Second Chance with His Army Doc

But she wasn’t listening. Whether because she couldn’t, or more because she didn’t want to, Mattie couldn’t be sure.

‘I hadn’t seen him as often as I might have liked. I’d always been too busy, but I guess that’s a poor excuse.’ She waited for Kane to answer, but he didn’t. ‘Maybe a perverse part of me felt as though I was being like him by saying the same.’

‘Does it help?’

‘The opposite.’ She pursed her lips in an effort to control the welling sadness, ‘I feel like I’ve let him down. Been selfish.’

The prickling was getting painful now and she dropped her eyes to stare into the fire, as though the dancing flames could somehow dry all the tears away before they fell.

She heard a shuffle, and felt Kane moving beside her, his strong arms wrapping around her and pulling her into the safety of his chest. And, for a moment, she felt safe, and seventeen, all over again.

She had no idea how long they stayed there, she warm in his arms.

‘So where have you been? I mean, which tours?’

He named a few places. Something in his tone told her that they were operational tours that he was happy to forget but which, sometimes in the dead of the night, his brain remembered in all too startling clarity, and he would wake up in a cold sweat.

A sensation she knew well enough.

And then he mentioned another tour, the worst tour she’d ever known, and she froze in his arms.

‘I was there, too. What year?’

For a moment, Kane hesitated, then he told her. It was as though an icy cold hand was creeping down her spine, spreading chill everywhere it touched.

‘That was hell on earth,’ she muttered thickly. ‘There was an ambush in an abandoned village. Our guys went in to get the women and children but...’

She couldn’t go on. Kane merely grunted but didn’t speak. She realised he couldn’t. His heart was pounding in his chest, thundering under her ear.

She lifted her head and stared into the flames and, for a moment, all she could hear was the crackling of the fire and a ragged voice. It took her a few moments to realise it was her own.

‘I saw some of the guys in there. I didn’t even think you’d make it out at one point.’

The air was thick with tension. A thousand memories, many of them bleak.

‘We nearly didn’t. We were pretty much pinned down, taking heavy fire with some really serious casualties. No one could get in to us, and we couldn’t get out. And then, suddenly, this sandstorm came in and we dec

ided it was all or nothing. We managed to get past the enemy, even got some distance away, though not far enough for any ambulance to risk getting into us. But then some crazy pilot flew in a chopper with a MERT team, led by the biggest badass army trauma doctor I’ve ever seen, to recover our two wounded.’

She blinked at him slowly, could feel the shock beginning to cloud her face.

He couldn’t be talking about her...could he?

‘The med team had barely got our buddies on board when the enemy tracked us, but the doc wouldn’t get on until the rest of her team were safely on board. We held them off long enough for the chopper to get off the ground, but I saw the doctor get clipped by a round in the back of her leg just as she leapt on board.’

‘Is that so?’ Mattie asked faintly, her gaze caught with his. She wasn’t sure if either of them were even daring to breathe, but she couldn’t stop her hand sliding down to her calf to the scar from that bullet wound. The scar he’d felt that first night together back in the hotel.

Did he know that he was talking about her? Did he realise?

And if so, had he recognised her back in that hellhole? Because she’d had absolutely no idea that, crouched down by her heli—trying to give enough covering fire so that she and her team could get the injured soldiers out—one of the other men still fighting had been Kane.

Her Kane.

Leaving those guys on the ground had been the worst feeling she’d ever had to deal with—knowing she was leaving them to their inevitable deaths. There was no way they were going to make it out alive, but the chopper had been tiny. Too small for anyone but her team and the two casualties.

Few things haunted her—one couldn’t afford to let them in this job—but that day did. Even now, she could remember that sensation as the adrenalin had kicked in and she—her whole team—had been determined to save the lives of those two injured soldiers. To make sure their buddies hadn’t died for nothing.

She’d had no choice—not that the knowledge helped. Nausea swelled within her.