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‘I see.’
Something flashed across her face, but it was gone before he could identify it.
He’d also left her on it so that she would always have a direct means to get in touch with him if she ever needed his help. He’d even hoped she would—especially in those first months after their wedding night. After all, they hadn’t used protection. He supposed it was a blessing that nothing had ever come of it; in his experience an absent soldier never made a good dad. And yet he suspected a tiny part of him had once hoped otherwise. Not that he could say that now.
The silence hung between them.
‘Now I see that it was a mistake,’ he ground out eventually.
* * *
A mistake. Was that really how he thought of her?
Thea felt the nausea churn in her stomach, as it had been doing practically every day since she’d heard about Ben’s accident.
She watched him edge painstakingly to the rock wall across the hidden courtyard, and resisted the urge to leap down and ram his wheelchair under his backside, just to stop him from punishing his body.
She spotted a movement out of the corner of her eye—it was the man who had been outside Ben’s hospital room that first day. She’d thought he was some kind of Army specialist, but now she wasn’t so sure. She’d seen him a few more times over the last few weeks, always observing but never making any direct contact with Ben. Perhaps he was some kind of counsellor—someone Ben could talk to. Someone who might be able to understand this irrational need Ben seemed to have to push his body to breaking point—and maybe beyond.
The first time she’d seen Ben in the wheelchair she’d felt a laugh of disbelief roll around her chest. It had been a welcome light-hearted moment in days of frustrating ignorance and gloom. Only Ben Abrams could have engendered a posse of men from his unit marching down to the hospital to present their hero commander with a racing chair which had once belonged to a former Paralympic basketball champion.
And only Ben would have hurtled around the corridors in it the following week as though he was in a rally car on a racing circuit, pushing his one good arm past its limits.
Even she, who was impervious to him now—or at least ought to be—hadn’t been able to ignore the fact that the simple white tee shirt he’d worn had done little to hide the shifts and ripples of the already well-honed muscles which had glistened, to the delight of several of the medical staff, covered with a perfect sheen of sweat.
She could still remember the feel of that solid chest against her body...the sensation of completeness as he moved inside her.
You, my girl, have all the resistance of a chocolate fireguard. She shook her head in frustration. Hadn’t she learned anything from that night? Despite his warnings, despite his resistance, she had pushed and pushed until Ben had ended up hurting her—more than she could have thought possible.
Yet here she was. And she might have come for closure, but he was already shaking up her emotions. It was difficult to keep hating a real-life hero who was prepared to sacrifice his own life for others time and again. Not just on an everyday basis, or even after Daniel had died, but when he’d been so very badly injured himself in that bomb blast.
According to some of the neighbourhood wives, all the Army convoys used frequency-jamming devices—which meant that the enemy who had detonated the IED which had caught Ben’s patrol had to have been close by. Close enough to potentially have had a shooter to take individuals out.
Ben would have known that too. With all his training it would have been one of the first things he had realised. But instead of taking cover he’d stepped up anyway, to save the lives of five of his men. By rights he shouldn’t be alive.
She had to admire this man who was so hell-bent on fighting his way back to full health, who refused to sit back and wallow in self-pity. Even his frustration, his anger now, was because he refused to accept the limitations his body was imposing on him.
She just wished he could let his guard down, even once, and let her in. But he never would. She wondered if he even knew how to.
There was no doubt that Ben’s sheer grit had helped him achieve in a few weeks what other patients far more fortunate than him were still fighting to attain after months. She might have known Ben Abrams would be a rare breed... What was it her brother had once told her the men called Ben? Ah, yes, ‘the Mighty Abs’. And indeed he was—by name and nature.
He even garnered attention in this place—not just as a soldier, but as a man. She wondered how much female attention he’d enjoyed over the last five years. It was none of her business, she knew that, and yet she couldn’t seem to silence the niggling question.
