‘I can understand that.’ Lukas barely recognised his own voice. ‘I can’t believe that you could stand to be near your parents after that.’
‘I couldn’t.’ She shook her head, but he noticed her shoulders were relaxing slightly and she was beginning to sit up straight again. ‘I think it’s why I turned so wild.’
‘But you picked yourself up. You got to medical school. That’s to be commended.’
‘Only once my mother had died and I felt like living that lifestyle was only punishing myself. I was lucky that I’d got good grades through school, despite all my coasting. But once I got my head down I worked hard, and I became a doctor.’
And then her brother’s accident had happened, and she’d ended up running away to Africa.
Lukas shoo
k his head, his mind still grappling with everything that he’d discovered in the past twenty-four hours. ‘I can only imagine what you’ve been going through these past years.’
He needed to stay focused and strong, for Oti. The wife he hadn’t wanted, but now found he couldn’t remember life without. The woman who hadn’t even felt able to tell him that she had been a virgin.
He felt like a complete cad.
If he was any kind of decent man he would walk away now. They’d agreed from the start that there would be no physical side to their marriage, and he should have stuck to that. He should never have given in to his overwhelming desire for her; he should have been strong enough for both of them.
He owed her that much.
And then she spun around abruptly in the bath, and he definitely wasn’t expecting the bright, almost dazzling expression on her face.
‘I haven’t been going through anything, Lukas,’ she told him earnestly. ‘Not any more. I’ve been focused on the positives and I’ve been living my best life being the doctor I always wanted to be in South Sudan.’
Lukas was still fighting to make sense of everything she was telling him. Revelation after revelation had fallen from her lips, building up a picture of a woman who was a million miles away from the creature he’d told himself, a matter of months ago, that she was.
She made him feel all at sea. And humbled.
‘I’m so sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘If it hadn’t been for this marriage you would still be out in Africa, doing the job you love so much. And this...us should never have happened. Go back—I won’t stop you.’
He began to lift himself out of the bath, to give Oti her space, vowing to himself that he would never touch her again, when she grabbed his wrists and held him in place.
‘Lukas—’ she cut him off, not even trying to conceal the excitement in her tone ‘—you could come out with me. Even just for a month or two. See what I do... Did.’
‘Oti...’
‘You asked me if there was anything you could do,’ she challenged. ‘This is it. Come back to South Sudan with me.’
‘Oti...’
But it appeared that now she had the proverbial bit between her teeth she wasn’t about to let go.
‘Please, Lukas. We’ll call it our honeymoon.’
And it should concern him more that his head told him to let her go whilst his...chest pulled tight with the effort of stopping himself from agreeing.
CHAPTER NINE
LESS THAN A week later, after an eleven-hour flight from London to Juba, the capital, and then a fifty-minute flight to a small airstrip in the middle of nowhere—the closest serviceable one given the season—Lukas found himself with Oti in South Sudan.
The paperwork for him to join her had taken a bit more work, as he’d not been on the charity’s books nor been through their lengthy application process. But it never failed to strike Lukas just how far limitless pockets of cash could get a person. Coupled with the fact that they’d clearly been prepared to move heaven and earth to get Oti back there.
It was crazy how the more he was around her the more he wanted her. Like an addiction, when the only addiction he’d ever had before had been to succeed and drag himself out of the council estate where he’d spent the formative years of his life.
They were four hours into their five-hour drive to the medical camp when they passed a woman on the road carrying a screaming, rigid baby, its arms locked in an uncomfortable outstretched position.
Lukas wasn’t surprised when the driver stopped the car and Oti leapt out. He followed out of instinct, but it was odd, after a professional lifetime of being the person people automatically looked to in order to resolve any number of problems, to now be the person relegated to standing on the sidelines watching.