‘I’ll walk you out to your car,’ Luke offered.
‘No need, thanks. I’m walking.’
‘I’ll come anyway,’ Luke said infuriatingly. ‘I need to grab my shaving gear from my car. Besides, we haven’t even said hello properly, Beth.’
Beth ignored the quirk of Mike’s eyebrow but she could feel her shoulders slump as she turned away. On top of discussing her famous father, she could just imagine how interested Chelsea and Maureen would be to hear that Luke was insisting on escorting her out of the building.
Her first shift at Ocean View hospital was ending with just as much of a disaster as it had begun with. Beth was in no mood to give a polite response to Luke’s query about how she was.
‘I would have been a lot better if you hadn’t told Mike who my father was.’
Luke looked justifiably taken aback by her sharp tone. ‘What’s the problem? He is your father.’
Beth couldn’t deny it, however much she would have preferred to. ‘I came to Hereford to make a new start,’ she said curtly. ‘My family was one of the things I was more than happy to leave behind. Now I’m going to have everybody I meet asking questions.’
The calm, early morning sunshine that they emerged into made the drama of the last six hours seem totally unreal. This conversation with Luke seemed just as unreal. How crazy that they could slip back into an argument the first time they got to talk to each other.
‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Luke didn’t sound sorry at all. ‘But what’s so wrong with your family? If he was my father I’d be proud of what he’s achieved in his career.’
‘Yeah…you would.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
The tone was enough to force Beth to slow her pace and turn to face Luke. He looked so tired, she thought. And annoyed. And genuinely puzzled.
‘Your opinion of my father was always higher than mine.’
‘I only met the man once. If you remember, you kept me away from your family for so long I thought you were an orphan.’ Luke shook his head. ‘For heaven’s sake, Beth. When did you start hating your father?’
‘I don’t hate him. I don’t hate any of my family. They’re strangers.’ Beth’s anger was more than ready to spill out. Gone were the days when she had responded to a conflict by bottling things up. ‘We were just an item to add to our parents’ CVs. Our son, the cardiologist. Our daughter, the paediatrician. Oh, there’s Beth, of course, but the only thing she ever did that we really approved of was to produce Luke Savage as a potential son-in-law.’
Luke had stopped walking completely now. He was staring at Beth with that look she had seen earlier. The one that implied she was a total stranger.
He opened his mouth but Beth didn’t give him a chance to say anything.
‘I wanted to escape from that “not living up to the family tradition” rubbish. Now, thanks to you, that’s going to be impossible.’
Luke merely blinked. ‘Was that all you came to Hereford to escape from?’
‘What?’
‘Is there anything else I should know about so I don’t put my foot in my mouth and make your new start any more difficult for you?’ Luke didn’t actually sound as though he was trying to be helpful. His polite tone had a distinct edge of sarcasm. ‘Have you left a boyfriend behind as well perhaps? Or a husband maybe?’
The tone pushed a button Beth had almost forgotten about. As if he cared about any answer she might supply!
‘A fiancé, actually.’
The effect on Luke was quite satisfying. His jaw dropped. ‘You’re engaged?’
‘Not any more.’
Luke’s expression became carefully blank, as though a switch had been thrown. ‘Who finished it?’ he asked quietly. ‘You…or him?’
‘Me.’ Beth glared at Luke. Just how much of her past was going to be dragged up before she could even find some time alone to come to terms with it all? It had gone beyond any kind of joke, however unfunny. Right now, it felt like her entire life was unravelling.
Luke met Beth’s glare without moving a muscle. ‘Not good enough for you, huh?’ he suggested casually.
Beth could feel the heat leaving her gaze but she couldn’t drag her eyes away from Luke. What would he say if he knew that her fiancé hadn’t measured up because it was Luke who had set the standard? Staying in a relationship with Brent would have been settling for second best. No, not even that close. It would have been stepping onto another emotional planet.
The thought was gone as quickly as it had come and Beth could feel her anger draining, but it was Luke who looked away first.
‘Maybe I should start a club,’ he muttered. He turned towards a black Jeep parked nearby. He took a step away from Beth then stopped again. Luke looked more than tired now. He looked…sad.
‘You’ve changed, Beth. I would never have thought you could stand up to trouble with gang members like that. Or start hating your family. Or go around dumping fiancés. I don’t feel like I even know you any more.’
The sadness in Luke’s expression was enough to bring the sting of tears to Beth’s eyes and she turned away quickly to hide them.
‘You never did, Luke,’ she said softly. ‘That was the problem, wasn’t it?’
The walk to the motel unit the hospital was providing until she found somewhere to live was not long enough to calm the spin-cycle effect Beth’s brain was having on her thoughts, and despite her exhaustion she knew she had no hope of sleeping yet. A walk on the deserted beach over the road from the motel seemed the perfect way to wait out the cycle.
Somewhere beneath the emotional roller-coaster the night had provided was a quiet pride in the fact that she had actually coped with it all. And the knowledge that she could cope again, if she had to. She wasn’t going to follow Neroli’s path and give up the work she loved because of intimidating patients.
Seeing Luke again had been just as much of a shock. But she had coped with that, too. Or had she? Somehow, it was crushingly disappointing that their conversation in the car park had ended up feeling just like one of the arguments that had marked the disintegration of their relationship. Nothing had changed.
But everything had changed. There was something different about Luke. A mystery that was never going to be solved if Beth didn’t stay in Hereford long enough to find out why Luke had chosen this quiet place to live and work.
And the tension created in the car park was never going to be resolved the way the old arguments had been. Until that last, horrible conflict, they had always made up their differences…in bed.
Any lingering tension would have been channelled into love-making that had made anything else totally insignificant. The world could have stopped turning as far as Beth was concerned when she had been in Luke’s arms like that. She wouldn’t have cared. She probably wouldn’t have even noticed.
An echo of Luke’s touch reached through the years and surfaced strongly enough for a spiral of desire to clutch something deep within Beth. A sound like a strangled groan escaped her lips and she sank onto a sun-warmed boulder.
How could she cope with this?
It was the ultimate reason to leave, wasn’t it? A very clear alarm sounding. If her body and heart were going to rebel against her head and decide they still wanted Luke, then she was going to be vulnerable. She could get hurt.
Again.
The thought was terrifying.
And exhilarating.
The spark was still there. Even if the result was a negative tension, it was better than indifference would have been, wasn’t it? When Beth had thought Luke had been ignoring her because he didn’t give a damn, she had felt astonishingly let down.
But it hadn’t been entirely negative.
He’d told her she’d been brilliant. He had looked at her—for just a fraction of a second—with an expression that had spoken of appreciation. Pride even.
And for the briefest pinpoint of time Beth had felt the sensation of pure joy that had always come from Luke being proud of her. Turning her face up to the sun, Beth closed her eyes and sighed softly. That sensation, however brief, was unforgettable. It was precisely what had been missing from her life for far too long. It was that elusive ‘x’ factor she had been searching for in all her attempts at other relationships. She had thought she might have found it more than once, only to gather enough doubts to ruin things.
