved to him that he was getting under her skin.
She wasn’t even sure that she believed her excuses.
‘Not married,’ she managed, at last.
The silence was so long that, for a moment, she wondered if she’d suddenly lost her hearing.
‘No perfect husband?’ His voice snagged over her. Rough, like sandpaper, making her skin prickle and her voice choke up.
‘No husband.’
And just like that something...shifted between them. She felt it with every raised, fine hair on her skin, and in every cell of her body. And she felt it in the way the air thickened around them. As if creating some bubble around her and Kane. An airwall between them and the rest of the world.
He took a step nearer to her. So close she could feel the heat seeping from his body into hers. Melting her. He dipped his head, centimetres from hers, then stopped, his warm, vaguely minty breath dancing over her skin.
He was going to kiss her and, heaven help her, she wanted him to.
‘What went wrong?’ he asked softly, making her blink.
What was wrong with her? He was after answers and all she could think about was kissing him. She was such an idiot.
‘That’s none of your business.’ She sucked in a sharp breath.
What was she going to tell Kane? That she’d spent ten years thinking she’d got over him, thinking that she’d found the perfect man in George Blakeney, only for her to look up and imagine—at her damned wedding rehearsal dinner—that she’d seen Kane standing in that room.
As shameful as that was.
She could still remember that awful night with heart-breaking clarity. Even now, if she closed her eyes, she could remember exactly how she’d felt standing on that stage next to her future husband, a gentle sort of happiness fizzing inside her as they’d addressed their guests and looked forward to their wedding the following weekend. She recalled smiling out into the sea of loving, happy, laughing faces, all the well-wishers who had travelled so far to be with them, and how that bubble had popped in an instant the moment she’d thought she’d seen Kane standing at the back—as bleak and imposing as ever.
Worse still was the dangerous thrill that had rushed her entire body at the thought that he had finally, finally come back to her.
She remembered swaying. Clutching at George’s arm just to stop herself from toppling off the stage. She’d turned to look at George and then back into the crowd, and in that instant Kane had disappeared. Gone up in a puff of smoke, which was apt since he’d never really been there in the first place. She’d been imagining him, conjuring him up because really, deep down, however happy she’d been with George, there had always been that cloud, hovering just in her periphery. However much she’d loved her fiancé, there had always been that little piece missing.
She’d spent fourteen years pretending otherwise, but the simple fact was that Kane Wheeler had stolen the very core of her heart years ago, and she’d never really had it to give to anyone else.
But that didn’t mean she had to stand here like the gauche, helplessly-in-love teenager she’d once been. She was a successful doctor. An army major. It was time to act like it.
‘You were right, Kane,’ Mattie bit out. ‘I should get back to work.’
‘Mattie...’ His voice corkscrewed around her, twisting her, bending her to his will the way he always had done.
She couldn’t let him.
It was...interesting to see you again.’ She forced herself to take a step back and break all contact. It made things a little better, though not enough for her liking.
‘I’ll buy you a coffee,’ he announced abruptly, his tone suggesting that his brain hadn’t entirely engaged with his mouth when he’d blurted out the offer, such as it was.
It was ignominious how tempted she was to agree. Had it ever been so hard to shake her head instead of nod?
‘Sorry, but right now I have work to do. A long shift so I won’t even be finished until the early hours.’
What did she say that for?
‘Tomorrow night, then.’
She wanted to say yes. Oh, how she wanted to.
‘Tomorrow night, I’m meeting friends. And, Hayden, it’s a celebration.’ Stop waffling, she ordered herself. Sucking in a breath, she made her brain focus. ‘Thanks for the offer, though. Perhaps we’ll run into each other again in another fourteen years.’
And then, before the less rational part of her brain could talk her round, she turned and left.
Walking away from Kane for the first time ever.
Copyright © 2020 by Charlotte Hawkes
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ISBN-13: 9781488066726
Tempted by the Heart Surgeon
Copyright © 2020 by Bev Riley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.<
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