Christmas with Her Bodyguard

by Charlotte Hawkes

  ‘And wait for you to get back?’

  ‘No, just until I’ve crossed. Then I’m going to release the rope and you’re going drive to camp. Just like if someone approaches you.’

  She opened her mouth to object but he pre-empted her.

  ‘And the longer you argue, the less chance his mother has.’

  ‘But, Myles...’

  ‘Get a team and wait for me at the bridge. If I can get her down to you, I will.’

  ‘And if you can’t. If the baby is coming?’

  ‘Then I’ll try to deliver it. I watched you enough times in your clinic, I can make a decent attempt. I might not be you but if I’m all she has then I’m better than nothing.’

  She wanted to say no, but part of her knew it could be the only chance this woman had.

  ‘What about the boy? You can’t take him with you—it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Far too dangerous,’ Myles agreed.

  ‘And I’m not supposed to take him in the truck, but I can’t leave him here.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have a choice.’ Myles jerked his head to where the kid was fixed on the river bank. ‘I don’t think he’ll leave this spot as long as his mother is on the other side. He knows what I’m trying to do.’

  ‘Will he be safe?’

  ‘Safe is relative in these parts,’ Myles offered grimly before putting his hands on the tailgate to jump back in. ‘Okay, I’m tied up. Take us back upstream.’

  * * *

  Rae saw the boy before she saw Myles.

  She’d been pacing the compound for several hours when she saw the kid heading down the road, his face as pinched and frightened as before. But whilst his body had been stooped with desperation before, it was now straighter, taller, more hopeful.

  He was keeping a steady pace, but this time there was no shouting, no drawing attention of any kind. Still, his eyes were trained across the river, and Rae could only follow his gaze, something which might possibly have been her stomach lodged in the vicinity of her throat.

  Myles.

  His gait was unmistakeable, although he had shirked the volunteer garb that he’d been wearing in favour of something closer to the clothing worn by the people swarming across the bridge. And in his arms, the unmistakeable figure of a pregnant woman, a bundle in her arms that, Rae realised with a jolt, looked suspiciously like a newborn baby.

  There was clearly an issue.

  It felt like an age as he reached the bridge, joining the throng who were already jostling to cross the narrow planks. She could see him moving, trying to fight his way through. All she could do was wait, and pace, knowing that every minute was crucial to the baby and the mother, but unable to do a single thing about it.

  And then he was close enough for her to call a couple of local volunteers to bring out a gurney, which arrived at the same time that Myles did. There was no missing the blood covering the woman’s clothing, and Myles’.

  ‘You delivered the baby but the mother’s haemorrhaging?’

  ‘Yes. There was no choice, that baby was coming out. The heartbeat was weak but it was there, I had to clear its lungs and nose of fluid. It will need to come back with us to the neonatal team. However, it’s the mother I’m most concerned about. She hasn’t delivered the placenta and now she’s haemorrhaging.’

  ‘Okay, let’s get her inside and check her levels. I’m guessing her haemoglobin is going to be down so we’ll need to find her some blood—her son would be a good start—and start transfusing her. Then we can get inside and try to get that placenta out.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘YOU’RE VERY QUIET.’

  They were almost an hour into the drive back to Camp Sceralenar, the ambulances with the more urgent patients in the convoy, but the two of them alone again in the four-by-four.

  She hitched her shoulders, her gaze fixed out of the window.

  ‘You can talk to me, you know.’

  ‘I know.’ She smiled sadly but didn’t pull her eyes away from the barren landscape. ‘I just don’t know what to say.’

  ‘There was nothing you could have done, Rae. The baby was born too early and they just don’t have the equipment out here to help these babies survive. But you saved the mother. Because of you, the kid who flagged us down isn’t an orphan right now.’

  ‘I know that.’ She turned her head slowly to look at him.

  ‘It just doesn’t help,’ he supplied.

  ‘No, it doesn’t. I just... I’m not sure how I feel.’ She drew in a long breath. ‘When I first arrived here I was shocked at how brusque people were. How cold. How little they grieved, or showed their grief. They were so desensitised to all the death and I couldn’t understand it. Now I think I do.’

  Was the tight coil inside his chest normal? Like an over-wound clock.

  ‘Do you?’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘One in five foetuses don’t survive here. That number is so much lower back home, and those that don’t survive are often lost well before labour. I might see one death a month. But out here I see them every day. Multiple times. Worse, most of those babies die because of complications during labour.’

  ‘There’s no care out here,’ he concurred quietly. ‘Most of these women don’t even know there’s a problem until it’s too late. And even if they did, what can they do about it? There are so few hospitals, and anyway, what money do they have?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He could see her swallow, desperately trying to hold herself together.

  ‘I couldn’t understand how they could be so accepting, so stoic, at first. But these women go into pregnancy knowing the chances of something going wrong are high so they are prepared to lose their baby. Perhaps too prepared.’

  ‘Probably,’ he concurred, ‘but there’s nothing you can do to change that. That’s the way life out here is. You just have to find a way to deal with it. To cope.’

