Caroline Anderson, Josie Metcalfe, Maggie Kingsley, Margaret McDonagh

by Brides of Penhally Bay Vol. 03 (li

  Still, it was kind of the man to spare the time to talk to her like this, especially when he must be longing to get back home to his bed. But all Emily could think was that it was wasted on her when she would far rather that it was Zayed comforting her. And it could have been, except she’d been stupid enough to send him away.

  ‘The sky’s always darkest just before the dawn,’ she could hear Beabea’s voice saying as she drove slowly down the driveway, but it seemed as if this night was never going to end in the bright promise of a new day.

  She halted at the junction with Mevagissey Road, knowing she ought to turn left to go back to the cottage, but suddenly she couldn’t face going there.

  There was only one place she could go while her emotions were in such turmoil and that was her secret thinking place on the beach, the hidden nook among the rocks that had played host to almost every decision she’d ever made about her life—whether she really cared at thirteen years of age that stuck-up Melanie Philp didn’t want to be her best friend any more; whether to cut her waist-length hair really short before her school leavers’ Ball to make herself look more grown-up and ready for the big wide world; whether to specialise in paediatrics or surgery, and so many other milestones, great and small.

  She parked her car at the top of the cliff in the car park near the steps and made her way down to the beach, glad of the thick cardigan she’d grabbed off the back seat. September was going fast and even though the weather was still beautifully warm by day, at this time of the morning, she could feel that autumn was not so far away.

  Beabea had always said that autumn was her favourite time of the year, the season that showed the fulfilment of all the promise of spring and the burgeoning of summer in harvests of fruit and vegetables to sustain them through the winter. She’d especially loved the fabulous displays of colour as the deciduous trees began to shut down for their winter rest.

  ‘I’m sorry you missed the leaves turning colour,’ she whispered into the breeze, her heart heavy at the thought that she’d never again come home to a kitchen table covered in a display of brilliantly hued leaves that her grandmother had collected on her walk that day. But even though she hated the thought that she was now all alone in the world, she couldn’t in all conscience have wanted Beabea to linger long enough to see the leaves one last time, not with the level of medication it had taken at the end to control her pain.

  ‘Emily,’ said the voice she most wanted to hear, and she closed her eyes tightly against the imagined sound, wishing it were real and regretting again that she’d sent Zayed away.

  Why had it seemed so important that she show the world that she had the strength to deal with this loss alone? Why couldn’t she simply have admitted just how good it would have felt to lean on him and borrow his strength for a little while?

  She was sitting here feeling frozen inside, hardly daring to allow herself to imagine what the days and weeks ahead would be like because she was afraid to.

  There! She’d admitted it.

  It was all very good saying that she’d coped with loss before and had dealt with it, but the last time she’d had Beabea there to hold her while she’d fallen apart and put herself back together. This time she would have no one because she’d sent away the only person she wanted near her.

  In fact, she needed him to be with her so much that a moment ago she had even imagined that she’d heard his voice swirling around her in the chill of the early morning breeze.

  ‘Emily?’ The sound of those liquid syllables couldn’t belong to anyone else, and she opened her eyes to peer eagerly into the darkness, knowing with a sudden leap of joy that Zayed had come to find her. Was there enough light for him to be able to find this place again? Would he be able to find her in the darkness?

  ‘Zayed. I’m here,’ she managed with a rusty croak to her voice as tears of relief began to threaten. She couldn’t even get to her feet as the events of the last few hours finally overwhelmed her. ‘I’m here,’ she repeated, but he was already there in front of her, darker than the darkness surrounding them, arms strong and shoulders broad as he wrapped them around her and invited her to rest her head against him.

  ‘Oh, Zayed,’ she whimpered as she burrowed into him, finally knowing that she had found a safe refuge before the storm broke, and with that thought the tears started to fall.

  Even as he wondered what on earth he was supposed to say to her, Zayed ignored the brief flash of panic and simply tightened his hold on the sobbing woman in his arms.

  There was no sign now of the dedicated young doctor eager to learn everything he could teach her, or of the empathetic young woman who voluntarily spent her time visiting the convalescent children in his house. This was the young girl whose parents were already long gone and who had just lost the only close relative she had left in the world.

  When he hadn’t been able to wait any longer for her to contact him, he’d driven back to the hospice to discover that her car wasn’t there any more. As he’d already established that it wasn’t parked at the cottage, there was only one other place he knew to look.

  And, just as he’d guessed, she’d been here in her special place, probably doing nothing more than staring blindly out to sea, feeling numb with disbelief that her beloved Beabea had gone.

  He pressed his cheek gently to her head, easily able to empathise with her grief even as he drew in the fresh herbal scent of her shampoo mixed with the underlying essence that was pure Emily.

  In his head he could admit just how much he was drawn to her…had been drawn to her from the first time he’d caught sight of her.

  To have her in his arms like this, even in such devastating circumstances, was almost enough to make him feel whole again—for all the good it could ever do him.

  If he were into self-delusion, he might dream that she could be satisfied with someone who would never really be a whole man again, but why would she?

