Except in herself.
‘We were traveling at approximately seventy kilometres per hour on a relatively straight section of road when we entered a dip with unseen black ice, and the vehicle slid, hit the curb, left the ground and rolled twice before coming to a halt on its side.’
‘All right.’ Kat nodded.
‘I exited the vehicle through the side window and, having assessed the likelihood of the gas tank leaking and the vehicle bursting into flames, I took my...companion with me. I assessed him for injuries, saw the laceration to the femoral artery. The driver, Giorgio, made sure our female companion got out safely, too.’
‘Good...’
‘I tended to the femoral laceration for approximately twenty minutes during which time the medics arrived and transported us to the hospital.’
‘By using your knee over the proximal right iliac artery to slow flow velocity to the CFA.’
‘Is that a question or a statement?’
She blinked at him.
‘Both, I suppose. Okay, I need to check your pupils and then I’d ask you remove the top half of your clothing.’
For now there was no need to ask him to remove the trousers. Unlike the ripped, blood-soaked shirt, the only mark on the trousers was where his knee had been rammed into the older man’s injury.
Worse, and more shamefully, she wasn’t sure she had quite psyched herself up for the sight of him and his thunderbolt thighs. Still, as her eyes watched him shrug smoothly out of his jacket and shirt, Kat found her mouth going drier by the second until, finally, she was faced with the most chiselled, masculine chest she’d ever seen.
Muscles on muscles. Lean, hewn and flawless, leaving her heart in a dither over whether it could pound out the most energetic beat of its life or whether it should simply stop altogether.
He was surely too impossibly perfect to be real.
Her mouth felt parched, her skin tight and hot, and even her fingers were tingling with the ridiculous urge to reach out and touch those ridges and contours. And then he turned slightly and she caught the jagged edges of a scar; an old bullet wound by the looks of it.
A tiny imperfection, which somehow made him all the more beautiful, and rare.
Her guess would be that he was some kind of a bodyguard for whoever the VIP in that room was. And she couldn’t shake the knowledge that she was going to need all her professional level-headedness to get through the next half-hour or so in one piece.
* * *
Logan didn’t like it when the nurse—Kat, her manager had called her, hadn’t she?—fell so quiet. It made him wonder what was going on behind those expressive eyes.
And then he didn’t like it that he even wondered such a thing. She was pretty enough...more than pretty, interesting, he conceded grudgingly. But there was no reason for him to notice.
Look what had happened the last time he’d really noticed a woman. A trickle of bitterness threatened to weave through Logan, but moments before it did, it was instead washed out by a crashing wave of love. Love in the form of one four-year-old little boy.
Whatever hassle and grief Sophia had brought into his life, he wouldn’t change a single moment of it if that meant losing the best thing he’d ever known—his son, Jamie.
‘So...’ The nurse cleared her throat. ‘Let’s get you sorted so you can get back to standing outside your...companion’s door. I understand from the notes that you aren’t from Seattle.’
‘Actually, I am. Born and raised,’ Logan surprised himself by saying.
‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘You’re back, visiting?’
‘Something like that.’
It was a stock response, so why was he having to clamp his mouth shut from saying anything more? What was it about this woman that almost had him opening up in a way that he never did? That had him about to tell her that he was home for good? Finally.
He was bringing Jamie from Isola Verde to the USA, to the very place where Logan himself had grown up, to try to give his son—or, if he was honest, both of them—a fresh start.
Ironic that today was supposed to have been his last day ever as royal bodyguard to Roberto Baresi—the King of Isola Verde. More than that, though, King Roberto was a good man, underneath it all. And he’d been more than just an employer to Logan. Over the years, the older man had been a kind friend, too. Now he was in that room along the hall. Possibly dying. The fallout was potentially catastrophic—and not merely the political ramifications.
Logan hated that he was stuck here, in another room, not doing his job as bodyguard to the King.