‘I can’t wait to get out of here and have everything go back to normal.’

She forces herself to look at him. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’

He blinks. ‘I had no idea about Nath, Oli, no idea. About any of it. I still can’t believe it. I’m pretty sure the emergency he asked me to come back for was completely bogus. He was trying to create trouble between us.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ll be home in a couple of days. Not as agile, obviously, but I’m fit so I should recover pretty quickly.’ He gestures to the laptop on the side table. ‘I’ve been reading up on gunshot wounds. Hopefully by our holiday I’ll be close to full strength.’

‘Dean, stop.’ Oli doesn’t drop his hand, but she looks away—at the window, the door. Anywhere but his beautiful eyes.

‘Oli,’ his upbeat tone shifts swiftly to pleading, ‘help me out here. I don’t know what to do. I feel so lost and sick about everything.’

‘I’m sorry you’re hurt, I really am, but you lied to me. You never told me you can’t have kids.’

He stops moving and closes his eyes. ‘I know, but I was worried it would make you change your mind about being with me. I wanted everything to be perfect. Plus you did say you weren’t sure you wanted to have a baby anyway.’

‘Not being sure and not being able to is quite different.’

‘I really am sorry,’ he says.

Oli swallows past the giant lump in her throat. ‘It’s not just that.’

Tension ripples down his arms, and he pulls his hands away. ‘You’re the one who thought I was capable of god knows what, Oli.’

They face off angrily, both taking deep breaths.

‘I was wrong,’ she says finally. ‘But what does it say about our relationship that I could even think it? We don’t trust each other.’

He bites his lip. ‘I’ll do anything to fix this. Anything.’

He’s a little boy in a man’s body who thinks that with enough money and enough spin, anything is fixable. She’s been addicted to him for over a decade, never quite able to put the possibility of being with him to rest. And when his perfect life imploded all those years later, he sucked her back in. She was no match for the pull of the past; all those feelings simply thawed, strong as ever. She landed right back where she’d started, and Dean—confident, self-assured Dean—wasn’t about to let the one thing that stood in their way be a problem. In Dean’s world, problems are just things you throw money at until they go away.