Fight or flight?
Back home, she might well have done the latter. But out here she always felt different. Bolder. Stronger. More herself.
Straightening her shoulders, Oti looked directly at him. ‘Obviously it was, because you’ve been very fastidious about not being alone with me ever since that night.’
She could hear her heart beating in the long pause before he answered.
‘I was giving you space.’
‘Please,’ she snorted, as if that could somehow conceal her hurt. Her shame. ‘You don’t need to sugar-coat it.’
‘I’m not trying to sugar-coat anything,’ he refuted. ‘I’m trying to be sensitive. More sensitive than it seemed I was when I took you to my bed.’
She frowned. ‘I seem to remember that I was the one who came to your bed.’
‘Because you felt you had to.’ Lukas looked disgusted, but she knew it wasn’t aimed at her. ‘You felt you had to have sex with me.’
‘I assure you I didn’t.’
Was that really what he’d thought?
‘We had sex, I found out that you were a virgin, and then you told me that the most intimate you’d ever been before with anyone had been some scum who had attacked you.’
He was clearly fighting to keep his voice down, yet she knew none of his frustration was aimed at her. It was a liberating experience.
‘I came to you that night because I wanted to. Because I chose to.’
‘I’m not the man a woman like you should choose to give such a gift to, Oti. I don’t think you fully appreciate that. This is an arrangement, not a proper marriage. The two shouldn’t be confused, and sleeping together just seemed to be blurring those lines.’
‘Are you saying you don’t think you can trust us to share a bed without...blurring the lines?’
‘I’m saying that I’m sure I don’t trust us to.’ His voice turned gravelly, and just like that her body started to melt again. And it had nothing to do with the heat.
A heavy silence settled around them, loaded with meaning and thick with desire. She opened her mouth to try to break it, but it felt as if it was impossible.
Perhaps he had a point. Every time she found herself close to him, sensations she didn’t care to analyse tangled inside her, and it was getting harder and harder to push them back down. It didn’t matter how ferociously she reminded herself, it seemed all too easy to forget that the agreement wasn’t about wanting to be with the man; it was about having to do it.
‘There’s been a Hep E outbreak in the local village,’ Lukas said, startling her, after a while. ‘I was talking to Clay earlier and he has already been to investigate, and he found no detectable free residual chlorine in the supplies the villagers are keeping in their homes.’
‘That’s strange.’ Oti frowned, not entirely sure why Lukas had changed the subject but trying to follow his lead, aware that Clay was their go-to water and sanitation guy. ‘We always chlorinate our water before distribution. We have to. Hep E and acute watery diarrhoea can kill quickly out here. If the water isn’t protected then that would likely provide a clear, active pathway for the water-borne diseases.’
‘We’re wondering whether contamination occurred at the tap stand, in the water container or elsewhere, and if recontamination can occur. We need some turbidimeters and photometers, as well as some chemical analysers, and then we’ll head out and conduct a full investigation.’
‘Great.’ Oti cranked her smile up a notch, still not quite certain what was going on. ‘It will be good to see the results. If there’s something going wrong it’s a chance to put it right and save lives.’
‘I thought maybe you’d want to put together a medical team to go and vaccinate them, or treat them, or whatever Hep E needs. We could work together,’ he suggested carefully. ‘Albeit from different sides of the problem.’
It didn’t matter how Oti tried to tell herself to rein it in, her heart started doing a little race of its own.
She didn’t want to tell him that there was very little her team could do for waterborne diseases such as Hep E or acute watery diarrhoea. They could test to see if people were positive, but usually it was about preventative measures and good hygiene education.
But if Lukas wanted them to work together and maybe use that shared goal to forge a new connection and find their way back to where they’d been before, then maybe he was right.
It made sense to work alongside each other whilst forcing a little space between them on a personal level. It was logical.
The problem was...her mind and her body didn’t seem to agree that logic was the right way to go.
CHAPTER ELEVEN