Her words resonated. I need to help. He totally understood the sentiment. It remained one that he was unable to articulate. After he had done his part, he could have walked away. He knew that Lily had expected him to. She probably would have preferred him to walk away.
His jaw muscles locked tight as he looked down at this fiercely independent woman, half her face hidden in his shoulder. He struggled to poke his anger into life but instead experienced an overwhelming surge of protectiveness. It was primal and illogical, a throwback to hunter-gatherer days.
It was love.
They were right. Love did set you free. In his case the prison bars had been of his own making.
‘She’ll be fine, Elizabeth, just let...’ Blocked in a corner, he tried to ease past the woman, calling out, ‘In here, she fainted!’ Relieved to finally see assistance in the form of a nurse and a doctor, he reluctantly passed Lily onto the trolley that arrived.
As a child she had always been cynically sceptical of those scenes in films when the swooning heroine lifted a hand to her head and said in a faltering voice, ‘Where am I?’
As she opened her eyes and mumbled, ‘Did I faint?’ she felt some sympathy for those heroines.
‘Yes.’
Her eyes flew wide at the sound of his voice. Ben, she discovered, was standing beside the bed she lay on looking stern and—she gave her head a tiny shake—he was wearing what she thought of as his closed look.
‘Well, I suppose I did it in the right place,’ she said, struggling to pull herself upright, only to find her progress hindered by a large hand in the middle of her chest. ‘Will you stop that? I have to—’
‘You have to stay there and sit up gradually. Then you will drink this vile cup of tea the kind nurse made you, while I will go and reassure your mother that you are all right. Then I am taking you back home, where you will sleep.’
Out of the list Lily could see herself doing one: the cup of tea sounded good.
‘I’m—’
‘Let me guess, fine?’ he drawled, sounding bored.
‘Well, I am.’ She directed a pointed look at his hand planted on the middle of her chest. ‘But I won’t be if I can’t breathe.’
The pressure immediately lessened, which did not help the breathless feeling, suggesting it had more to do with than his proximity. She pressed her eyelids closed and breathed in the scent of his skin. Blindfolded, she could find him in a room of a hundred people; it was terrifying how fine-tuned all her senses were to him.
‘Can I get up now?’ Unaided, Lily, she reminded herself. Despite all her best intentions, she had leaned on him a lot during the last couple of weeks, and he’d been there. She was under no illusion, despite his deeply developed sense of duty, now that Emmy was out of danger how much contact he would want.
Access was the least she owed him; it was a debt she could not begin to pay. During the last weeks of uncertainty, her entire focus had been on her daughter’s...their daughter’s recovery. Lily had not even begun to think about what happened next, once Emmy was out of danger.
‘Slowly.’
She did so, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. They were in a curtained cubicle in an empty bay of beds. As she got up he pulled aside the curtain with a swish of fabric.
‘You all right?’
She lowered the hand she had lifted to her head. ‘Fine,’ she lied, fighting a wave of nausea.
‘Drink the tea.’ He wheeled the trolley closer and pointed at it.
‘Is that an order?’ His attitude made her want to grind her teeth and do the exact opposite, but she was awfully thirsty so it probably wasn’t worth making a fuss.
‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
His ironic comment brought her eyes to his face, seeing for the first time the lines of strain etched around his spectacular eyes. Over the last couple of weeks she had rarely given much thought to how he was feeling.
‘This stoic stuff is admirable, to a point,’ he continued, ‘and then it just gets irritating. I know it goes against the grain for you to agree with anything I say and you have established the fact that my opinion counts for nothing. But none of those points are my idea. They are the doctor’s orders. Emily Rose,’ he said, enjoying giving her her full title, ‘is asleep. And you will be of little use to her if you end up as a patient here yourself.’
‘All right.’
His brows lifted at the ready capitulation. ‘Common sense? Will wonders never cease?’
She acknowledged the rueful comment with a twitch of her nose and admitted, ‘I know I need sleep, but I haven’t been able to switch off for weeks. I think I’ve forgotten how.’
She gave a yawn and a stretch and, his eyes on the smooth section of midriff it revealed, he found himself thinking of several interesting methods of helping her switch off... He on the other hand felt very switched on!
She lowered her arms, but the damage was done; all he could think about was kissing a path up the soft curve of her belly...or down and—
‘Besides, I couldn’t bear for her to wake up and be alone.’
The plaintive admission made him feel like a total bastard, when all he could think about was getting her clothes off.
‘She’s not going to be alone when she wakes up,’ he soothed, the colour scoring his cheekbones the only remaining evidence of the frustration that burned in his veins. ‘Your mother will be there and the nurses who, let’s face it, she has managed to wrap around her little finger.’
Lily grinned then yawned again, her hand patting her mouth. If this didn’t stop soon she’d dislocate her jaw. ‘She really is a charmer, isn’t she?’ she agreed with pride. ‘You’re right.’
‘Now that hardly hurt at all, did it?’
She shot him a look. ‘I do need some sleep. Could you give me a lift to the B & B?’ Did that sound pushy? ‘Or if you’re busy I could get a cab. Oh, could you ask Mum for the room card?’ Though Lily had only been to the small B & B once or twice, her mum had been sleeping there—except on the couple of occasions she had taken advantage of Ben’s offer of his helicopter and flown back home.
On the last occasion she had come back that same evening admitting that she could get very used to that form of transport. Then she had broken the news to Lily that her secret was no longer a secret.
News travelled fast in a small rural community and everyone now knew the identity of Emmy’s father.
Lily hadn’t really expected the news to spread so quickly. She had half anticipated that Ben’s grandfather might have wanted to bury the truth but he hadn’t and Lily found, rather to her own surprise, that she was not particularly concerned.
The only person she hadn’t wanted to know was Ben and now that he did, other people gossiping didn’t really matter to her.
‘Not walk?’ he mocked.
‘Actually I could, couldn’t I?’ She realised, missing the irony totally, the small B & B where her mum had taken a room was literally just round the corner from the hospital.
The initial idea had been for them to take turns sleeping there, but Lily had found it much less stressful to sleep in a chair by her daughter’s bed.
He looked at her for a moment and shook his head. ‘No, you couldn’t. I will take you, though obviously I will expect petrol money.’
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