A Surgeon for the Single Mom

‘I didn’t mean to do that.’ He only half apologised as he lifted his mouth from hers. ‘I tried to walk away, Effie. But I couldn’t. There’s this dark...thing which twists and knots inside me. I don’t expect anything from you. I came to tell you that I should have told you the truth from the start. And that I’m sorry I didn’t.’

It hurt. So very badly.

‘Yes.’

She sounded composed, but he could see the vein pulsing at her neck. A fraction too fast. Too fluttery.

‘You should have told me that you were using me not simply as a buffer but to shock your family into leaving you alone. You should have been clear that you weren’t inviting me to stay because you were worried about Nell and I not having a roof over our heads but because you wanted the dramatic vision of an unmarried single mother being your lover.’

‘That’s not entirely accurate. I invited you and Nell to stay because I couldn’t stand by and watch you live in that flat,’ he asserted. ‘But once I realised the visual it was creating for the more traditionalist side of my family I admit I played up to it.’

‘What about the dates? And taking Nell to that birthday party?’

‘I took Nell because she needed the opportunity to go and meet new friends and you were working.’

‘But the dating?’

‘Yes...’ He paused, not even sure himself. ‘And no.’

‘What about Paris?’

He exhaled heavily. ‘I couldn’t believe you’d never been out of the country before. I loved the idea of being the person to take you abroad for the first time. But I admit there was also a part of me that knew it would get back to my family and keep things stirred up.’

She nodded, as though she was grateful for his honesty. As though every single word he uttered wasn’t rushing into her, pouring into her chest and stinging her heart and stopping it, the way a swarm of bees might kill an enemy one tiny sting at a time. Individually merely painful but combined ultimately fatal.

The way it felt for him.

‘Why did you love the idea of taking me abroad?’ she managed at last.

Tak fought to gather his thoughts. It wasn’t an action he’d had to take before. ‘I told you—you got under my skin in a way no one has ever done before. I didn’t know what to do with it. It’s how things became so confused.’

‘I could have forgiven you all of that,’ she whispered. ‘If you hadn’t been intimate with me.’

‘Ah...’ For the first time in a while that heady, intoxicating glint was reignited in his eyes. He could feel it. ‘Now that, I can say with absolute honesty, was never part of the plan.’

She stared at him for a long, long moment, and time seemed to stand still. ‘Never?’

That flash of hope in her eyes did things to him that he couldn’t even understand, let alone explain.

‘No, intimacy was never my intention,’ he told her honestly. That was simply me finding myself unable to resist you.’

‘You couldn’t resist me?’ Effie was trying to sound sceptical. Worldly.

Tak managed not to grin in triumph. ‘How could I?’ he murmured. ‘Since I’d managed to fall for you.’

Her reaction was all he could have hoped for. From the shallow breathing to the shift in her body language, and from the quickened pulse to the way her all too expressive eyes betrayed her.

‘You...you fell for me?’

‘I’m in love with you, Effie.’

The words came out on their own. Yet they felt as right and as true as anything ever had.

‘Surely you know that? Even if you don’t trust me with your head, let your heart answer this one. I love you—and there’s no game-play, no agenda. You’re the one who broke through to me when I thought it was impossible for anyone to reach me. You’re the one who made me finally see that, time and again, I was giving my mother the benefit of the doubt because of all that she’d been through with my father and with Saaj, but she was never going to be the woman or the mother I wanted her to be.’

He spoke as though it was a fact—like his lungs fuelling him with oxygen, or his heart pumping blood around his body. Not that either of them seemed to be functioning normally right now. They seemed to flip-flop between working too hard and forgetting to work at all.

Tak shook his head gently and lifted his palms to cup her face. ‘You doubt it?’