CHAPTER THIRTEEN
KATESWIRLEDNOODLES around her fork and, ignoring the expectant faces of two of her colleagues barely suppressing their laughter, popped it in her mouth. The chilli heat this time was instant.
Mouth on fire, she finished her glass of milk. ‘You two are evil,’ she seethed, only half joking.
Her photograph deleting spree meant she’d been the last to arrive in the canteen. The only main course left was the noodles with chicken and prawns and peanuts, which was absolutely delicious excepting the abundance of Thai chillies infused in it.
‘More milk?’ Stefan, the only other European who worked there, asked.
‘Bring the cow,’ she laughed, and added another forkful into her mouth.
So much for her not being a masochist!
But this was good. A little companionship and conversation and laughter. The days here were long and people rarely lingered after dinner, most grabbing their needed sleep. The nature of their jobs meant a full night’s sleep wasn’t guaranteed. Kate was looking forward to her first weekend off and the promise of a sightseeing trip with one of the nurses. Anything to fill her days and keep her brain busy. Stop her mind from taking over.
The main door opened and Yuna, Kate’s slightly terrifying boss, walked in. She clocked Kate and zoomed over to her.
‘You have a visitor.’
Kate stared at her blankly.
‘A visitor,’ Yuna repeated, this time more slowly. ‘Shall I let him in? Or kick his ass back to the airport?’
Him?
Her stare zipped to the door ten feet from where she was sitting.
Standing at the threshold...
She shoved her chair back with such force it would have toppled if the wall hadn’t been there to break its fall.
Leander knew he was breaking the cardinal rule. Yuna had been explicit. He must let Yuna ask Kate privately if she was willing to see him.
His legs had disobeyed before his brain realised what they were doing, and the first thing he’d seen looming through the opened door was Kate sitting with two men whose company she was clearly enjoying.
To see her animated face in the flesh after all this time had sucker-punched him.
It was the face he’d seen when he’d come round from his near drowning on the beach and known in that instant that he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.
The animation had fallen the instant she’d spotted Leander.
Yuna followed the direction of Kate’s now-ashen face. Features contorted with fury, she pointed a finger at him. ‘You. Do not move.’
To Kate she asked, ‘Well?’
The two men Kate had been seated with had also risen and were flanking Kate and the diminutive boss, staring at Leander with the deepest suspicion. As they were barely taller than the women, the sight of them geeing themselves to square up to him would have been comical if he’d been focusing on anything but the face he’d missed more than it was possible to believe.
Forcing his body to remain at the threshold, he asked hoarsely, ‘Can we talk?’
Talk, Kate thought dazedly. Leander wanted to talk. That was if it even was him. Wasn’t it known that too high a dose of chillies could make a person hallucinate? It wasn’t actually possible that the figure standing in the canteen doorway was Leander. People didn’t just turn up here. This was a rainforest, for goodness’ sake!
He’d told her to forget him.
‘Can I kick him out or not?’ Yuna asked impatiently.
Even though she knew this wasn’t happening, Kate shook her head, at the same time grabbing Yuna’s skinny wrist to keep herself anchored and hoarsely whispering, ‘Please stay.’
The noodles she’d been eating were churning in her stomach, clashing with the violence of her heartbeats.
‘You hear that?’ Yuna taunted. ‘She wants me to stay. So get on with it.’
There was something strangely reassuring in Yuna’s protective stance and in the body language of the two men with them. Leander wouldn’t allow himself to hope that he had a future with Kate. If he left Borneo with her deserved rejection ringing in his ears then at least he would have the comfort of knowing she was amongst people who would care and look out for her.
He had to clear his throat and then clear it again.
‘Kate, I’m sorry. I’m here to beg you, on bended knee if that’s what it takes for you to take me back.’
Even with the distance between them, he heard the whimper that came from her closed mouth. It was a sound that sliced through his heart.
‘Since you’ve been gone...’ He shook his head and breathed deeply. He could never explain in mere words the hole that existed in him. And then he sighed and filled his lungs with more of the humid air. ‘I say since you’ve been gone but you only went because I pushed you away, and I pushed you away because I’m the biggest fool on this earth. I knew you were the best thing that had ever happened to me. I was too stupid to admit it to myself but deep in here...’ He made a fist and pressed it to his heart. ‘I knew I loved you.’
Her eyes widened.
‘What I didn’t know was that living without you would be such torture. It’s a torture I deserve. I’ve hurt you so many times and all because I was too damned stubborn—and frightened—to accept that the life I’d built around my own needs and pleasures was crumbling around me. It started crumbling the moment you first jumped into the back of my car on the island and now it’s nothing but ruins.’
Her hand fluttered to her mouth.
‘I’ve always been selfish, Kate,’ he admitted starkly, wishing he could peer deep into her brain and see what she was thinking. ‘But you already know that. You’ve already accepted that. You see me exactly as I am and still you love me... Loved me.’ He swallowed a lump that had lodged itself in his throat. ‘You are the only person in the world I can’t be selfish with. Your happiness is all that matters to me. You don’t make me wantto be a better man; I have no choice in it. To hurt you is to hurt myself. Since you’ve been gone...since I pushed you away,’ he corrected himself, then grabbed the back of his head, trying desperately to find the words he needed to say before the fear gripping his heart and lungs took full control of him. ‘Everything you said about my estrangement with Leo was true. I functioned for fourteen years without him and it’s only now that he’s back in my life that I can acknowledge just how badly I missed him in those years.’ He attempted a smile. ‘What you said about us being identically stubborn is also true.’
