‘Wasn’t that my choice?’ Thea asked incredulously. ‘And when we decided to get married anyway, wasn’t that a good excuse for us to re-evaluate? See if it could be more than just a marriage of convenience?’
‘We weren’t meant to be, Thea. I’m not good at all this...talking.’
‘You’re not doing badly,’ she noted. ‘It’s more than I’ve ever heard you admit before.’
‘But you’ve had to push and push. We both know that would have grown old quickly—we’d have eventually grown to resent each other for it. And you would have been stifled in a cold marriage and never blossomed into the confident, successful doctor you are today.’
He’d only appreciated the truth of his words as they came out, and he was surprised when Thea nodded her head sadly.
‘Funny, but I thought the same thing last night. I would never have realised how strong I really am.’
‘So now we need to look to the future.’ He changed the topic with forced brightness.
‘Okay...’ Thea acknowledged hesitantly. ‘How do you propose we do that?’
‘We try being friends—like you offered back at the hospital. We still have to live together whilst I’m recovering, so we need to find some solution—however temporary.’
She nodded slowly in agreement.
‘Obviously there’s still an attraction there,’ he stated. After that spark the other morning there seemed little point denying it. Better to confront it head-on. ‘But it’s just a physical thing. We can ignore it if we really want to.’
And if he exhausted his body with physical exercise and took plenty of cold showers. But he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t afford to let Thea get under his skin again or give in to temptation only to hurt her all over again when he backed away emotionally. And he would.
She looked as though she was going to object again, but then she closed her mouth and offered a tense smile.
‘Sure we can ignore it. It’s not as though it’s even real, is it? Probably it’s just a residual effect of a long-overdue conversation which, now we’ve had it, will go away by itself anyway. We’ve both moved on in five years, right?’
‘Right,’ he agreed, wondering why he felt as though a tiny black hole of emptiness had just opened up in his chest at the way she could dismiss it—them—so easily.
‘Okay, so...friends,’ she confirmed, licking her lips before chewing nervously on the inside of her cheek. ‘And now, in the spirit of friendship, can I ask are you still going to push your recovery so hard? Push your body past its limits?’
‘I don’t know.’ He didn’t want to talk about it, but he forced himself to face her.
‘You still think you’ll return to active duty when you recover?’
‘Sure.’
‘I thought so. I said so to Sir James on the Board, when they told me to ask you to consider coming to work with the Air Ambulance.’
Not what he’d been expecting her to say.
He glanced at her sharply. Her feigned casual air wasn’t fooling him.
‘You want me to work with you?’
‘The Board have asked me to present the offer to you. It would be on a consultancy basis. As they understand it, even though you’re physically healed enough to return to work, you still won’t be ready for deployment to a war zone again for quite a while. So working with the Air Ambulance would be a great way to keep your skills sharp.’
And it would keep him in the game if he was never cleared by the Army to return to active duty. He’d be damned if he was going to let his injuries defeat him. But he had to admit it would keep his skills honed. Plus he’d get to work with Thea every day.
He hastily pushed that thought to the back of his mind. ‘What do you think?’
She shot him a penetrating look. ‘You want to know what I think?’
She sounded so shocked it surprised him. It was as though she thought her opinion didn’t matter to him. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
He frowned at her. ‘Of course. We’d be living together as well as working together. And you have to admit that it hasn’t exactly been the easiest ride so far.’
‘Of course,’ she