Harlequin Medical Romance March 2025--Box Set 2 of 2 by Kristine Lynn

Author:Kristine Lynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2025-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

IVAN WISHED HE could take the words back even as they left his mouth.

Why had he said that?

He never talked about Maksim. Never. It had always cut too deep, and the guilt had been almost crushing. But Ruby was right; Connor’s unexpected appearance the night before had caught him off guard. Slicing open a cache of memories that Ivan hadn’t been ready to see—especially when he was still reeling from that damned scan.

His fingers clutched the picture that was in his pocket, and had been in his pocket ever since the ultrasound—not that Ruby needed to know it.

He wasn’t ignorant to the fact that Ruby’s ploy to get him talking about himself—which hadn’t fooled him for a second—had ended up working with surprising success.

The evening hadn’t gone at all as he’d planned. But then, he’d noticed that every encounter he had with the woman seemed to veer off on a path of its own. Usually everything in his life was carefully arranged, planned out, yet Ruby Channing had an uncanny knack for turning things on their head.

He wanted to say he didn’t like it. But even now, when her shock was evident and her hazel eyes were widening as she stared at him before setting her wine glass down, when she gave him her full attention, he found himself helpless to do anything but wait for her to answer.

He tried to take some comfort in the fact that she clearly hadn’t known that much about his past, which meant that no one else at Little Meadwood was likely to have known, either.

The way gossip worked in the tiny village, a part of him had always wondered whether, at some point over the years, the truth had come out.

‘I didn’t know that.’

And he wondered if that changed what she thought about him.

‘Does Vivian know?’ she asked when he didn’t elaborate.

‘I have no idea,’ he told her honestly. ‘I always assumed she did though I never talked about him.’

And when he lifted his head to look at her, the empathy in her expression shook him to his core.

‘Then she couldn’t have known.’ Ruby managed. ‘She would never have taken one of you without the other, surely.’

The words hung on Ivan’s lips but he couldn’t bring himself to say them out loud. Instead, he found himself becoming lost in memories that Ruby wouldn’t even begin to fathom. The weight of the world—the entire universe, even—seemed to hang in the air between them. And when he finally began to speak, each syllable was just a little bit too measured. Too loaded with long-suppressed emotion.

‘We weren’t both in foster care,’ he gritted out. ‘At least, not in the beginning.’

Yet despite best efforts to keep his tone level, he was certain Ruby could hear that faint ache beneath it, the one that would betray the depth of the wound that ran too close to the surface. The trauma that had festered, untreated over too many years.

But there was nothing he could to about that now.

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