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 out. ‘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