Way to go, idiot. Talk about the very person she doesn’t want to think about.
But Thea smiled. A small, fond smile which tore at Ben’s heart.
‘When I was a kid I couldn’t pronounce Alethea, so I used to tell people my name was Ethel. Dan loved it. Even when I started to be known as Thea he still called me Ethel. It was our thing. No one else could share in it.’
‘Right...’ Ben swallowed uncomfortably. He wished he’d never asked. Somehow it had made him feel closer to Thea. He didn’t want to feel closer to Thea. He clenched his fists as the image that had haunted him for the last three weeks swam into his head in high definition.
Dan...cradled in his arms as he lay dying on that hard desert ground.
Their two-man patrol had walked straight into an ambush and the two of them had been alone and pinned down by the enemy, with only a rocky outcrop for protection. Ben had tried and tried to stem the bleeding but it had been just too severe. Time had started to run out for the guy he’d fought alongside twenty-four-seven, for three hundred and twenty days of their last year’s tour of duty. And for multiple tours over the last seven years before that.
Grief hovered in the back of his mind but he refused to let it in. There was no place in his mind for mourning—he had to stay strong for Thea. She didn’t know the half of it. And he was never going to tell her. Besides, wasn’t he the king of shutting out emotions? He’d been doing it well enough for the last decade and a half.
‘Did you ever wonder how we’d never met before?’ Thea asked suddenly. ‘I mean, you were Daniel’s best friend and I was his sister.’
‘Not really.’ Ben paused thoughtfully. ‘Dan was always careful to keep the two sides of his life separate—his personal life and you, and his Army life. I think after your parents died he didn’t have the easiest time of it in the kids’ home. He never really talked about his past to anyone.’
‘Except you?’ Thea observed. ‘Because he trusted you?’
‘Right,’ Ben answered bleakly.
‘But still...’ Thea shook her head, still confused. ‘If he trusted you that much, surely you’d have come with him round to the flat?’
‘No, I never came round.’ Ben shrugged. ‘You have to understand I’m a commissioned officer. Dan wasn’t. Being part of a team and in each other’s company twenty-four-seven is one thing, but socialising back home isn’t that easy.’
‘Because the Army don’t allow it?’
Thea frowned, confused. Ben didn’t blame her. The Forces had their rules, their protocols, and if you were a part of it then it all made sense. It could save lives. But to an outsider trying to understand it might seem strange.
‘They don’t encourage it,’ Ben admitted. ‘We have separate messes for socialising. But the Army do realise that the bonds formed in war time don’t just dissolve when you get back home. So, like some of the others, Dan and I used to go on training runs together, and we headed into the mountains once or twice a year—but always off the base.
‘Right...’ Thea hedged. ‘But when you were deployed together he never even showed you a photo of me?’
‘Having a photo of your wife, or girlfriend, or baby is one thing. But having a photo of your sister... There’s no way Dan would have risked the guys seeing a photo of a girl like you. It would have invited attention...comments that a brother wouldn’t want to hear about his sister.’
‘Oh.’
Thea flushed a deep scarlet as the meaning of his words sank in. He found it surprisingly endearing—a reminder than she had never really appreciated just how stunning she was. Even now.
‘Tell me what you thought the first time you met me,’ she said. ‘On that date we went on together.’
He stiffened. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to be having.
‘Please, Ben. I need to hear something...pleasant... Everything’s gone so very wrong. I just want to hear what you told me that night.’
Ben met her wobbly, pleading gaze. She wanted distraction, a better memory to offer some flicker of consolation at one of the worst times of her life. After the way he’d treated her, surely he owed her that much?
‘I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever met,’ he said quietly. ‘Not just aesthetically, but on the inside, too. You were fun, impetuous...you had a vibrancy about you which was wonderfully infectious to all those around you. You made everyone want to be near you, to be part of your group.’
He’d been on a rare night out with some other officers—at a crowded bar—when Thea had slipped into the space beside him. They’d started talking casually and that had been it—he’d never felt such an inexorable attraction to a woman before. He’d excused himself from his group as soon as he’d been able to, just to spend the rest of the evening in Thea’s company.
‘Oh...’
She sounded let down, and he knew why. She thought he’d understood her better.
He hesitated, then conceded. ‘At least that’s what you wanted people to see. But beneath that veil there was a quietness, almost a shyness about you when you thought no one was watching you. Judging you. I assumed it was a defence mechanism you’d created after your parents had died, to stop people asking if you were all right.’
‘Really? You saw that?’
Her evident pleasure that he’d seen a part of her others had been only too happy to ignore made him want to kiss her and berate her all at the same time. And that was the damned problem.
‘So the next day, when you told me we couldn’t see each other any more...?’ She hiccupped, clearly torn between not wanting to say the words and needing to know the truth. ‘You didn’t have feelings for me anymore?’
How was he supposed to answer that? From the moment they’d met he had been hooked. This spellbinding young woman had persuaded him to take her to a funfair. There had been a small group of them—Thea’s friends—but he hadn’t even noticed them after the first few minutes. He had only seen Thea.
They’d hurled leather balls at the coconut shy, laughed their way through the hall of mirrors and shared an incredible, intense first kiss at the top of the Ferris wheel.
In most of his life—even much of his childhood—Ben had never felt as happy and free of responsibility as he had that evening with Thea. And he’d known even then that she had an ability to make him fall for her such as no other woman ever had.
And now she wanted to know why he’d walked away from her. What could he say? He owed her something. Perhaps a variation on the truth was the safest option.
‘We’re just...weren’t a good match. I’m sorry, Thea.’
Her body seemed to curl even more into his arms and he felt worse than ever. But it was a necessary lie...no, a half-truth... They weren’t a good match. Ben could recall tantalising glimpses of a real inner confidence and a love of life, rippling constantly beneath that artificially shimmering, vivacious exterior. He had seen them from the beginning. She was the kind of person who made people feel good, want to bask in her warm glow for ever.
He wished he could be the kind of person who made her feel good, who could inspire that hidden side of Thea.
Instead he knew that he was the kind of person who would eventually extinguish that dancing light in her soul. If he was the kind of man his father had been he would drag Thea down, as his mother had been dragged down. What kind a life would that be for a woman like Thea?
He’d known as he’d walked her home that night, wondering at the way she had made him feel about her after just one incredible date, that he needed to walk away from her before he did hurt her.