‘It’s more than that. One day at the FIBUA an over-eager soldier fell out of a second-storey window during a routine house clearance. I ended up treating a casualty for real and performed my first emergency tracheotomy. I saved my first life and I didn’t freeze, I didn’t panic. The adrenalin was pumping, yes, but other than that it just came naturally. It was the moment I realised I could really do it, I could be an army trauma doctor—I could be a great army trauma doctor. The rooftop was where I finally let go of the past and embraced a new, positive future.’
‘So you come up here after bad days like today to try to recapture that sense of victory,’ he realised.
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘To remember what it feels like to get it right. Saving a life is a rush like no other; it’s an unbeatable feeling. But losing one is devastating. And the nature of the MERT means that sometimes you lose more than you win.’
Yes, he could certainly understand that, just as he understood her need to come up here and have her moment of weakness out of sight of the others, her reluctance to shed a tear in front of her team. He understood her sense of propriety that, as their team leader and a major, she should stay strong for them.
It was a degree of staying in control he recognised all too well.
So why was he still up here instead of leaving her alone?
Because he felt as if he could help her, Ash realised. Some part of him needed to help her. It wasn’t about this inexplicable chemistry between them, although that had probably been the catalyst. It was about the way they had clicked, working in the field together the previous day. In all his experience, he had never fallen into such harmonious synchronicity with someone in such a short time, almost pre-empting each other’s needs as they’d worked towards the common goal of saving that corporal’s life.
‘Felicity, you know you did everything you could today. You...’
‘We lost them all,’ she choked out, interrupting him. ‘All of them. It wasn’t enough.’
‘And you aren’t to blame,’ he stated firmly.
She didn’t answer immediately, simply stared angrily out over the sunset. When she did finally speak, her voice was little more than a whisper.
‘It’s bad enough when it’s a warzone. When there are IEDs and enemies. I’ve been to enough of them; I’ve dealt with explosions, and fatalities, and soldiers requiring multiple amputations. And all I can do, every shout, is know that I’ve done my utmost to get them back as much in one piece as I can.’
‘I know,’ he murmured reassuringly.
Her voice was choked and he knew she was close to the edge. He had no idea why, but he found himself putting his arm around her shoulders and drawing her in. She stiffened at first, resisting him, and then allowed herself to be shifted, still fighting to hold back her sense of failure.
‘But here we’re not in a warzone. It was an avoidable accident and it killed so many. And there was no one I could help. Not a single person. Not even one child.’
Before he could stop himself, or tell himself that this wasn’t keeping control of his emotions around her, Ash twisted her around to cradle her. It was more than a colonel being there for another soldier, it was personal, and inappropriate, and dangerous.
He rubbed his hand up and down her back to soothe her. And for several long minutes she let him.
Finally, as the tears subsided and she fought to regain control, she shifted away from him as he reluctantly let her go. A dark shadow he didn’t care to identify stole over his chest, pulling a tourniquet around his guts and clenching his fist.
He rubbed a hand over his face. For two people who valued their self-control, neither of them seemed to have been doing particularly well since they’d met.
What was it about this woman that was so different to anyone else?
For years he’d succeeded in keeping people at arm’s length, maintaining a barrier between himself and the rest of the world. Only Rosie and Wilf had been the exception. He’d known that the only sure-fire way never to lose control of his emotions, the way his father had, was to ensure he didn’t let people close enough to generate those emotions in the first instance.
Yet here he was, on the roof with a woman he’d met barely seventy-two hours earlier, wondering what it might be like to have someone like this in his life. To have a bond with her that was more than the one they’d forged out there in the field the previous day.
She turned to him, then returned her gaze to the front. He twisted again to study her elegant profile—the long neck whose sweet scent he could still recall if he closed his eyes.
‘So are you here as Colonel Stirling, CO of the QRF team? Or Ash, the man who nearly kissed me in that supply room yesterday?’ she managed hoarsely, still not turning to face him again.
‘Whichever you’d prefer.’ Ash kept his voice low and even, blocking out the fact that the same question was tumbling around his own head.
Why had he felt so compelled to seek her out?
Part of him wondered if it had anything to do with the news he’d received today about his foster mother. Something threatened to bubble up inside him, and Ash swiftly closed it down to concentrate on Fliss. Willing her to give him the answer he shouldn’t want to hear.
The silence felt like an eternity.
‘Tell me about the grenade scar,’ she said quietly, by way of response.
He stuffed down the black storm which immediately began to batter the lid of the box he kept it in. Only this time it didn’t seem to rage with quite the power it had in the past.