Bit by bit, the night-terrors that had woken him, screaming and sweating, had begun to get fewer. To the extent that he’d known it was time for him to move on from protecting Roberto Baresi and return to medicine.
Yet now, for the first time, it occurred to Logan that the nightmares had practically stopped altogether these past few weeks.
Because of Seattle, obviously. Not because of Kat. And yet he couldn’t deny that she had played a part in helping him to feel so at home, so quickly.
‘I wasn’t ready to return to medicine initially, so a friend recommended this role as a bodyguard.’
‘Must have been some role,’ she commented. ‘The hospital rumour-mill is rife with speculation.’
‘And your guess?’ he asked, casually.
Kat looked unimpressed.
‘I don’t guess. If people wanted me to know, they would tell me.’
Logan didn’t care to analyse what shot through him at that. He’d expected nothing less from Kat, and yet he felt vindicated all the same. She was exactly the woman that he thought she was. Compassionate, loyal, discreet.
‘I was bodyguard to Roberto Baresi,’ he confessed, and instantly it felt like a weight lifting from his shoulders. ‘He was...is...the King of a place called Isola Verde.’
Kat didn’t answer. He hadn’t really expected her t
o. Yet it felt good, sharing that burden with her. The guilt and fear he’d felt ever since that car accident. The gnawing worry that he could have done something more. Something to stop the accident in the first place.
‘You were a king’s bodyguard?’
‘I was.’
She sucked in a long breath then shook her head.
‘Wow. I mean, wow. So that’s why you said your wife married you for the glamourous lifestyle?’
And suddenly, whether it was because of what he and Kat had just done, and the fact that he suddenly felt different somehow...changed, Logan couldn’t have said. Either way, he found himself talking about Sophia without the slightest bit of the resentment or anger that had threatening to colour his words in the past.
‘Sophia was beautiful. Charming. Manipulative.’ He shrugged. ‘Only I couldn’t see it.’
‘Why not?’ Kat asked, and there was no challenge in her tone, only interest and care.
Everything that he knew her to already be. Everything that his ex-wife had never been.
‘I was fresh out of a theatre of war. A tour that had gone bad. I’d lost men—friends—and I was in pain. She was skilled in reading people, you might call her a social chameleon. And maybe I also saw what I wanted to see.’
‘You had a void, and she presented herself in the perfect shape to fill it?’ Kat guessed.
‘That’s a pretty accurate way to put it,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t doubt that she was probably running from her own demons—maybe she still it—but she was attracted to the status I had as a royal bodyguard, accompanying the King wherever he went.’
‘I remember you saying it was a glamorous lifestyle.’
Logan pulled his mouth into a self-deprecating smile.
‘The King’s life was glamorous. Mine was not. But I didn’t realise that’s what Sophia had been after until it was too late.’
‘Until Jamie was born.’
Logan thought back to the first moment when he’d cradled his precious son in his arms and how, in that instant, everything had changed.
‘I took one look at him—my son—and I realised that none of the baggage I’d been carrying around from my military days was worth passing on to this innocent baby. I realised what I’d been missing for the past few years. I also realised what Sophia really was.’
‘Is that when you left her?’