Surprise flitted over her face.
‘That’s precisely how it feels. Every time. No matter how many times I see awful things happen to innocent people.’
‘I’m not sure that feeling will ever go away, Birdie,’ he said quietly.
‘Neither am I,’ she admitted. ‘But, actually, I’m not too unhappy about that.’
‘So tell me, Birdie,’ he asked abruptly, ‘what happened in your past to make you run away to help people in countries as far away from home as South Sudan, Nepal and Haiti?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
BRIDGET VALIANTLY TRIED to restart her heart, which appeared to have stopped beating. But it was impossible with what seemed like this spiked thing penetrating her chest.
The noise of the small party had faded fast into the night and all she could hear was a rushing in her ears. Then silence.
The worst thing about Hayden’s question was that he’d asked it as though he actually cared. As if she really mattered to him, when they both knew that they’d agreed there was—and never would be—anything more between them.
‘Who said I was running away from anything?’ she choked out at last.
‘I’m a commanding officer in the army,’ he pointed out almost kindly. ‘I’ve seen plenty of soldiers and civilians alike who have been running away from something. I can recognise the signs.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ she said in a panicked voice.
‘No.’ His voice was so low that she had to strain to hear him. ‘I am not.’
A charged energy arced between them and Bridget was forced to acknowledge that it was futile pretending to ignore it.
Worse, a part of her wanted to talk to him. She’d spent over a decade quashing her past and yet, with one seemingly solicitous question, she suddenly longed to tell him what he purported to want to know. As though sharing her story could somehow, finally, make it seem less defining.
But she couldn’t speak.
The words simply weren’t there and the silence lengthened between them. The seconds ticking slowly by.
‘You can’t run forever, Birdie,’ he murmured at length, the compassion in his voice startling her. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, at least find someone to talk to. There’s no hiding place from who we are. At some point you’re going to have to face whatever it is if you want peace. Trust me.’
‘I don’t have anything I need to face,’ she managed. ‘I have peace. Out here.’
‘You have purpose out here,’ corrected Hayden. ‘That isn’t the same thing.’
‘So everyone is running from their past?’
‘No.’ He didn’t rise to it. ‘But you are.’
‘You don’t know as much as you think you do.’
She bristled. But it didn’t stop her from realising that there was truth in his words. And what did it say about him that he could read that truth in her, when no one else had ever done so in all these years?
‘I know that you’re a different person out here. Even if Mattie hadn’t said so, and even if I hadn’t heard all the things people had to say about you today, I would have known it from the way you became so animated any time you discussed your work when we were back home.’
He’d been talking about her to other people? All day? She wasn’t ready to scrutinise what that meant right now—if it meant anything at all—but she could file it away for later. For when she wasn’t feeling so shocked.
‘That’s just a passion for work. You’re the same, by all accounts.’
‘But you’re a whole different person out here. Freer. Happier. Like you’ve undergone a complete metamorphosis.’
Freer.
Wasn’t that the very word she’d used when she’d thought about it herself?