Charlotte Hawkes – Christmas With Her Bodyguard (страница 3)

‘Wait, you said Myles was hurt?’

Clearly there was more to it than that but it was little comfort to know her instincts had been correct. Still, since Rafe hadn’t stopped pounding along the corridors leaving Rae’s legs burning as she tried to keep up, this wasn’t going to be the ideal time to press him on it.

‘Wind your neck in, Rae. I didn’t say that.’

It was so far from Rafe’s usual lexicon that there was no missing his agitation. Which perhaps helped to explain why he apparently hadn’t noticed she’d gone from pretending not to remember Myles to showing fear he had been hurt.

Ironically, that only stirred her up all the more. Still, she needed to be more careful. More blasé.

‘Wind my neck in?’ She fought back her agitation to teasing him, shedding her American accent in order to imitate his vaguely plummy English pitch. ‘My dear brother, I do believe you’re the one who had me practically frogmarched from my thirty-six-hour shift at the hospital onto your private jet and flown across the Atlantic. Yet I’m the one who needs to “wind my neck in”?’

‘Funny, Rae.’ She could almost hear him roll his eyes at her. ‘Your impersonation leaves a lot to be desired. You could take the Dick Van Dyke award for abysmal cockney accents. I’ll warn Myles.’

She forced a laugh and told herself she wasn’t getting anxious. She had to pretend that his existence meant absolutely nothing to her.

Which, of course, it did.

It was only galling that she didn’t find herself remotely convincing.

‘Fine.’ She forced a dazzling grin even though her half-brother couldn’t see her. ‘You try my accent. I bet you can’t sound like a New Yorker.’

‘Rae,’ he cautioned.

‘Seriously, give it a try.’

‘Raevenne.’ He stopped at last, turning around to face her, his hands on her shoulders. ‘Stop panicking.’

Her stomach somersaulted again. Her half-brother knew? Surely that was impossible.

She was only relieved she’d slept most of the plane journey and her shift at the hospital had been so busy that she hadn’t eaten more than a biscuit for the last eighteen hours. At least it meant there was nothing to regurgitate.

‘Who said I’m panicking?’ Her shrill voice didn’t help and she stopped abruptly.

The silence was practically pressing in on her as she nonetheless followed Rafe up the stairs to his office in the panoramic suite on the tenth floor. He never took an elevator if he could take the stairs. One of the few overhangs he couldn’t conceal from his years in conflict zones as a frontline officer in the British army. Thank goodness for her own daily cardio sessions at the exclusive gym uptown.

And for the fact that they weren’t in the Manhattan office with its sixty-five storeys.

Then, all too soon, they were standing in the anteroom to Rafe’s office, her heart threatening to pound out of her chest at any moment.

Myles was on the other side of the door and she wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t ready to face him. To see even a shadow of disgust or condemnation in his expression.

Rafe’s hand reached for the door handle.

‘I can’t...’ she choked out, stumbling backwards.

‘Well, if you can’t do it for yourself, or even for me, then do it for Myles, Rae. He’d never say it but I think he needs us. The firefight was bad, Rae, it took Myles out for months whilst he wasn’t able to operate.’

A surgeon who couldn’t operate? Myles unable to operate? It didn’t bear thinking about.

She’d been ready for Rafe’s cajoling, even for him to order her in. But she hadn’t been prepared for him to lay such a perfect trap. It was her Achilles heel. If someone needed her help, she could never deny them. Rafe had known it, and he’d baited her shamelessly.

‘What’s going on, Rafe?’ She glowered at him even as she was compelled to ask the question, but Rafe simply shook his head.

‘It isn’t my story to tell.’

Frustration rushed her, but she was determined to hold her nerve. At least, outwardly.

‘If you want me to agree to this—’ she was amazed she managed to make it sound as if she were actually in control—as though her body hadn’t been turning itself inside out, caught between longing and sheer terror, from the moment she’d discovered that Myles was even in the building ‘—then you’ll tell me exactly what’s going on. Now.’

* * *

Myles could hear them, out in the corridor. Talking quietly.

He couldn’t make out the words but the context was unmistakeable. The higher, female voice, clearly Rae’s, was demanding. Rafe’s deeper voice was firm but uncharacteristically urgent. Myles gripped the sides of the plush chair and shifted awkwardly.

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.