  Emily Livingston was a woman with the whole world at her fingertips, talented, intelligent, beautiful and able to take her pick of any man she wanted. It certainly hadn’t escaped his notice that she had every single man in the department lusting after her, to say nothing of the less faithful married ones. Not that she paid any of them any attention, far less accepted their invitations.

  What chance would a man who wasn’t even a countryman of hers have with a woman so quintessentially English?

  A sudden smile flicked across his face when he replayed that last thought. It was a good job that he hadn’t voiced it aloud or he would have been shot down in flames.

  Not English! Cornish! she would have corrected him proudly. And don’t you forget it!

  ‘I’m sorry,’ hiccuped that same voice from somewhere under his chin. ‘I didn’t mean to blubber all over you.’

  ‘You may blubber all you like,’ he invited. ‘You know it is an important part of the grieving process.’ But it seemed as though the storm was beginning to abate.

  ‘Did you?’ she asked when she finally broke the silence again.

  ‘Did I what?’ Had he missed a part of the conversation while he’d examined…and dismissed…the idea of asking her to accompany him back to his country? Even if she were to agree to the idea, how long would it be before she realised that she didn’t want to stay with a man without honour; the sort of coward who had let his wife and son die without doing a thing to save them; the sort of man who had fled his country and the never-ending nightmares without doing his utmost to bring justice down on the murderers who’d killed his family.

  ‘Did you cry when you grieved?’ she asked softly, but the question had all the impact of the original explosion.

  It completely short-circuited his thought processes so that he couldn’t brush it aside the way he’d done in the past. This time the only thing that came out of his mouth was the raw, unvarnished truth.

  ‘No, I did not cry, because I did not have the right,’ he admitted hoarsely. ‘How could I play the wronged husband robbed of his family when it
was so much my fault that they died?’

  He heard the sharp hiss of her indrawn breath and steeled himself to feel her withdraw from him in disgust.

  She did pull back a little way but only so that she could glare up at him in the half-light of the early dawn with eyes that reminded him of those of an angry cat.

  ‘So you set the explosion, did you?’ she challenged. ‘You invited your wife and child to stand there while you detonated it and then you deliberately did nothing to save their lives?’

  ‘No, I did not make the bomb or detonate it,’ he said, impatient that she was deliberately misunderstanding him. ‘But they died because I did not do anything to save them.’

  ‘Because you yourself were seriously injured,’ she broke in sharply, but he dismissed that argument the way he always did. He was a doctor with the skill to save lives, therefore he should have been able to save his wife and child. ‘And has anything been done to track down the people who perpetrated this atrocity?’ she continued, apparently only too happy to ignore her own problems by occupying her thoughts with his.

  ‘That would be difficult, considering the ones who caused it are the ones who would be charged with investigating it,’ he fired back hotly, and could have cursed aloud at his indiscretion.

  ‘You mean, you know who killed them?’ she demanded incredulously. ‘And they are not in prison?’

  He closed his eyes and counted to twenty, then again backwards to one, but still the only thing that felt right was to tell her everything—that his was a family divided, with an uncle who had craved power enough to try to wipe out any opposition, including his own brother, while conveniently placing the blame on fundamentalist extremists.

  ‘Is there any way of proving this?’ she asked, and his heart swelled with unaccustomed elation when he realised that her outrage was clearly on his behalf—he could tell that just by looking at her as the sun started to peep over the horizon.

  ‘Not unless I go back to Xandar and confront him,’ he said. ‘And then, only if he didn’t arrange to have me killed before I could do it.’

  ‘But then? Would you be free to stay in Xandar and set up another department for your little patients?’

  ‘That would be irrelevant because I will not be going back,’ he said firmly, suddenly struck by the realisation that this time it wasn’t the situation in Xandar that was ruling his decision but the fact that going back to take on such a project would mean breaking the promise he’d made to Emily’s grandmother.

  And if there was one thing he hated doing, it was breaking promises.

  He’d been brought up to be an honourable man, and even though his bride had been chosen for him for political reasons, he’d had every intention of laying down his life to protect her and any family they had. So the fact that they’d died while he lived felt like an indelible stain on his character.

  Except…would the promise wrung out of him by Emily’s grandmother be a way to lessen that stain? If he were to succeed at taking care of the grieving woman in his arms, would he be able to hold his head up again? Would it be the second chance that Emily had spoken of?

  The two situations were not in the least similar. Xandar and all its political turmoil was so very different from peaceful Cornwall, and Leika had been the wife chosen for him, while Emily…

  He paused in his thoughts, wondering exactly how he should categorise the person who had brought sunshine into his life just by entering it.

  If he were being fanciful, he could say that she, too, had been chosen for him, by her grandmother, placed in his care by an unbreakable promise.

  And just why did that thought fill him with dismay and set his pulse racing with excitement at the same time?

  ‘I’m dreading going home,’ Emily admitted in a small voice still thick with the threat of tears. ‘It was bad enough when Beabea moved to the hospice, but at least she was still almost within sight of the cottage. Now…’

  ‘So come to live with me instead,’ Zayed heard himself say with a sense of disbelief.

