But then he remembered that was gone, now—blown apart in an instant—and he had nothing.
Nothing to be proud of any more. Nothing to offer. Not to any woman, but certainly not to Rae. So, if he couldn’t keep his tone even, controlled, neutral, then he was going to have to go the other way.
He was going to have to ensure that the last thing Rae wanted to do was revisit old haunts best left to rest.
‘I owe Rafe. And if that means taking on the role of discreet bodyguard to his half-sister—’ the words were deliberate, as if to wedge even more distance between them ‘—then I will. But believe me, Rae, as soon as it’s over I’ll be back out of your life faster than you can even turn around.’
* * *
Rae couldn’t move, could barely even breathe, and she had no idea how she’d managed to answer him. Caught in a fist so tight that it felt as though it was crushing her soul right out of her chest.
She swallowed hard and plunged in.
‘Fine. Then...we keep it strictly professional.’
‘That would be best.’
He didn’t blink, didn’t even move. There was no trace at all that he even remembered the kisses they’d shared. The way he’d made her body come to life as no man ever had before.
Or since.
‘Rafe mentioned that you’ve already completed the necessary qualifications and that you and he have been discussing a clinical observation role for some months already?’
‘I’m weighing my options,’ Myles confirmed curtly.
A coldness crept over her skin; the sense that he was trying to shut her out as much as possible. It shouldn’t hurt. But it did.
She fought to peel her eyes off the man who stood, more imposing and mouth-watering than ever, in front of her. She failed.
He looked well.
Actually, he looked more than well. She wasn’t sure when they’d closed the gap between them again, but he was so close now she had to tilt her head right up to maintain eye contact. To prove she wasn’t really as intimidated as she felt. To pretend her heart wasn’t doing odd...flippy things.
Myles was tall. She’d forgotten quite how tall. She wasn’t exactly short to start with, but even wearing heels as she was, he still towered above her. Six feet three with shoulders wide enough to block out the view from even the expansive picture window behind him, but then a V-shaped chest tapered to a narrower waist, more athletic-fit than body-builder-fit, and powerful thighs encased in dark trousers. Familiar, and yet at the same time different.
His body itself looked like a weapon—precisely honed and utterly lethal, but it was more than that. He’d grown up, she realised with a start, and now he was more honed, more powerful, more...dangerous.
He positively exuded dominance, strength, control. As they stood there glowering at each other it was as though the last decade and a half toppled away without warning.
‘I’m sorry.’
The apology was out before she even knew the words were on her tongue. But his scowl only deepened.
‘What for?’
Rae hesitated. What had she meant? That night? Justin? Whatever had happened to Myles’ distinguished army career?
Ultimately she shook her head, unable to articulate the thoughts that lurked in the fog of her mind, and the fringe that she’d been growing out, which was too long to be bangs but too short to tie back into her trademark ponytail, fell forward from behind her ear.
For a split second she thought his hand moved, as though about to tuck the hair back into place. And then she realised he was merely lifting his arms to fold across his chest, even as he took a step back. Putting more space between them, leaving her inexplicably bereft.
Had she imagined that instinctive, smouldering gaze from Myles? She must have, because the look he was casting her right now was, at best, one of distaste. At worst...
God, she still wanted him.
Realisation crashed over her like an icy wave on a scorching day. Because if she still wanted him, after everything, then she was as much in danger of making a fool of herself in front of the man as she had ever been.
And that simply couldn’t happen.
Heat scorched her cheeks as Rae remembered the way she’d crept into Myles’ room practically naked that last night and offered herself to him in the most intimate way she possibly could. He’d responded so urgently, so demandingly, so loaded with intent, she’d been lost in the moment and totally unprepared when he’d wrenched himself away, bundled her up into the quilt from the end of his guest suite bed, and pushed her unceremoniously back out into the corridor, slamming his bedroom door in her face.
He’d rejected her. Without a word of explanation. And she’d felt as though her world had crashed around her. The fact that he and Rafe had left the next day for some army exercise had meant that there had been no chance for her to get answers, and so for months she’d shut herself away wondering what was wrong with her. If she wasn’t pretty enough, or sexy enough, or experienced enough.
Nonetheless, a bruised self-confidence didn’t excuse the fact that she’d been stupid enough to fall for lies from a piece of trash like Justin. How had she ever thought that he could make her feel like an attractive woman again?
‘You’re sorry for what, Rae?’ he repeated, his voice harsher than ever.
But if she couldn’t explain it to herself, how could she explain it to Myles?
In all these years she’d never once explained herself to the press. Never once tried to put forward her side of that story. Not least because she knew no one would listen. Or if they did, they would spin it so that somehow she ended up coming out even worse.
Stupid, as well as scandalous.
More than that, if she’d told the truth, said that she’d known nothing about the camera, then it would have been a criminal offence and there would have had to have been a legal case.
Inevitably there would have been a character assassination of her, and even back then Rae had known that if the police and press had delved into her, then they might have found out about Myles.