  ‘Like you have.’ She cast him a sidelong glance before looking away guiltily. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Yes, you did. In your own way.’

  But he was astounded to find that it didn’t rankle as it had in the past. It didn’t grate on him. He wanted to talk to her. To let her into his head. To help her to know him, to understand him.

  As if he believed she could actually help him.

  He’d lost his career, his reputation, the life he’d known. The only thing he had left to give her was his honour. Then it was up to her. She could take him, or she could leave him. His chest constricted painfully.

  He’d battled terrible enemies, been in firefights that should only ever have had one outcome, lost too many friends to count. He told himself he’d withstood worse than any woman walking out on him, then ignored the little voice that goaded him that Raevenne wasn’t just any woman.

  ‘And you’re right, I haven’t found a way to deal with it so I’ve just been bottling it up inside. But it was always bound to spill over at some point.’

  He was aware she’d stilled. She was frozen in her seat wanting neither to look away nor to engage, for fear of breaking the moment. For a few moments, he turned his head from the road and met her clear, direct gaze whilst something rolled through him, low and unstoppable, like a drumbeat, or thunder.

  * * *

  ‘I’m grateful to you for offering to be the one to listen, but I need you to know that I’m not making any promises. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to tell you everything, or that it will make any difference.’

  ‘I don’t need anything from you. I just want you to know that you have that option,’ she whispered.

  He nodded, unmoving for another moment, finally turning his attention back to the road.

  ‘Part of the reason for not wanting to talk about the night...that we found the village burning...was that I
was trying to protect someone.’

  He didn’t realise he’d stopped talking until Rae spoke up hesitantly.

  ‘Lance Corporal Michael McCoy?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head but then stopped again. When she reached her hand out to touch him, her fingers resting gently on his forearm, it was oddly encouraging.

  ‘I was trying to protect his daughter.’

  ‘His daughter?’

  ‘Kelly. She was five years old and she was his whole world.’

  Rae sucked in a breath, sympathetic but still not understanding. He didn’t blame her.

  ‘A few days before that mission Mikey had received a letter from home. A well-intentioned family member telling him that they’d discovered his wife had been having an affair.’

  Her hands fluttered against her throat, a shocked sound escaping her lips.

  ‘They wrote a letter? When Mikey was in a warzone?’

  ‘They meant well. I guess they thought he was better finding out with his friends around him than coming back home to his wife knowing nothing about it.’

  ‘God,’ she breathed. ‘What an impossible choice. But surely... I mean, why did they put him on that mission?’

  Guilt, black and familiar, erupted through him like molten lava in a volcano. She gasped, horrified.

  ‘I’m so sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. I didn’t mean it at all how it sounded.’

  ‘His OC thought he was okay.’ His voice was raw, fractured, barely recognisable. ‘When I mentioned my reservations to him, he said that he’d known Mikey a long time and that he was confident. I couldn’t argue. I tried telling Mikey he should sit this one out but he begged me not to push it. He explained that he already knew about the affair, that he’d confronted her about it after we’d come back from our previous tour of duty, but she’d sworn it was over.’

  ‘Oh, Myles. What a horrible choice to have to make.’

  ‘He told me it wasn’t news to him, that he’d been handling it just fine all this time whilst the rest of his squad knew about it. I couldn’t put my finger on why I wasn’t so sure, so I let it go. We were days away from the end of his third tour and his rifles squad had been protecting my medical team for eight months. We’d been lucky enough to be together from the start of this tour without any significant casualties, and he didn’t want to dip out on the last mission of the tour.’

  ‘He made it sound so plausible.’ Rae exhaled.

  ‘He did, and I believed him. With hindsight, I should have known better. The other guys saw what they wanted to see, whilst I was just far removed enough to see the warning signs for what they were. But it was a standard recce and we didn’t expect to see anything significant out there so I made the decision to keep his secret. It’s a decision I will regret for the rest of my life.’

  His voice cracked and for a moment, he couldn’t speak.

  ‘What happened, Myles?’ Rae prompted softly, and he actually believed she could feel every last drop of his anguish. ‘What did Lance... What did Mikey do?’

  It was as though a dense, black fog had descended over him and he couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. Still, he forced himself to push through it.

  ‘We walked through that village, looking for survivors, the stench and the sights worse than any kind of horror film anyone could ever make. I still can’t be sure exactly what triggered him,’ he began, ‘but suddenly he just lost it.’

  ‘Lost it?’

  Something roared through Myles, as though trying to drown out the words he didn’t want to say.

  ‘He knew they had to still be somewhere in the area. They weren’t hard to track. We tried to stop him but... I’ve never seen anyone move so fast, as though the horror of it had taken him over. We heard the firefight even as we raced in but it was too late.’

  He stopped the vehicle, unable to trust himself; needing to step out for a moment, to let the cool night air flow over his skin, to quell the nausea churning his stomach into a quagmire of regret and recrimination.

