Why the hell had he ever agreed to this?
An image of Raevenne hovered in the back of his mind but he pushed it easily aside.
Ridiculous.
He wasn’t here for her. He was here because he had no other choice. Because he needed a job that took him away from battlefields and death, and Rafe, his former best friend, had offered him exactly that. And because his painstakingly constructed life had unravelled so incalculably these past six months.
Almost seventeen years in the British army—where he’d thought he would stay his whole life—over. Just like that.
Guilt pressed in on him.
Heavy.
Suffocating.
He blocked out the images—the smell of burning flesh, the village burned to the ground, young Lance Corporal Mike McCoy—which threatened to overwhelm him. Blackness closed over him and for a dangerous moment he swayed on the spot.
Only his subconscious fighting to lock on the familiar, feminine voice, muffled as it was through the door, provided him an anchor to the present.
He grasped at it gratefully.
One day at a time. Wasn’t that the advice he’d given out, time and again over the years, to soldiers in his position? Never imagining that one day it would be him standing there, his life having imploded and now lying in tatters around him.
But this wasn’t the army. Or what had happened out there. This was simple, uncomplicated, repaying an old debt to a good friend. Playing bodyguard whilst Rafe tracked down exactly who was threatening his family.
And right now, being a bodyguard beat being a surgeon hands down. True, part of Rafe’s plan included clinical observation but he could handle that. Observation was one thing. It was staying an active surgeon right now that certainly wasn’t an option.
An operating room with a body on the table in front of him and a scalpel in his hand was no place for a man who suspected he was on the edge of mild PTSD. His heart hammered angrily at the mere thought of it. At such an obvious sign of his own weakness. But those tours of duty had taken so many men and women he knew, so many innocent kids, so many helpless civilians, particularly that last week. And especially that last mission.
When perhaps he could have...should have...made different choices.
All those women, those kids. Mikey. It had taken them all.
Did it have to have taken part of his soul, too?
The sounds in the hallway provided a sudden, welcome distraction from his uncharacteristic moment of self-pity.
Ten operational tours in the past twelve years alone, sometimes back-to-back, and never once had he allowed himself to look back and dwell. Everybody knew that was the road to self-destruction because it wouldn’t bring anybody back and it was a waste of time.
Galvanised, he pushed himself out of the seat and stalked across the floor just as the door swung open and the familiar form of his former army buddy strode in. But it was the figure slinking in behind Rafe—her head resolutely down—that arrested his gaze.
Raevenne Rawlstone.
He hadn’t thought about her in years.
Liar.
He ignored the silent accusation.
But he had shoved memories of her, of that one Christmas together, to the back of his mind. Yet now, having heard Rae’s muffled yet nevertheless unmistakeable voice through the door, he found he couldn’t stuff her back into whatever cold corner of his mind in which she’d been lurking all these years.
It was insane. Objectionable. Unacceptable. And yet, it seemed, here he was.
He wasn’t aware that he’d crossed the room towards her until she lifted her head—those unmistakeable laurel-green eyes with their perfect, moss-green edging that had haunted him far more than he had ever cared to admit—and finally met his stare full-on.
His breath lodged, as though he were winded, as though seeing her for the first time in fifteen years. Innocent and fragile. So far removed from those gossip columns, those entertainment channels, that awful Life in the Rawl reality show.
He’d tried to escape them but it hadn’t been easy. When you were out in a conflict zone it was amazing what light escapism soldiers found entertaining. And still, it made him grit his teeth so hard he was surprised his jaw didn’t break.
‘Ma’am,’ he ground out stiffly before his brain got into gear.
It was ridiculous given how they’d once known each other, and he wasn’t surprised she hesitated before sliding her smaller palm against his and managing a stiff handshake.
‘Major.’
Was that a jolt of...something...surging through him?
Impossible.
So why was he having to fight himself not to snatch his hand away?
Myles glanced back at her.
He had no words to articulate why he felt so upended. Or even what it was. Which was when she opened her mouth and bit out, ‘I don’t want you as my bodyguard.’
Not quite that fragile, then.
Something else tipped sideways within him and suddenly, bizarrely, he found himself fighting a faint smile that toyed on his lips.
He thrust the odd sensation aside, reaching instead for his more familiar cloak of dispassion and finding something slightly less reassuring. It was all he could do to school his features.
‘Something wrong?’
She cocked her head to the side as if actually contemplating it.
It occurred to him that he hadn’t had anyone evaluate him like this in a long, long time. Ever since he’d been a desperate recruit, prepared to leopard crawl from Fort William to Cape Wrath if it meant winning an army bursary to study medicine.
‘I think I might prefer someone who looks like they could handle a shoving, unruly crowd. Someone more...’
Belatedly, he realised she was deliberately trying to insult him.
‘More?’ He arched one eyebrow as though indulging a silly, petulant child, which, he reminded himself, was exactly how he saw her.
‘Yes, you know, more...’ She waved her hand airily. ‘Bigger, more intimidating.’
‘Is that so?’
‘That’s....so.’ She flicked out her tongue and the movement snagged his gaze. Inexplicably he couldn’t seem to draw his eyes away.
‘Indeed? Well, if you’re worried that you aren’t going to be...safe enough with me, I can assure you that I have no intention of letting anyone go near you.’
Including himself, he concluded haughtily, and it felt like an odd kind of triumph. Almost as if they were sparring again, the way they had done all those Christmases ago.
What the hell was going on, here?
‘That aside,’ she stated primly, ‘are you always this high-handed and condescending? Or is it just because it’s me?’
The flashes of the Raevenne he used to know weren’t doing much to help his sense of self-control. Oddly, it was as if a light were suddenly glinting through him, casting tiny spots of illumination and colour on a darkness that had been growing for too long.
A part of him wanted to lean towards that light.
A bigger part of him wanted to extinguish it.
‘Not usually. Then again,