‘Myles, please. I want to help. Let me help.’
‘I’m leaving. Now.’
She stood immobile, her mind desperately searching for the words that would change his mind; wondering how she could prove to him that she meant what she said. She wanted to help.
But his forbidding expression bit into her. An icy shiver rippled down her spine. This was a battle she wasn’t going to win.
Wordlessly—helplessly—she dipped her head in acknowledgement as he gathered up his belongings, and left her room.
CHAPTER TEN
MYLES HEFTED ANOTHER crate onto his shoulders and carried it from the four-by-four to the supply room in the compound, his eyes trained on the steady stream of people crossing the river.
He told himself he wasn’t brooding. That his head wasn’t still stuck back in Rae’s room last night. That his mind wasn’t still full of her words, her scent, her taste. But mostly, that his heart wasn’t full of self-loathing for whatever he’d done to her in his hellish sleep.
He should have known better.
He should never have gone near her, never have let his desire for her overwhelm logic. He was supposed to be looking out for her, not sleeping with her. However undeniable the attraction between them. However intoxicating.
Because, ultimately, where could it ever lead to? What did he have left to offer a woman like Raevenne?
He’d lost his career in the army, he couldn’t function as a surgeon, he didn’t even have control over his own head. He was broken. Damaged. Defective.
And she deserved so much better.
He could scarcely believe that last night he had come so astonishingly close to telling her what had happened that last mission. That he had been on the verge of spilling every last regret, and fear, and anguish that had been crowding his head—making him feel as though he was inevitably going to implode at some point—for far too long.
So, instead, Myles concentrated on the tiny figures stretched out for miles on the flat plains on the other side of the river. They travelled fast or slow, in groups or alone, as far as the eye could see. Just like hundreds of thousands of caribou migrating annually across the arctic tundra. Only they weren’t wild animals. They were humans. Wretched and frightened, involuntarily displaced from their homes.
His eyes followed the straggling groups as they got closer, became more tightly packed, until they were swarming and grouping, and all desperate to cross the single rope and plank bridge. It was sheer madness how being on one embankment rather than the other would make such an incredible difference to their lives.
In other camps they might be alone because of an earthquake or a flood, or some other kind of natural disaster. But here, over a day’s drive from the Camp Sceralenar, the people weren’t coming for those reasons. They weren’t coming for the women’s hospital that Rae ran so smoothly.
He knew what these people were running from.
Only too well.
For a brief moment, flashes of other images played in his brain like a horror show he never wanted to watch.
He shut them down. But not before he heard Rae’s voice in his head telling him there was no shame in talking about it. Logically, he knew she was right. He’d spent the last six months trying to stuff it back down, pretending the memories didn’t exist.
And look where that had got him.
‘That’s the last of it.’ Pushing the thoughts from his head, he approached the camp leader. ‘Where do you want me now?’
She eyed him up and down with a grin.
‘Take a break. Get some water. You must be exhausted. You were like a machin
e, lifting three crates to everyone else’s one. Talk about a man on a mission.’
‘I just want to work.’ He forced himself to sound pleasant.
There was no need for everyone to know how preoccupied he was. How he wished he weren’t here, but back at the main camp. Back near Rae, where he could make sure she was okay. Happy.
Or, at least, happier than he’d made her last night.
What the hell had he been thinking, telling her all that stuff? Things he’d never told anyone else. Never wanted to tell anyone else. Because outside the army no one else’s opinion of him had ever mattered. Until now.