  ‘Live with me…’ Emily’s heart stood still as those words wrapped around her, then it started beating again at twice the pace.

  ‘You want us to live together?’ The suggestion was so unexpected that she was having difficulty believing that she’d heard him correctly.

  ‘Would that be so bad?’ he asked. ‘You have already said that you do not want to go to your own home and you seem to enjoy yourself at mine.’

  ‘But that’s not what you just said,’ she pointed out, scared by her bravery but needing to have everything spelt out in words of one syllable. Her heart was involved here, and she’d already had it broken enough times for one lifetime. ‘You invited me to live with you, so I need to know whether that was some sort of proposal or…’ Emily could feel her cheeks burning with the fear that she was making a monumental fool of herself.

  ‘I should warn you,’ she continued without giving him time to reply, ‘just because Beabea’s gone, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to…to drop my standards.’

  That didn’t mean that she wasn’t tempted to, she admitted silently. Zayed was everything she wanted and she’d fallen deeply in love with him in the short time she’d known him, but she could never be happy with anything less than marriage.

  Then there was the fact that he was still carrying so much baggage…so much unwarranted guilt.

  ‘Drop your standards?’ he repeated with a frown that was easily visible now that the light was strengthening behind the cliff at their backs, making the sea look as if it stretched away from them like a rippled silver sheet all the way to the horizon.

  ‘It wouldn’t feel right to move in with a man without the benefit of marriage,’ she said, and cringed when she heard how prim and proper she sounded.

  He stiffened against her and she had an awful feeling that she knew exactly what he was going to say when he finally broke the uncomfortable silence.

  ‘I am sorry, Emily, but I had not thought to marry again because I have nothing to offer a woman.’

  ‘Nothing to offer?’ This time it was her turn to look puzzled as she leant back far enough to focus directly on his face. ‘What do you mean, nothing to offer? You’re an intelligent, hard-working man who also happens to be extremely good-looking, and you do a difficult job extremely well.’

  ‘Thank you for that testimonial,’ he said wryly, ‘but there is one thing that can never be changed, no matter how much you might want to.’ The harsh tone of his words drew her eyes up to his to see that dreadful empty look return. She wanted to reach up to cradle his cheek in her hand but somehow knew that this was not a time when he would be comfortable accepting gestures of caring.

  ‘The explosion did not just injure my back,’ he continued gruffly. ‘The surgeons were convinced that the situation would improve but it looks as if the condition is permanent.’

  ‘Condition?’ She could feel the tension tightening still further in his body and knew he would rather be up on his feet and striding around on the sand than sitting here among the rocks with an argumentative, weepy woman in his arms.

  ‘I can never have another child,’ he said bluntly, the words exploding out of him. ‘It appears that some connections from my spine to my…my masculinity…have been damaged.’

  ‘And you think I would only marry a man if he could give me a child?’ she exclaimed as she leapt to her feet, uncertain whether to be insulted that he might think that of her or sad that the idea would have occurred to him in the first place. ‘I would never even think to do that because, to me, a child is just the byproduct of a marriage. A wonderful byproduct, if you are lucky enough, but the most important people in any marriage will always be the two people who make their vows.’

  He rose more slowly and she wondered guiltily whether that time spent with her weight pressing down on him might have stressed his injuries and put back his recovery programme. But one look at his expression told her that the ever-present pain in his back was the last thing
on his mind.

  It was obvious that he had serious reservations about where the two of them went from here, but she refused to be embarrassed about her assumption that he was making some kind of proposal. If she hadn’t, they wouldn’t be having this conversation and she’d never have learned about the hidden consequences of his injuries.

  ‘We both need time to think about this,’ she said firmly, even though she already knew exactly what she wanted. It was desperately sad that he would never be able to have a child of his own, because the more she’d seen of him the more she’d realised that he would have been a perfect father.

  But even if it meant she could never have a child of her own, she would count herself lucky if she had Zayed by her side for the rest of her life.

  ‘In the meantime, there’s work and plenty of it waiting for us at St Piran’s,’ she declared.

  ‘Not for you. Not today,’ he said with a shake of his head. He held out one lean hand in invitation to accompany him back up the steps to the car park at the top of the cliff.

  Emily held back a moment, finding that she was dreading the start of the new day and loath to end this ‘time out of time’ together.

  Behind him, she could see the first of the early-bird surfers paddling out to catch their first wave of the morning, oblivious to the events of the night that had changed her life for ever.

  Zayed turned to follow her gaze, watching the first figure leap agilely to its feet to guide the board so that it received the full force of the incoming wave, before he flicked a glance in her direction. ‘And you think you could teach me to do that?’ he said in tones of disbelief.

  ‘It’s possible, even for someone of your great age,’ she teased, but the mention of age brought back other memories that spoiled her enjoyment of the tranquil scene.

  ‘What will you do today?’ he asked as they climbed the cliff, and the thought that he would soon be going to work while she was condemned to spend the time alone was depressing.