Christmas with Her Bodyguard

‘Well, if you can’t do it for yourself, or even for me, then do it for Myles, Rae. He’d never say it but I think he needs us. The firefight was bad, Rae, it took Myles out for months whilst he wasn’t able to operate.’

A surgeon who couldn’t operate? Myles unable to operate? It didn’t bear thinking about.

She’d been ready for Rafe’s cajoling, even for him to order her in. But she hadn’t been prepared for him to lay such a perfect trap. It was her Achilles heel. If someone needed her help, she could never deny them. Rafe had known it, and he’d baited her shamelessly.

‘What’s going on, Rafe?’ She glowered at him even as she was compelled to ask the question, but Rafe simply shook his head.

‘It isn’t my story to tell.’

Frustration rushed her, but she was determined to hold her nerve. At least, outwardly.

‘If you want me to agree to this—’ she was amazed she managed to make it sound as if she were actually in control—as though her body hadn’t been turning itself inside out, caught between longing and sheer terror, from the moment she’d discovered that Myles was even in the building ‘—then you’ll tell me exactly what’s going on. Now.’

* * *

Myles could hear them, out in the corridor. Talking quietly.

He couldn’t make out the words but the context was unmistakeable. The higher, female voice, clearly Rae’s, was demanding. Rafe’s deeper voice was firm but uncharacteristically urgent. Myles gripped the sides of the plush chair and shifted awkwardly.

Why the hell had he ever agreed to this?

An image of Raevenne hovered in the back of his mind but he pushed it easily aside.

Ridiculous.

He wasn’t here for her. He was here because he had no other choice. Because he needed a job that took him away from battlefields and death, and Rafe, his former best friend, had offered him exactly that. And because his painstakingly constructed life had unravelled so incalculably these past six months.

Almost seventeen years in the British army—where he’d thought he would stay his whole life—over. Just like that.

Guilt pressed in on him.

Heavy.

Suffocating.

He blocked out the images—the smell of burning flesh, the village burned to the ground, young Lance Corporal Mike McCoy—which threatened to overwhelm him. Blackness closed over him and for a dangerous moment he swayed on the spot.

Only his subconscious fighting to lock on the familiar, feminine voice, muffled as it was through the door, provided him an anchor to the present.

He grasped at it gratefully.

One day at a time. Wasn’t that the advice he’d given out, time and again over the years, to soldiers in his position? Never imagining that one day it would be him standing there, his life having imploded and now lying in tatters around him.

But this wasn’t the army. Or what had happened out there. This was simple, uncomplicated, repaying an old debt to a good friend. Playing bodyguard whilst Rafe tracked down exactly who was threatening his family.

And right now, being a bodyguard beat being a surgeon hands down. True, part of Rafe’s plan included clinical observation but he could handle that. Observation was one thing. It was staying an active surgeon right now that certainly wasn’t an option.

An operating room with a body on the table in front of him and a scalpel in his hand was no place for a man who suspected he was on the edge of mild PTSD. His heart hammered angrily at the mere thought of it. At such an obvious sign of his own weakness. But those tours of duty had taken so many men and women he knew, so many innocent kids, so many helpless civilians, particularly that last week. And especially that last mission.

When perhaps he could have...should have...made different choices.

All those women, those kids. Mikey. It had taken them all.

Did it have to have taken part of his soul, too?

The sounds in the hallway provided a sudden, welcome distraction from his uncharacteristic moment of self-pity.

Ten operational tours in the past twelve years alone, sometimes back-to-back, and never once had he allowed himself to look back and dwell. Everybody knew that was the road to self-destruction because it wouldn’t bring anybody back and it was a waste of time.