‘Do you want to come with me?’
‘To your work?’
By the look on her face, she was just as surprised he was by her offer. Still, she rallied well.
‘Why not? I mean, I can see how you might be going a little mad with nothing to do. I think I would be too, in your position. And from a professional point of view I think you’d find it really interesting. The base is quite big and there are quite a few teams on site. Plus we’ve got a couple of ex-Army trauma specialists with us at the moment. You won’t be able to come out on any calls, of course, but you can see how things go down at the base.’
‘And today just happens to be Take an Estranged Husband to Work Day?’ Ben grinned. The offer was tempting, but he couldn’t see them letting him in.
‘It might not be usual, but not everyone is the “Mighty Abs”.’ Thea deflected his scepticism with aplomb. ‘A decorated major and renowned Army field trauma surgeon? Oh, I think they’ll make an exception.’
Ben suppressed a shudder. ‘Thanks for that.’
Still, if it meant getting out of this place and having something decent to distract him he wasn’t about to grumble too loudly.
He grabbed his bomber jacket and followed her into the hallway. ‘Lead the way.’
* * *
Thea made for the live feed screen on the wall the minute she stepped through the doors. Returning calls of greeting absentmindedly, she scrutinised the screen. It streamed real-time information on all incoming 999 calls for potential call-ups. Already she knew it had the potential to be a pretty busy day, but for now she had enough time to show Ben around.
Ben! She spun around with a start, but he’d already been whisked away. Dammit. Coming to work had provided the mental distraction she’d been craving, but it had also made her forget the one thing she needed to warn Ben about. That nobody actually knew she was married.
She felt physically nauseous as she dashed through the base, pulling up short as she spotted Ben in the break room, already surrounded by her colleagues. Well, she’d been right to suspect that he’d be more than welcome here, judging by the way everyone was falling over themselves to be introduced to him.
In one way it was a good sign—it meant she could give him the basic tour and then let someone else take over. Inviting him to join her certainly hadn’t been an altruistic gesture. Being around Ben was proving even harder than she’d feared. Her little cottage, her haven, was now thick with tension, memories and unanswered questions. All of which she’d thought she had laid to rest a long time ago.
Seemed she’d been wrong.
So she’d brought Ben here. Hoping to prove to him just how much she’d changed in the last five years and perhaps hoping that their mutual love of medicine might offer them some interesting cases which they could discuss back at home—instead of strained one-liners as they skirted awkwardly around each other.
Caught up in anxious thoughts, she suddenly realised that everyone at the base had gone deathly silent. Apprehension gripped her as nine pairs of eyes fixed accusingly on her.
‘Ben is your husband?’
‘You’re married?’
Dammit, she should have warned Ben to keep his mouth shut.
‘Got a family tucked away we don’t know about, too, Thea?’
That last quip had Thea’s heart plummeting to the soles of her rubber rescue boots. They wouldn’t be so quick to smile at her if they knew the truth. Ben wouldn’t be so keen to be around her if he knew the truth.
‘I... We... I...’
Of all the eyes boring into her it was the pair of familiar battleship-grey eyes she was most conscious of. Ben’s. The pair she was keenest to avoid meeting.
Confusingly, she sensed the greatest level of accusation coming from him...and something else she couldn’t quite pinpoint... Could it be...hurt? He had a damned nerve, she tried to tell herself.
‘It’s called a personal life for a reason, guys.’ She tried to joke, but even to her ears it came across as prickly and standoffish.
‘What my wife is trying to say is that it isn’t easy being married to a soldier.’ Ben stepped in, somehow managing to unruffle feathers and smooth things over with apparent ease. ‘I’ve been on a lot of back-to-back tours and that’s always...difficult.’
A series of grunts and nods told Thea they were buying it, and it was all she could do to stop her mouth from dropping open. Aside from the fact that it wasn’t remotely close to the truth, why the heck couldn’t Ben be so apparently open and communicative when it came down to what was really the problem between them?
As her colleagues drifted back to work, affording Ben and Thea a degree of space, Thea marvelled at their acceptance. If had been up to her, she wouldn’t have lived it down for at least the next year.
She supposed she should be grateful to him. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t help noticing the way he’d fitted so seamlessly into her life, as though none of the pain of the last five years meant anything. She was beginning to wish she had never brought him here.