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‘Let’s get out of here...’ She flashed him a tight smile when she saw him, and Ben wondered whether that was a suggestion or a plea. He cleared a path for her through people who were milling around them and she followed, silent now and without the smiles that had accompanied her conversations with the families of the men on the fishing boat.

Ben headed for the shaded surgery, knowing that was probably the one place that they could be alone.

CHAPTER SIX

THE NIGHTMARES THAT had been kept at bay for so long had begun to gain focus. As Arianna had begun to relax after the hard work of building her practice they’d become more frequent, and now...

Now they were starting to leak out into he

r days. Last night they’d been terrifyingly clear and when she’d gone down to the harbour this morning, the sound of the ferry horn had made her jump. The bobbing motion of her own boat had brought tears to her eyes, and then she’d brushed them away, telling herself that she’d see Ben soon.

His presence, and then the urgency of their mission to the stranded boat, had chased her fears away. But as soon as they’d left the injured men on the mainland and she had time to think again, she’d felt suddenly sick, pointless questions echoing in her head. What if...? What if somehow she could go back through time, and the doctor’s boat could provide willing hands to pull her brother from the water? Her father had built a new dock for the ferry, to make sure that day could never happen again. She’d come here to make sure that there would be medical help available without having to send to the mainland. None of it seemed enough, because nothing could prevent what had already happened.

Ben walked beside her, back to the surgery, without saying a word. There was something companionable in the silence, as if he understood everything that she was feeling. Even if that was comforting, Arianna desperately needed someone to understand and it felt that Ben, or at least her own fantasy of him, always had understood her.

She made it to the building that housed the surgery, proud of the way that her hand was steady when she took the keys from her bag and unlocked the door. Good. Fine. She was doing okay. Her footsteps sounded on the tiled floor and she opened the door into the surgery. Light slanted through the blinds, the same way that it had filtered down through the water when she’d found herself sinking beneath the waves...

‘Hey, there.’ She felt Ben’s arms around her shoulders and squeezed her eyes shut.

‘I’m not crying...’

‘No. Of course you’re not. Never occurred to me that you were.’

Okay, so she was crying. And her limbs were shaking too, against the quiet strength of his body.

‘I’m fine. Really. Pretend it didn’t happen.’

She felt his chest heave in a sigh. ‘Pretend what didn’t happen? The whole of the last twenty-five years?’

That was the glue that held them together. A lifetime that had been spent dealing with the fallout of what had happened that day on the ferry, and Ben’s uncanny ability to understand that. His life had been changed by that day as well.

‘I’m just... This is crazy.’ She pulled away from him, wiping her eyes. ‘I’m not going to dwell on the past, Ben. I’ve never done that.’

He nodded. The smile that hovered at the corners of his mouth had a hint of reproach in it.

‘What?’ Whatever it was, he might as well just come out and say it.

‘You’ve told me your whole life story, and you’ve not once been sorry for yourself...’

Arianna frowned at him. ‘There’s a but in there, isn’t there.’

‘You want to hear this?’

No. Something told her that she really, really didn’t want to hear it. But his eyes were mesmerising, and they wouldn’t let her go.

‘Probably not. Say it anyway.’

‘I think you’ve worked hard and that you’re making a difference, but you can’t enjoy that because you’re still the little girl who’s so bound up with her parents’ grief that she won’t show her own. You’re still trying to prove to everyone that you’re not the second-best child who survived, but you can’t prove it to yourself.’

The emotion swelled inside her.

‘How dare you?’ Before Arianna knew what she was doing she’d raised her hand, ready to slap him. He didn’t even flinch and that somehow made her behaviour even worse. Tears of frustration started to well in her eyes and she brushed them away impatiently.

‘I’m sorry, Ben. This isn’t all about me, I know that.’

‘Do it.’ His eyes taunted her. ‘It would be the first really honest thing you’ve done.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’


Tags: Annie Claydon Billionaire Romance