Luca's Bad Girl - By Amy Andrews Page 0,53
tend to encourage confidences.’
Luca chuckled. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He sobered before pinning her with a speculative stare. ‘Your turn. What makes Dr Mia McKenzie tick?’
He knew there were things, deep-seated things, that made her the wonderful, non-cuddly woman he’d come to think of as naturally as he inhaled and exhaled.
It was Mia’s turn to look out the window as his question made her squirm. She wasn’t so sure she wanted a man who thought every relationship had potential for toxicity to know her deepest, darkest stuff.
‘Same things as everyone else, I guess,’ she hedged.
Luca watched her avoid his gaze. Right … so this wasn’t going to come easy. But he was suddenly desperate to know what made her the woman she was. Why she didn’t stay the night. Why she didn’t cuddle.
Why she was looking anywhere but at him.
‘Okay. Let’s start with an easier question. Why did you become a doctor?’
Mia barely suppressed a snort. How could he know the answer to that question was about as entwined with her baggage as was possible? She glared at him. ‘Why did you become a doctor?’
‘A child nearly drowned in a lake near where my grandmother lived when I was a teenager. I helped revive her. I knew then and there I wanted to be a doctor.’
Of course. Trust Luca to have an answer. She only wished hers was as cut and dried.
Luca leaned forward in his chair, placing his elbows on his knees, and the foil crinkled. ‘Come on, Mia. I told you mine.’
The beeps of the monitor seemed to mock her every thought. Oh, what the hell …
She glanced out the window again. ‘My mother had a baby. A stillborn baby, when I was ten.’
Mia didn’t want to be sucked back to that time but here, in the darkness, surrounded by the fury of mother nature, it seemed impossible not to be. ‘One minute I was going to have a baby sister to dote on. The next minute she was gone. The doctors were so good. Kind and compassionate. Not just to Mum but to me too. I guess I made up my mind then.’
Luca watched her as she stared intently out the window as if the meaning of life was lurking in the treetops. ‘That must have been a hard time in your life. Your parents must have been devastated.’
Mia snorted. ‘You could say things were never quite the same again.’
Luca frowned. ‘They didn’t make it?’
Mia shook her head. ‘My father walked out a few weeks later and found himself another family. My mother took to our couch and zoned out for the rest of my life. Last time I checked, she was still there.’
Things suddenly became much clearer for Luca. The most important man in her life had deserted her at an age and during a time when she’d needed him most. And her mother had been too grief-stricken to fill the gap.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘You were just a child. You didn’t deserve to be abandoned like that.’
Mia could almost feel the intensity of her ten-year-old pain as she stared out the window. She rolled her head to look at him. ‘I hated him for so long.’
Luca shrugged. ‘But of course. You needed him and he wasn’t there for you. Or your mother.’
Mia gave a harsh little laugh. ‘My mother.’ She shook her head. ‘My mother let me believe that he was the bad guy. That he’d found a better family. But she lied to me for years.’
‘Oh?’ Luca frowned.
‘I found my mother’s file when I was a med student working at The Harbour. The baby wasn’t my father’s.’
Mia rolled her head back to face the window. The find had been cataclysmic and still sucked her breath away.
‘I confronted her about it. She admitted that Dad walked out because he’d found out about the baby’s paternity. She didn’t defend herself or apologise for letting me think the worst of him. She just said that I didn’t understand what it was like to be married to a man who worked twenty-four seven.’
Luca watched as a range of emotions flitted across her face. Her emotional fragility after the Stan incident suddenly tightened into crystalline focus. It must have stirred up all those old childhood hurts.
‘Did you … did you contact your father … try and reconcile?’
Mia bit down on her lip—she would not cry. No matter how hard that particular part in the saga had been. No matter how polite and distant her father had been. He’d been hurt