“Qui—Prince... Captain? There is a protocol...” Anais said from behind him.
He turned and looked pointedly at her embroidered shoulder. “I’m sure there is. Send whoever will be coming out to the garden, Anna.”
“Yes, sir.” She didn’t flinch, though he noticed she also didn’t look him in the eye.
Grabbing the handles of Ben’s chair, he maneuvered them both right out the door and down the hallway. He knew the way to the garden.
He’d loved a girl in those gardens. A girl who apparently no longer existed.
How the hell had she managed to sneak back into the country under a different name, and start practicing medicine at a government facility, of all things?
Once they wheeled out into the fresh air, Quinn angled them to a bench so he could sit and be on eye level with the person he’d actually come to see. The one who obviously needed to talk.
Parked in a patch of summer sunshine, he waited. It wasn’t the time for pushing. It wasn’t the time to tell Ben he should want to live, or to tell him anything about his own condition. He’d listen. And he’d talk about other things. Be a friend. Be present.
Call Ben’s fiancée and family as soon as he left.
Leave this Anais nonsense to figure out later. It wasn’t really important. There was nothing she could say to him to make any of what had gone on between them better.
I never loved you.
I stopped loving you.
You were never that important to me...
What could she really say to explain leaving?
The desire to know was just a natural reaction to seeing her again, a summoning of that anguish he’d moved past at least a few years ago.
It didn’t really matter. She didn’t matter anymore.
* * *
Three hours and at least a hundred self-reminders not to think about Anais later, Quinn found himself outside the shut door to Dr. Anna Kincaid’s office.
Anna Kincaid. Anna. Kincaid. The name summoned bile to his throat. Seven years might as well have been seven minutes for the crush of desperation that had him wanting to claw through the door to reach her.
He’d managed to shove her to the back of his mind—for part of the time—and been present for his best friend, but it wasn’t good enough. He’d heard the sparse number of words Ben had been able to speak, but in the long silences she’d filled his head again and again. When the psychiatrist had found them he’d been allowed to stay, but he hadn’t learned much more about what had driven the attempt. All he really knew was what his eyes could tell him, and the memory of the strangeness he’d felt when he’d lost comparatively insignificant pieces of his own body to service. Some days still, he was shocked when he looked down at his hand and saw that not only the fingers but his wedding ring were gone. Some days, he still expected to find her beside him in the morning when he woke.
What he should be doing right now was making calls and going to the palace—where they’d expected him a few hours ago. Instead, he stood at her shut door. He couldn’t hear her inside, but he could feel her in there, like heat on his skin.
If he felt like admitting it to anyone else—he barely felt like admitting it to himself—he’d felt her at the old family castle the moment he’d stepped into the building. At the time, he’d put it down to memories haunting him more than something in the present. But, standing there, he didn’t even have to touch the door to feel her on the other side. His mangled hand hovered over the knob, and it heated his palm like light...
His hand wavered; he had to pull back from the knob. His arm felt seconds from a cramp, riddled with tension.
He didn’t know which was worse—not knowing still, or that he could be so daft to even think for a fleeting second that anything about her could still warm him. The heat was long-simmering rage and pain. Nothing light about it.
If anyone noticed him standing here, feeling the energy emanating from her door when any rational person would just go inside...the psychiatrist would want to spend some time alone with him next.
He opened the door and it slammed directly into something, halting his forward march.
She stumbled out from behind the door, looking disoriented, but her stagger gave him room to enter and he took advantage of it, shutting the door directly behind him.
“Why were you standing there?”
“I was thinking about locking the door,” she said without preamble. Then, redirecting his question, “Why were you standing outside the door?”
“Anais, I’ve had a hell of a day. I paused because I wanted to make sure I had control of myself and didn’t come right in here and shake you hard enough to knock the brown off of you. What the hell are you playing at with this drab makeover and the name-change? Are you in the country illegally?”
She flinched, then shrugged back from him across the distance of her tiny office. He’d struck another nerve. That shouldn’t please him, but the pink that flashed in her artificially tanned cheeks and the way she smoothed her hair down felt almost like satisfaction. He had seven years of jabs in reserve and, by the look of things, it wasn’t going to get boring anytime soon.
“Of course I’m not here illegally. I had my name changed. Legally. Then I changed my appearance. My mother is getting older—she’s got diabetes and had a heart scare last summer, not that I should have to explain myself. This is my country too, and I shouldn’t have to lose it forever because I married poorly when I was young and naïve.”
A tic in his right eyelid flickered at her return volley.
Definitely different from the Anais he’d known.
“How...?”
“Your brother changed my name for me quietly.” She rubbed her cheek and he knew where the door had clocked her, but she stayed standing there, close enough—only because of the wall behind her—that he could reach out and touch her if he wanted to.
He did want to, so he shoved his hands into the well-worn fatigues he preferred these days, comfortable clothing he’d soon lose as he picked up a new mantle of duty.
“I went with Anna because it’s close enough to Anais for me to still save myself if I start to say my old name. Kincaid is my grandmother’s maiden name, so I have some attachment to it. Doctor, however, is legitimately mine.”
Softness had always abounded in Anais. Tender heart. Soft, free-flowing wavy strawberry-blonde hair. Curves that bewitched him. Gentle aqua eyes. Youthfully plump cheeks and lips... Soft.
A red mark darkened that formerly plump cheek, outside the blush that had already faded. She’d had her ear to the door listening when he’d slammed it open. Not locking it. Or maybe not locking it yet, whatever she’d claimed.
She made herself sound even harder than she appeared. That physical angularity was by far the biggest change, and the one that had momentarily thrown him when she’d come into Ben’s quarters. Not her hair color, her eye color, the glasses, or that suspicious tan... It was how square her jaw seemed now, the gauntness of her cheeks, and the now slender but apparently strong body supporting it all. Anna Kincaid was hard.
He didn’t know what else to say.
For seven years, he’d had a million questions for her—mostly in the first couple of years when everything was hardest. But now, standing here, he didn’t want to ask her why she’d gone. Those old wounds could pop back open with the slightest prod. His chest already ached just looking at this shadow of his brightly colored Anais.
“Are you living back in Easton?”
“No. Are you still at the penthouse?”