Christmas With Her Bodyguard

It occurred to him that he hadn’t had anyone evaluate him like this in a long, long time. Ever since he’d been a desperate recruit, prepared to leopard crawl from Fort William to Cape Wrath if it meant winning an army bursary to study medicine.

‘I think I might prefer someone who looks like they could handle a shoving, unruly crowd. Someone more...’

Belatedly, he realised she was deliberately trying to insult him.

‘More?’ He arched one eyebrow as though indulging a silly, petulant child, which, he reminded himself, was exactly how he saw her.

‘Yes, you know, more...’ She waved her hand airily. ‘Bigger, more intimidating.’

‘Is that so?’

‘That’s....so.’ She flicked out her tongue and the movement snagged his gaze. Inexplicably he couldn’t seem to draw his eyes away.

‘Indeed? Well, if you’re worried that you aren’t going to be...safe enough with me, I can assure you that I have no intention of letting anyone go near you.’

Including himself, he concluded haughtily, and it felt like an odd kind of triumph. Almost as if they were sparring again, the way they had done all those Christmases ago.

What the hell was going on, here?

‘That aside,’ she stated primly, ‘are you always this high-handed and condescending? Or is it just because it’s me?’

The flashes of the Raevenne he used to know weren’t doing much to help his sense of self-control. Oddly, it was as if a light were suddenly glinting through him, casting tiny spots of illumination and colour on a darkness that had been growing for too long.

A part of him wanted to lean towards that light.

A bigger part of him wanted to extinguish it.

‘Not usually. Then again, I don’t often come across someone so infamously flippant and disparaging.’

She glowered at him, and instead of it confirming every last, negative rumour he’d ever heard, he found himself oddly drawn to her. Still, he held his ground.

He wasn’t sure who was more startled when Rafe cut in, clearly amused.

‘Glad you still remember how to handle my sister’s prickly side.’

It was testament to how much his old friend thought of his half-sister that he dispensed with the half part of the title.

Interesting.

‘Seems so.’ Myles forced a lightness into his tone. He wasn’t sure why, but he couldn’t allow Rafe to see there was any issue between him and Rae.

‘Good, then there’s an urgent business call I really need to make. I’ll see you both tonight at the conference. Good luck, Rae. I know your lecture will be incredible.’

Then Rafe was gone, leaving the two of them alone in the plush office suite.

For several long moments neither of them spoke.

‘So,’ Myles finally broke the silence, fighting the urge to clear his throat, ‘you’re a doctor now?’

CHAPTER TWO (#ueeeab427-4172-5225-adf9-a6c342c9f71d)

HE HADN’T INTENDED the emphasis on now. Hadn’t meant to sound so disparaging. But the storm raging in his head wasn’t letting him think straight.

‘I am. Obstetrics and gynaecology.’ She lifted her head proudly and something kicked in his chest. ‘And I’m a good one, too. I’m also a maternal and foetal medicine specialist.’

She was actually sparkling. That moss-green edging in her eyes seemed more like a deeper navy blue right now, which had always meant her emotions were running high. He’d learned to read Rae through her eyes long, long ago.

‘So Rafe said.’ He wrenched himself back to the present.

‘Right.’ She bit her lip and it did something to his gut that it had no business doing.

‘He also told me you were giving a keynote speech at the World Precision Medicine Conference tonight.’

Her cheeks flushed again.

‘I am. And I heard you gave a brilliant lecture there a few years ago. I was meant to attend but...there was a medical emergency and I missed my plane.’

She offered a rueful grin and suddenly it occurred to him that whatever stories the media told—however they touched on her medical career but focussed on her personal life—Rae was utterly invested in her career as a doctor.

This, Myles realised with a start, was more like the Raevenne he remembered from all those years ago.

The rest of the world might know her as the girl who had catapulted her despicable side of the Rawlstone family onto the reality scene with a sex tape of her eighteen-year-old self and her twenty-eight-year-old bodyguard.

But that wasn’t the girl that he’d known. At least, not back then.

It wasn’t the sweet, blushing seventeen-year-old with whom he’d felt an attraction from the moment Rafe had introduced them. He’d tried to fight it, of course—Rafe had been his best mate, but even at seventeen she’d seemed far older, far more mature, than her years. The three years between them had melted away and, cooped up in that house trying to stay away from the rest of Rafe’s god-awful half-family—from the self-serving mother to the callous father so wretchedly similar to his own—he and Rae had forged a bond.

And then, despite his best intentions, the heady glances had evolved to fleeting touches, stolen kisses, and something so much more intense. He’d wanted her with such a ferocity, as he’d wanted no other woman before.

Probably as he’d wanted no other woman since, either.

It had taken a supreme effort to eject her from his room that night, even as he’d been physically aching to do something altogether different. It might have been legally acceptable, but it was still wrong in Myles’ mind. She’d been too young besides being Rafe’s sister. Neither argument had gone down well with Rae that night.

And all the while she’d been standing there in the flimsiest scraps of lace and his body had been under no illusions about how much he’d wanted her.

Even now, at the mere memory, his body tensed, coiled, like steel bands cinched tight on machinery, barely harnessing hundreds of pounds of pressure. The chemistry between him and Rae had been instantaneous. He’d tried to fight it, but it had been like nothing he’d ever experienced before. Its intensity had rocked him and it had only been the fact that she was his best friend’s half-sister that had enabled Myles to walk away from her that last night when she’d offered herself to him completely. When she’d offered him the precious gift of her virginity.

That and the fact that he’d thought she deserved better than someone like him who might sleep with her once or twice and then would be gone. He’d thought she thought more of herself than to want someone like that.

And then she’d gone and not only thrown her virginity away on some wide boy like that bouncer, but she’d filmed it and leaked it to the press, as well.

Instantly he shut down the quiet doubt that had always nagged in the back of his mind.

Rafe had always claimed his half-sister had been innocent, but if that were true Rae herself would have told her side of it a long time ago.

He’d fallen for that innocent act once before. Surely he wasn’t stupid enough to let himself be taken in by it a second time?

‘I’m here because your brother asked for my help.’ He injected a deliberately harder tone into his voice, reminding himself that nowadays he was immune to that look of hurt that skittered across her face. ‘Not to blow smoke up each other’s backsides.’