Christmas with Her Bodyguard

She still couldn’t see Janine’s face, but she could hear something colouring her expression. If Rae hadn’t known better, she might have thought it was excitement mingled with amusement.

‘No, I’m happy with this. Besides, might be fun for you to do the walk-through.’

Rae wrinkled her nose, wondering what she could possibly be missing. But there was no time to dwell. Leaving the bay, she quickly scrubbed up and darted around the curtain to the operating area, a bright, welcoming smile on her lips.

‘I’m Rae, sorry we have to meet under these circumstances, but hopefully we’ll get some time later. How can I help?’

‘Apparently you’re going to help me identify the uterine arteries.’ A pair of all too familiar eyes met hers.

Her heart hung, time seemingly slowing around her. He couldn’t be healed, not in a week. And yet he was out here, and apparently the new general surgeon.

‘Myles...?’

‘Indeed.’

‘General Surgeon?’

‘I wanted to move away from what I did before. And it isn’t as though I didn’t do lots of other trauma cases over the years. But maybe we can discuss it later. Before my patient bleeds out internally,’ Myles prompted, but there was no mistaking the expression in his gaze.

It promised her all the explanations she could want. Afterwards.

The one that told her everything was going to be okay. He’d healed himself, and he’d come back for her.

Everything else could wait.

Twenty hours, six C-sections, and a slew of both complicated and non-complicated deliveries later and they were in his tiny room, each with a fresh, hot coffee.

She waited for him to start the conversation, afraid to speak first.

‘I love you.’

She froze. Her body might as well have stopped working. She stopped swallowing, stopped blinking, stopped breathing.

Something welled inside her and she had the sudden, frightening suspicion that it was the urge to say the words back to him.

But she mustn’t.

A much as hearing him say he loved her was like the most beautiful song in the world piped straight into her chest, she needed more than that. She needed to understand.

‘I admit to a level of combat PTSD. You were right. I already knew it but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it aloud before now. Perhaps a fear of looking weak, or maybe a fear of losing respect. I certainly lost my self-respect. I didn’t know who I was, caught between the army soldier I’d been and this new, terrifying life on Civvy Street.’

‘But you’re still the same strong, responsible man you always were,’ she man

aged. ‘Anyone can see that.’

‘I couldn’t. Not until I met you. You helped me to see that I had a problem, and that I needed to talk about it.’

‘And did you?’ she whispered.

‘Did I talk to someone? Yes. I went to see my old brigadier.’

She stared at him, winded.

‘When?’

‘After I left you in the car, outside the railway station. When I went into the station there was already a train ready to leave so I bought a ticket and I jumped on board. To this day I don’t know where it was headed to. I realised my mistake a couple of hours in, disembarked at the next station and made that phone call to my old unit.’

His wry smile tugged at her. ‘You didn’t make the entire journey?’