Giving in to temptation, Thea allowed herself a lazy assessment of the man she had once thought herself in love with. Five years on and there were obvious differences, but he still resembled the young man she had known—if only briefly. Despite the dark rings around his eyes—testament to his recent experience—there was no mistaking that he was lethally handsome. Not pretty-boy handsome—he’d never been that—but a deep, interesting, arresting handsome.
The nose which had been broken in the field a few times only enhanced the dangerous appeal he already oozed, and the scar by his eyebrow snagged at his eye, lending him a devil-may-care attitude. She remembered kissing that scar. The feel of his skin under her lips. The glide of her hands down that infamous torso. In her naivety she’d believed that if he gave in to her once, just once, he would realise that they could start again...redefine their relationship.
Sheer folly.
Now, at twenty-six, she understood what Ben had known all along. Things between them would never have worked. He was too entrenched in his ways and she was too idealistic. Still, even if she had realised that one night would be their only night, she wouldn’t have changed it—even to spare herself the pain. But she would have taken her time that night. She hadn’t been a virgin, but at twenty-one she hadn’t had a wealth of experience either. She’d spent the last five years imagining how it would have felt if she’d let Ben do all the things to her he’d wanted to, let herself explore him more...
Heat suffused her body and, embarrassed, Thea dragged her mind from such inappropriate ponderings. Her emotions had been all over the place since she’d seen him again.
Because you still haven’t told him your painful secret, goaded a little voice. She closed her mind but it refused to be silenced. What about the baby you lost? Ben’s baby?
As long as he’d been away she’d been able to convince herself that it wasn’t the sort of thing that could be explained over the phone. But now that he was back she no longer had that excuse. She’d have to tell him before he left again. But not now—and not here.
‘Anyway, I’m not following you,’ she said abruptly. ‘Yesterday I was visiting you, but today I’m working in the area. I’m on my lunch break.’
‘You work here?’
‘The scrubs didn’t give it away?’
Ben frowned. ‘You were in your final year of medicine at uni when I left. Then you were going to be a junior house officer. I thought you wanted to go into paediatrics after rotations? That your goal was Great Ormond Street?’
She felt an unexpected rush of pleasure that he remembered. It shouldn’t matter. But it did.
‘It was. But then Daniel died and everything changed.’ She shrugged, seeing the flash of sorrow in his eyes before his face closed against her, as she remembered it doing a decade earlier when she’d spoken her brother’s name. Just another reminder of the fact that he could never open up to her.
‘I realised I was better in trauma. Daniel had taught me some stuff over the years—techniques you guys use out in war zones which had yet to filter down to Civvy Street. I was able to adapt those things into my own work, so I started to gain quite a reputation. Before long I was getting offers to go and learn from Army trauma doctors who were coming back from Afghanistan. The more I learned, the better I became, and the more offers I got.’
‘So now you work here? Nice scrubs... Blue always was your colour,’ he said without thinking. The conversation topic had momentarily given them common ground.
‘Actually, I work with the Air Ambulance as a trauma doctor. I just happen to be on secondment here at the moment.’
He saw through the excuse immediately, and the moment of connection between them disappeared as he glowered at her. ‘You’re playing with your career to stay here and check up on me?’
Dammit—she hadn’t wanted him to realise. She’d been lucky that the Air Ambulance had been so understanding from the moment she’d told them about Ben last month.
‘I’m one of the doctors for the Air Ambulance. I don’t play with my career,’ she objected. ‘They have set up a temporary exchange programme with one of the hospital-based trauma doctors for me.’
‘Are you that good?’ He looked impressed.
‘Yes.’ Thea nodded proudly and offered a cheeky grin. Typical of Ben to cut to the chase, and she wasn’t about to disappoint him with false modesty. She was proud of all she’d achieved—especially after losing Daniel and Ben, albeit for very different reasons. ‘I am good, as it happens.’
She’d worked hard for her achievements, and her past had driven her on—including Ben’s abandonment.
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