‘Indeed? Well, if you’re worried that you aren’t going to be...safe enough with me, I can assure you that I have no intention of letting anyone go near you.’
Including himself, he concluded haughtily, and it felt like an odd kind of triumph. Almost as if they were sparring again, the way they had done all those Christmases ago.
What the hell was going on, here?
‘That aside,’ she stated primly, ‘are you always this high-handed and condescending? Or is it just because it’s me?’
The flashes of the Raevenne he used to know weren’t doing much to help his sense of self-control. Oddly, it was as if a light were suddenly glinting through him, casting tiny spots of illumination and colour on a darkness that had been growing for too long.
A part of him wanted to lean towards that light.
A bigger part of him wanted to extinguish it.
‘Not usually. Then again, I don’t often come across someone so infamously flippant and disparaging.’
She glowered at him, and instead of it confirming every last, negative rumour he’d ever heard, he found himself oddly drawn to her. Still, he held his ground.
He wasn’t sure who was more startled when Rafe cut in, clearly amused.
‘Glad you still remember how to handle my sister’s prickly side.’
It was testament to how much his old friend thought of his half-sister that he dispensed with the half part of the title.
Interesting.
‘Seems so.’ Myles forced a lightness into his tone. He wasn’t sure why, but he couldn’t allow Rafe to see there was any issue between him and Rae.
‘Good, then there’s an urgent business call I really need to make. I’ll see you both tonight at the conference. Good luck, Rae. I know your lecture will be incredible.’
Then Rafe was gone, leaving the two of them alone in the plush office suite.
For several long moments neither of them spoke.
‘So,’ Myles finally broke the silence, fighting the urge to clear his throat, ‘you’re a doctor now?’
CHAPTER TWO
HE HADN’T INTENDED the emphasis on now. Hadn’t meant to sound so disparaging. But the storm raging in his head wasn’t letting him think straight.
‘I am. Obstetrics and gynaecology.’ She lifted her head proudly and something kicked in his chest. ‘And I’m a good one, too. I’m also a maternal and foetal medicine specialist.’
She was actually sparkling. That moss-green edging in her eyes seemed more like a deeper navy blue right now, which had always meant her emotions were running high. He’d learned to read Rae through her eyes long, long ago.
‘So Rafe said.’ He wrenched himself back to the present.
‘Right.’ She bit her lip and it did something to his gut that it had no business doing.
‘He also told me you were giving a keynote speech at the World Precision Medicine Conference tonight.’
Her cheeks flushed again.
‘I am. And I heard you gave a brilliant lecture there a few years ago. I was meant to attend but...there was a medical emergency and I missed my plane.’
She offered a rueful grin and suddenly it occurred to him that whatever stories the media told—however they touched on her medical career but focussed on her personal life—Rae was utterly invested in her career as a doctor.
This, Myles realised with a start, was more like the Raevenne he remembered from all those years ago.
The rest of the world might know her as the girl who had catapulted her despicable side of the Rawlstone family onto the reality scene with a sex tape of her eighteen-year-old self and her twenty-eight-year-old bodyguard.