She would have ruined his friendship with her half-brother, dragged his reputation through the mud, and even harmed his army career. All because she hadn’t seen Justin for what he really was...a lying, scheming lowlife who just thought he could use her connection to Life in the Rawl to get his own fifteen minutes of fame.
Plus, she’d figured the less drama, the quicker it would all die down.
She’d been wrong. It had been too juicy for the press to let go of. It was only in the last few years of her becoming a fully-fledged doctor and OBGYN that they had finally begun to leave her alone and stop trying to connect her to any decent-looking male with a healthy pulse.
The silver lining, if she could call it that, was that she’d long since learned to own her mistakes. Own the woman those awful experiences had moulded her into. It had become her armour, her best emotional defence. And right now, with her head swirling wildly and thoughts jostling impatiently, she needed some way to buy herself time before she blurted everything out to him without first preparing the ground, and inevitably ruining her one opportunity to make him understand.
She needed something familiar. She needed some kind of anchor.
Even if a part of her knew that anchor was actually a tub of cement shoes ready to drown her at any moment.
She tipped her head almost coquettishly and pulled her shoulders back in the kind of deliberately provocative move her sisters executed to devastating effect on practically a daily basis, but which she hadn’t used in years.
‘Forget it.’ She even managed to force the beginnings of a wicked little smile, even if her cheeks did feel tight and unwilling. ‘I wasn’t really thinking.’
Myles locked his jaw and she could practically see the tiny pulse flickering away.
‘Of course not,’ he ground o
ut. ‘Because why change the habit of a lifetime?’
‘Why indeed?’
She didn’t care that he was staring at her as though she were a fleck of contemptible mud on the toe of one of his polished army boots. Really she didn’t.
Not, she imagined, that he would ever tolerate any form of dirt on his parade boots.
And it didn’t twist inside her to know that he, like pretty much the rest of the world, actually believed that she had ever had any part in that vile sex tape. There was no reason for this shameful heat that spread over her cheeks. She’d long since mastered the art of pretending that it didn’t get to her. If she could fool the press, the public, then she could certainly fool Myles.
Tilting her head that little bit higher, Rae forced herself—however many knives stabbed into the dark hollow where her soul had once been—to meet his glower.
As if she were simply playing the game he evidently thought she was playing, although her voice damn near cracked when she answered him.
Myles narrowed his eyes but she ignored it.
‘Well, now we have those pleasantries out of the way—’ she rolled her eyes to make her point ‘—I think it’s time for me to go. I have a lecture to get ready for. Doctor or not, I find the press prefer glamorous photos to dowdy shots.’
‘Is that so?’ Myles pursed his lips and she knew he was thinking of the sex tape.
Just as she’d intended, she told herself.
It was the only way.
Other than Rafe, Myles was the only other man alive who she’d ever wanted to impress. She couldn’t explain it, but in some perverse way she would prefer he hated her for the choices he thought she had made, than know she was so pathetic that she’d let someone like Justin play her.
She scowled at him, and in that moment something crossed his face, pulling his features and making her look again.
She realised abruptly that he didn’t look as well as she’d initially thought. Or, more accurately, he looked physically incredible, but non-physically...?
Her heart kicked before she could stop it and it was all she could do not to reach out and touch his tense, strained face. His eyes were darker than she remembered. Bleaker. Grim and laced with pain.
Her head swam with echoes of her half-brother’s words outside the doors just before they’d entered the room. That Myles needed their help.
She had known that Myles had spent most of his career as a battlefield trauma surgeon with a specialty in plastic surgery—specifically with burns from bombs, IEDs and mines. But hearing that Myles had been caught up in it, injured so badly that he’d chosen to leave the army altogether rather than fly a desk, was sickening.
It had been awful hearing Rafe tell her that Myles, having been authorised to return to operating, had turned down lucrative job offers with hospitals up and down the UK, as well as opportunities in multiple top US hospitals.
It had taken her a while to understand what Rafe had been suggesting.
‘I think that right now Myles needs to see other specialties of medicine.’ Rafe’s caginess had snagged her attention. ‘I need you to help him, Rae.’
It was the closest she’d ever heard her half-brother get to a plea.
‘Let him see a different side to being a surgeon. One which doesn’t involve suicide bombers, and maimed kids, and putting your closest buddies in a body bag.’
She’d felt sick on Myles’ behalf.
She could have told her brother that being an OBGYN wasn’t all hearts and flowers; that death touched this area of medicine, too. But somehow it didn’t seem the same. Especially when she remembered the look on Rafe’s face when he’d told her that a lance corporal, a mere kid, had taken his own life that day, and that he feared Myles blamed himself.
‘Is he right to?’ Rae had asked abruptly.
She hadn’t meant to, but she’d suddenly found that she was shaking and this was the only way she could stop it.
