Second Chance with His Army Doc

In all likelihood, that something had been her memory that a row between their teenage selves about the army—and the fact that her joining up would have torn them apart—had been the last time they had ever spoken. Kane had been so anti any authority back then, including her military-orientated family. She was the daughter of a brigadier and he was the son of a man who’d fought in back-room pub brawls just for enough beer money to drink himself into a stupor every night.

In typical teenager-in-love fashion, she’d been naïve to think that their vastly different backgrounds didn’t matter back then. But surely he wasn’t still so entrenched in his views all this time later?

Yet whilst she wasn’t afraid to tell Kane, she found that she simply didn’t want to cloud this moment with an old, long-buried disagreement. She didn’t care to examine that choice in too much depth, which begged the question, What did she want? In the end, Mattie settled for a half-truth.

‘No, I don’t mean on operational duty.’ His lip curled slightly in disgust. ‘I mean that I thought... I heard...you gave up your army career.’

Her heart stopped thumping and simply...stopped.

He couldn’t know about George. Surely?

‘You...heard?’ she managed, her tongue sticking uncomfortably to the roof of her mouth. ‘How? From whom?’

His gaze was all too sharp. Too piercing. She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was pulling so tight she was afraid it might suddenly snap.

Abruptly, he shook his head.

‘Rumour.’ He shrugged. ‘Someone back in Lower Heathdale maybe? I really wasn’t that interested.’

She wasn’t sure she entirely believed him, but at least her heart was slowly thudding back into life.

‘What did they say?’ She barely recognised her own voice.

‘You were getting married and you were leaving the army for your husband. Some earl or something.’

She made a strangled sound in her throat. They were venturing into territory she wasn’t ready for.

Not yet.

‘Were they lying?’ he demanded.

As if her answer mattered to him.

And how she wanted it to matter to him. But she couldn’t afford for it to matter that way because she wasn’t ready to explain herself. She didn’t want to make some throw-away remark as though calling it off four years ago, on the eve of her wedding to gentle, loving George, hadn’t been the hardest decision she’d ever had to make.

She waited for the familiar punch of guilt that she’d always felt when she thought of her ex-fiancé but, for once, it didn’t come. Instead, her body was blazing. Singing. A veritable orchestra playing with all the fanfare of the Last Night of the Proms. All because of the man standing right in front of her now. Which could only say something deeply worrying about herself as a woman.

‘Were they lying, Mattie?’ Kane ground out.

‘No. They weren’t lying.’

That had been her intention. It just hadn’t happened. But she didn’t say that.

‘Why would you give up the career you’d dreamt of all your life for a wedding?’ he demanded. ‘Just because your husband is an earl?’

Without warning, he plucked her hand from his arm as if he couldn’t bear her to be touching him a moment longer. Then his palm stilled as it held her fingers and he lifted her hand to examine it. Deep furrows pulled between his eyes for a fraction of a second before he quickly smoothed them out. His eyes raked over her face, leaving it feel as though a fire was raging under every inch of her skin.

‘No ring?’ Was it her imagination or was his voice deliberately neutral? ‘Why not?’

A thousand little detonations went off inside Mattie at the unexpected contact, yet she couldn’t pretend it was an intrusion. Still, it was easier to tell herself that her body was reacting out of shock, rather than anything else. Certainly not some kind of chemistry. Just as she told herself that she wasn’t leaving her hand in his because she liked it, but rather that snatching it back would only have proved to him that he was getting under her skin.

She wasn’t even sure that she believed her excuses.

‘Not married,’ she managed, at last.

The silence was so long that, for a moment, she wondered if she’d suddenly lost her hearing.

‘No perfect husband?’ His voice snagged over her. Rough, like sandpaper, making her skin prickle and her voice choke up.