  Wordlessly, Rae got out of the vehicle and moved around it until she was standing in front of him. He had no idea how long they stayed there; it could have been hours, or maybe merely minutes. Then, abruptly, she bowed her head so that her forehead was resting against his, cool and settling. Neither of them moved, barely even breathed, but eventually, eventually, the roaring in his head began to abate.

  ‘None of us have ever voiced it, but I can’t be the only one to think that Mikey must have known what the outcome would be. That he couldn’t have hoped to take them all on alone. That he...didn’t intend to come back from it.’

  Rae raised her hands to cup his face.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I should have told someone I thought he wasn’t up to it. I should have fought harder to make people listen.’

  ‘You said it yourself, they already knew but they chose to see what they wanted to see. A strong Mikey, not one who was hurting.’

  The vision of her swam in front of his eyes.

  ‘You think that makes it easier?’

  ‘I’m not sure anything will make it easier.’ She jerked her head lightly from side to side. ‘Your responsibility and loyalty to the men you were so close to is strong. I think you’ll always believe there must have been something you could have done. Even if there wasn’t.’

  ‘You don’t understand. It was my job to anticipate all of that. If I had insisted on dropping him from the recce, he’d still be alive. A five-year-old girl would still have her father.’

  ‘That’s not realistic. And I think you know that, deep down. You did as much as you could with the information you had at the time. Odds are, if you’d left him behind on that mission, you’d have come back to find he’d found another way to do it. Rafe told me a few soldiers couldn’t take any more and took their lives in the toilet blocks on camps.’

  He couldn’t deny it.

  ‘And if Mikey had done that,’ she continued sadly, ‘you’d have been beating yourself up for not taking him on that mission. Thinking that if you had, he would still be alive.’

  In the darkest recesses of his head he’d wondered the same thing, too many times to recall, over the years. He’d woken up in a cold sweat, his mind searching to touch an answer that could never be found. He held his head up, his voice sharper than he intended. But at least it didn’t break or splinter, the way he felt his very soul was doing.

  ‘We’ll never know.’

  And that was the worst part about it.

  His words hung between them, like a shimmering, electrically charged barrier.

  His guilt was palpable. Perhaps he was most guilty that the surgeries he’d carried out on those villagers had drawn the attention of the enemy, made them collaborators. Maybe it was more about Mikey. Probably it was a combination of the two.

  She gazed at him, as though silently willing him to keep going, and not to suddenly regret his frankness, and shut her out instead. He hated the sorrow in her expression, almost as much as he hated that flicker of hopefulness behind it. As if she imagined him opening up to her now meant so much more.

  Because he couldn’t guarantee her more. He couldn’t guarantee her anything. He was damaged. Worthless.

  ‘Is that why you walked out on the army? The surgeries? Because you think this is the punishment you deserve?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘You say it like you don’t believe it.’ He couldn’t keep the accusation out of his tone. ‘You think it’s right that those innocent villagers should die, that I let one man get to the point where he took his own life, that one little girl now has no father, and all the while I get to walk away unscathed? To walk around as though nothing ever happened?’

  ‘But you aren’t unscathed, are you?’ she pointed out. ‘You don’t walk around as though nothing happened. You’ve sacrificed everything: your caree
r as an army officer, your career as a surgeon, even some kind of a decent life. You can’t tell me that taking a job as a bodyguard to the vile Raevenne Rawlstone wasn’t your idea of punishment.’

  ‘You’re not vile.’ Anger coursed through him without warning. How dared she talk about herself that way? How dared she even think it?

  Rae held her ground.

  ‘But you didn’t know that at the time, did you? You thought I was vacuous, and trampy, and spoilt. The perfect penance for someone as culpable and selfish as you?’

  The blackness swirled faster, harder.

  ‘You’re not that woman.’

  ‘And you’re not that man,’ she declared triumphantly.

  His eyes seared. Scalding and furious. He practically spat the words out at her.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Except that I do,’ she announced, ignoring his attempts to intimidate her. ‘I’ve got to know you now. And even if I didn’t, my brother knows you, yet he gave you this job. He entrusted me to you.’

  She lifted her hands to his chest. The way she had only a few nights ago. Reminding him all too easily of how it had been between them. How it maybe could still be.

  ‘He trusts me. But I don’t deserve that trust.’

  ‘You absolutely do. And that’s why I trust you, too.’

  He couldn’t stop himself. He covered her hand with his, his calloused thumb pad caressing her skin.

  Less than a month ago he’d thought she was like some kind of breathtakingly beautiful angel, but that it was only skin deep. But he’d been wrong. She was beautiful inside, as well as outside.

  He’d spent the last few weeks humping and dumping. He’d hoped that working out here would soothe his battered sense of self-worth and it made him feel as if he was starting to heal. As if he could be useful again. Worthy.

  Worthy of Rae?

  He thrust away the taunting voice but he wasn’t quick enough. New questions tumbled around his head.

  Could he ever be worthy of a woman like her? She was incredible, blending in seamlessly, with no trace of the socialite he’d thought he’d known. She was like a different version of herself out here. A better version. Freer. More comfortable in her skin. The real Rae, he realised abruptly.