‘We can when we’re not under enemy fire. Takes a bit longer when my men also have to fire back.’
‘Now you’re being facetious.’ She frowned.
How was that possible to make him want her more than ever?
‘No, I’m just teasing.’
‘Well, I hope you’re enjoying yourself.’
‘As it happens, I am,’ he confessed with another grin. ‘But wait until we get to our first river and you can see for yourself how we do it.’
‘You’re really serious, aren’t you?’
‘Like I said,’ he told her breezily, ‘this is something we have to do regularly, even in contact situations. If the rest of the army needs to move somewhere fast, we have to be able to make it happen.’
She pursed her lips, clearly tempted to agree. He could almost read the reservations as they paraded through her mind.
‘Relax, Birdie. It will be fine.’ He shrugged, ignoring all the alarm bells clanging in his head.
They’d been ringing ever since he’d heard himself tell her, the night of the welcome party, that she was going to be driving with him rather than in her own charity’s vehicle.
Since when had he ever wanted to spend time with a woman so badly he was willing to bend the rules?
The answer—should he have admitted it rather than ducking the unspoken question entirely—was...never.
* * *
So much for concentrating on the incredible show being carried out less than twenty metres in front of her—so slick, so elegant, and so well rehearsed that it might as well have been a West End performance—all Bridget could think about was the fact that Hayden’s leg was pressed sinfully close to hers.
She felt like a tangle of nerves and nothing else, leaving her jumpy and restless. Hayden, on the other hand, looked completely relaxed and at ease.
‘So, right now the guys are putting together a five-bay, medium girder bridge which can span a nine-metre distance, and once fully built, ramped and decked, can take up to one hundred and thirty tonnes if it’s a wheeled vehicle, or if it’s a tracked vehicle up to eighty-five tonnes.’
She tried not to consider the fact that the glorious early morning sun was painting the sky a stunning, cloudless blue whilst she was standing here with Hayden, leaning on the bonnet of his four-by-four, feeling utterly peaceful.
‘Tracked vehicle?’ It was a tousle to drag her mind back to the matter at hand. ‘You mean...a tank?’
‘Tanks, armoured personnel carriers, mobile platforms for high-velocity missiles.’
‘You lost me after tanks.’ She laughed weakly. ‘But put it into context for me. What do tanks weigh?’
‘On average? I’d say about seventy tonnes.’
‘So you’re telling me that those eight men out there can put a bridge in place in under ten minutes and it will get a tank across a nine-metre gap.’
‘Steady on.’ Hayden grinned, and her stomach flip-flopped all over again. ‘They can put the bridge together in that time, but it takes a bit longer to push it out over a gap. Okay, so the initial part of the bridge you can see there is called the horseshoe, and the smaller part you can see at the front is called the nose. The pieces you can see each two-man team picking up right now weigh about two hundred kilos. But those beams over there—we call them bank seat beams—weigh around five hundred kilos each.’
‘So that’s why you guys suffer so many musculoskeletal injuries.’ Bridget laughed, but it cracked at the end when her mind decided to suddenly conjure up an image of Hayden’s body and the tiny scars she remembered seeing that night at his hotel.
The scars she’d touched, and kissed, and tasted.
‘Yeah, they’re quite heavy bits of kit.’
‘Hmm?’ Guilt lanced through her as her mind whirred. Something about heavy bits of kit? ‘But your guys are making it look like a walk in the park.’
She shifted position, moving against Hayden. Everything sizzled through her. Working with Hayden was thrilling but simultaneously fraught.
Every time she thought she was succeeding in dampening the attraction between them, he said something, or did something, and it flared up again.