One of the first things Leander had done when he’d come round after his surfing accident was call his brother and apologise properly for the first time for leaving the way he had all those years ago and for being a selfish coward in the way he’d gone about leaving. With Leo insisting the blame lay with him and being adamant the deterioration of their relationship after the family business trouble was his fault, while Leander saw clearly now that it was his fault and that he should have gone home and insisted his brother lean on him for emotional support, the twins had been forced to agree that they had both played their part in the whole sorry mess and that it was the future that mattered now. A future as brothers. Twin brothers.
Who cared if people couldn’t tell them apart? The one person who mattered most knew with one glance that he was Leander. She saw him.
Soon, once everything with Kate was resolved for good or for ill, Leander would fly to his brother and they would sit down for the first time in too many years and share a beer together. Whether he would be able to taste the beer and take enjoyment in his brother’s company all depended on what came next now.
‘I could function without Leo, but I can’t function without you. I don’t just miss you, Kate.’ Something hot was stabbing the back of his eyes. ‘The world still turns but it turns without me, because without you in my life, there is nothing for me. My life belongs to you. I love you and I don’t know how to live without you. I...’ His voice cracked as suddenly it hit him that he really could walk out of this place and never see her again. That Kate, his beautiful, joyful, funny pixie princess might have already moved on emotionally. That he’d hurt her too deeply for her to be able to put her trust in him again.
He would have no one to blame but himself.
Kate had listened to Leander’s almost rambling speech with the sensation that she’d stepped out of her body and was watching weightless from above, only her grip on Yuna’s wrist stopping her from floating up to the sky. It had been all too incredible, and even as she’d listened to every word he said, a dazed voice had kept repeating in her ear that it couldn’t be him.
It was the break in his voice that pulled her back down to the ground. A break that speared straight into her heart, and suddenly she saw him clearly. Leander.
Her Leander, the man who had lit her heart from that very first smile and switched on unimaginable passions and joy and a zest in her veins that had all dimmed into nothing without him.
Her Leander, looking utterly wrecked.
He’d lost weight. That wasn’t stubble around his jaw but a thick, unruly black beard. His hair looked like it hadn’t ever seen a comb. His eyes were those of a man who’d lost the ability to sleep.
Those eyes shone with tears.
Those eyes shone with agony.
Staring into them...
She saw it. The truth. It was right there, his heart shining through his tortured stare.
Leander had come to her.
There was a gentle push on her back. She didn’t need it, or know or care who’d done it and didn’t look to see. Her gaze was glued in its entirety to the man her heart had gift-wrapped itself for long before her head had realised it.
She walked to him with that floating sensation drifting through her again.
Leander couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t hear anything above the roar of noise in his head. Couldn’t tear his gaze from the figure walking like a dream towards him. Diamond stud earrings glittered in her ears...
She reached him.
Her throat moved. Her chin wobbled. A tear spilled down her cheek.
For the longest time neither of them spoke.
Her throat moved again, and then her chest rose and fell like a sigh, and she put a trembling palm to his bearded cheek and quiveringly whispered, ‘If you ever push me away again or run from me then I will rip your heart out with my hands.’
A scintilla of the weight compressing his lungs lifted.
Covering the hand against his cheek tightly, he nuzzled into it. ‘Take it now. It’s yours.’
Jade eyes fixed on his, she cupped the back of his neck with her other hand. ‘For ever?’
He almost closed his eyes at the rush of emotions her touch on his neck evoked, but he kept his stare locked on hers, willing her to read the sincerity in them. ‘It’s yours, Kate, for as long as you want it.’
The tiniest curve tugged at the side of her mouth. ‘I want it for ever.’
‘You have it. My heart and my soul.’ The soul she’d saved without even trying.
Faces inching closer, her stare bore into his for what seemed an eternity before the curve widened a little bit more and he felt it, felt Kate’s heart and soul reaching out to meet his and fuse together, lifting the weight inside him in its entirety.
‘I love you,’ Kate breathed as their mouths brushed together, and as she was pulled into the deepest, sweetest and yet most passionate kiss of her life, the last shreds of her heart flew back together and knitted seamlessly into place, leaving her whole.
He loved her. Leander loved her.
An unsubtle cough behind them broke their mouths apart.
They’d both forgotten they had an audience.
Not loosening their hold on each other, they locked eyes again. Overwhelmed by all the emotion flowing through her, still only half believing that all this was really happening, that Leander did love her and that he’d come all this way for her, Kate giggled and tightened her grip around his neck. ‘I love you,’ she repeated.
‘And I love you. Always, always.’
The unsubtle cough sounded again. ‘I suppose this means I’m going to have to advertise for a new vet,’ Yuna grumbled.
‘Absolutely not,’ Leander said firmly before Kate could even think what to answer. ‘Kate will stay here for as long as she wants to be here. I’ll be making the changes necessary to make our marriage work.’
Kate’s eyebrows lifted like a shot. ‘Marriage?’
‘If you’ll have me.’
If she’d have him? In the space of a few hours Kate had gone from rock bottom to feeling that she’d been lifted to the top of the world.
Smiling so widely her muscles screamed in protest, she kissed him with a passion so deep it left him in no doubt what her answer was.