‘I even remember suggesting, several times, that you could join the army yourself.’ She heard the lift to her voice, as if she wasn’t quite in control, but she couldn’t seem to stop it. ‘You always told me that it wasn’t for you, that you would never want to be a soldier. I pleaded with you, Kane.’
And how she’d pleaded.
She’d been desperate for him to join up when they’d been teens. She’d wanted them to have a life together, and even though Kane had never wanted to go to university, she’d begged him time and again to speak to her father, to ask him to guide him on the way to becoming a non-graduate commissioned officer.
He’d been a bright kid at school, even if he’d been the wild kid. The rebel. He could have got good A-levels if his dad hadn’t pulled him out to earn a wage, just so that the old guy had more drinking and gambling money.
But Kane had been a hard worker. Focused and trustworthy. He could even have taken night courses for those missed A-levels. Her father would have helped him.
‘You told me you would never, ever join the military. A
nd nothing I said ever changed your mind.’
‘So I was wrong,’ he clipped out curtly. ‘Turns out joining the Infantry was the greatest thing I could have done.’
But she didn’t miss the strange, bleak look that flashed across his eyes for a split second before it was gone.
She frowned, trying to work out what she’d seen. But she couldn’t. It was like only having a few pages from a book and trying to work out what the whole thing had been about.
‘How? How did it happen, Kane?’
‘It isn’t important.’ He shot the question down with all the deadly force of a surface-to-air missile.
Shutting her out, unequivocally, and it hurt. Far more than she should let it. The ground was shifting beneath her and she struggled to try to get the conversation back onto something more solid.
‘Nevertheless...’ she offered weakly.
‘Nevertheless what, Mattie?’ he demanded. ‘Nevertheless I should have known that, even though you’d left your career for your new husband, you signed up again when the marriage went wrong? How could I have known?’
She blinked, the conversation moving too fast and skipping too many facts for her to follow. Her chest was aching with the effort of containing her hammering heart. It didn’t help that his eyes had locked with hers, virtually rooting her to the spot.
Her mind raced back to that moment at the hospital when she’d first spoken to him again after so many years. He had mentioned he’d heard about her engagement when he’d told her he’d heard a rumour she was leaving the army. He had demanded that she confirm the rumour, but before she’d said anything more, he’d spotted her ringless finger, hadn’t he? And she’d been so frantic to change the topic of conversation—before he’d realised that she hadn’t married sweet George because a weak part of her had never stopped loving him, Kane—that she’d merely confirmed she wasn’t married and moved on.
Did he really think she’d got married and then...what? Divorced?
The blood hurtled through her veins, but the thoughts in her head were still jumbled. Confused.
‘You never told me, Kane, but who did you hear the rumour from?’ she asked slowly, barely recognising her own voice.
He stopped, his eyes catching hers, refusing to let them slide away. Pinning her where she stood. The silence in the room so tense it almost suffocated her. And all she could do was wait.
‘You,’ he said eventually. ‘I heard from you when you announced that you were leaving to concentrate on being a civilian doctor.’
Mattie didn’t answer, she merely shook her head adamantly. But the hammering was making its way into her brain, pressing on her temples. There was only one time she could think of that she’d made any such kind of public statement.
‘What do you mean, I announced it?’ she asked carefully.
His face shuttered down. Effectively locking her out.
‘Forget I said anything.’
She knew this side of Kane. This so-called stubborn streak that people had always taken to mean that, once he’d taken a stand, there was no talking him around. But Mattie also knew that it was less about blind stubbornness and more about trying to protect himself.
And with an upbringing like his, he’d needed to protect himself from a lot.
Nonetheless, her legs were still threatening to skitter away from underneath her. Very un-major-like. Certainly uncharacteristic. She didn’t know how, but Mattie drew herself up to her full five-foot-seven height. It might have worked had Kane not been a full eight inches taller. She still had to tilt her head up towards him, which did nothing to lessen the aura of power that swirled around him.
‘You were there,’ she whispered at last. ‘At my wedding rehearsal. Weren’t you?’