‘Of course not.’ Rafe had looked momentarily annoyed, before making a clear effort to soften his tone. ‘Please, Rae? You’d be solving two problems for me. You would be getting a bodyguard we can both trust. And you would potentially be helping the man who showed me how to be the best leader and soldier I could possibly be.’
The pain on his face had got to her. But it was nothing like the expression she was looking at right now on Myles’ face. Fifteen years ago she would have ached to steal that pain away for him. But not now, she told herself firmly. Not now.
Rae wasn’t sure she believed herself or why the words sounded so hollow in her head.
But still, she would do what Rafe had asked her to do. Not just because it was her half-brother asking, but because, deep down, they both knew she liked to fix people. She couldn’t fix her own life so she concentrated on others’. It was probably one of the reasons why being an OBGYN suited her so well. There were always dark moments but in this field the outcome was more often positive, especially when it entailed bringing a new life into the world, and into the arms of an ecstatic mother.
If that couldn’t shine some light into whatever dark pit Myles was in, then surely nothing could?
And the fact that she was the one helping him—that maybe she could prove to him she was a skilled, professional OBGYN and that the incident with Justin, for which she’d become infamous, was nothing more than a brief, shameful moment in her past—had nothing to do with it.
‘You know you can talk to me, Myles,’ she began impulsively. ‘I’m a good listener...whatever you’re going through.’
She knew immediately it had been the wrong thing to say.
‘Did you manage to sleep on the flight?’ he asked abruptly.
How she wished she could take her words back. Swallow them. Instead, she tried to regulate her breathing enough to answer.
‘Yes.’
Seven hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep in the company jet’s bedroom suite had inarguably been more comfortable than the doctor’s accommodation at the New York clinic where she’d snatched the odd hour or so whilst pulling her second thirty-six-hour shift of the week.
‘Clearly it wasn’t enough—you still look tired.’ He peered at her, concerned.
It was hard to ooze the nonchalance for which she was so ironically well known when her whole body was going into overdrive at the mere suggestion of solicitude from him.
‘Gosh, thanks for the compliment.’
She even managed to keep her voice from shaking, but Myles ignored her dry tone.
‘You should look after yourself more.’ He apparently felt the need to hammer home the point.
Rae chastised herself for hoping for something more praiseworthy from him.
‘Says the man who, if you’re anything like my brother, exists on four hours’ sleep a night.’ She kept her laugh deliberately light.
He shrugged as though it was okay for him.
Her chest cracked.
So much for Myles being her bodyguard, meant to protect her, to ensure she didn’t get hurt. As far as Rae was concerned, he was the one person who could wound her more deeply than anyone else ever could.
Just as he had done before.
Clearly fifteen years had taught her absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER THREE
‘CASE C CONCERNS emergency foetal intervention at twenty-five weeks and four days into the pregnancy, for a sacrococcygeal teratoma. That is, a congenital tumour growing at the base of the foetus’ spine. It is one of the most common tumours amongst neonatals, occurring in approximately one in every forty thousand babies. But because it arises from stem cells it can be made up of any kind of tissue from anywhere around the body.’
It took a while for Myles to realise that he was as caught up in her lecture, her enthusiasm for her subject matter, as everyone else in the ballroom.
She looked magnificent up t
here on the stage and holding the entire conference in silent rapture. He had hugely underestimated her. Underestimated the residual feelings that still ran between them, and now he was here. Paying the price.
He tuned back in, unable to help himself.
‘Ultrasound. And because the teratoma has a blood supply, the baby’s heart was pumping much harder. It was as if they were in competition and the tumour was winning, resulting in a significant risk of the baby going into cardiac arrest.’
Myles shifted his position.
He’d been a battlefield trauma surgeon for so long. He’d never imagined doing anything else. Never wanted to.
But that was before.
In seventeen years, nothing had quite got to him like that day with Mikey, and what had happened in that village. And, suddenly, he’d found himself never wanting to pick up another scalpel for the rest of his life. Not because he was afraid of what he might do. But more he was afraid of what he might no longer be able to do.
Ever.
PTSD. Not uncommon after so many back-to-back tours, and so many atrocities, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept. It didn’t make the idea of going back to operating any more appealing. Which was why accepting Rafe’s suggestion of clinical observation—a sort of halfway house—had made sense, even if he hadn’t actually liked the idea.
He had his qualifications. And it wasn’t as though he was doing anything else. The death threats to Rafe’s family had been the proverbial added bonus. The tie-in with Rae almost like fate. He focussed back on Rae.
‘The de-bulking of the tumour on the actual foetus usually takes less than half an hour,’ she was telling them. ‘The majority of the five-hour operation is spent opening up the uterus in the first instance, and then stitching it closed again. Our biggest concern is to avoid compromising the health of the mother, and we have to make sure the uterus is sealed and watertight.’
Fascinated, he allowed himself to be absorbed by her presentation. Her care for her patients shone through her excitement for the skilled procedure. She handled the questions well, informing without patronising, always happy to elaborate or explain.
Christmas with Her Bodyguard Page 3