Christmas With Her Bodyguard

And that simply couldn’t happen.

Heat scorched her cheeks as Rae remembered the way she’d crept into Myles’ room practically naked that last night and offered herself to him in the most intimate way she possibly could. He’d responded so urgently, so demandingly, so loaded with intent, she’d been lost in the moment and totally unprepared when he’d wrenched himself away, bundled her up into the quilt from the end of his guest suite bed, and pushed her unceremoniously back out into the corridor, slamming his bedroom door in her face.

He’d rejected her. Without a word of explanation. And she’d felt as though her world had crashed around her. The fact that he and Rafe had left the next day for some army exercise had meant that there had been no chance for her to get answers, and so for months she’d shut herself away wondering what was wrong with her. If she wasn’t pretty enough, or sexy enough, or experienced enough.

Nonetheless, a bruised self-confidence didn’t excuse the fact that she’d been stupid enough to fall for lies from a piece of trash like Justin. How had she ever thought that he could make her feel like an attractive woman again?

‘You’re sorry for what, Rae?’ he repeated, his voice harsher than ever.

But if she couldn’t explain it to herself, how could she explain it to Myles?

In all these years she’d never once explained herself to the press. Never once tried to put forward her side of that story. Not least because she knew no one would listen. Or if they did, they would spin it so that somehow she ended up coming out even worse.

Stupid, as well as scandalous.

More than that, if she’d told the truth, said that she’d known nothing about the camera, then it would have been a criminal offence and there would have had to have been a legal case.

Inevitably there would have been a character assassination of her, and even back then Rae had known that if the police and press had delved into her, then they might have found out about Myles.

She would have ruined his friendship with her half-brother, dragged his reputation through the mud, and even harmed his army career. All because she hadn’t seen Justin for what he really was...a lying, scheming lowlife who just thought he could use her connection to Life in the Rawl to get his own fifteen minutes of fame.

Plus, she’d figured the less drama, the quicker it would all die down.

She’d been wrong. It had been too juicy for the press to let go of. It was only in the last few years of her becoming a fully-fledged doctor and OBGYN that they had finally begun to leave her alone and stop trying to connect her to any decent-looking male with a healthy pulse.

The silver lining, if she could call it that, was that she’d long since learned to own her mistakes. Own the woman those awful experiences had moulded her into. It had become her armour, her best emotional defence. And right now, with her head swirling wildly and thoughts jostling impatiently, she needed some way to buy herself time before she blurted everything out to him without first preparing the ground, and inevitably ruining her one opportunity to make him understand.

She needed something familiar. She needed some kind of anchor.

Even if a part of her knew that anchor was actually a tub of cement shoes ready to drown her at any moment.

She tipped her head almost coquettishly and pulled her shoulders back in the kind of deliberately provocative move her sisters executed to devastating effect on practically a daily basis, but which she hadn’t used in years.

‘Forget it.’ She even managed to force the beginnings of a wicked little smile, even if her cheeks did feel tight and unwilling. ‘I wasn’t really thinking.’

Myles locked his jaw and she could practically see the tiny pulse flickering away.

‘Of course not,’ he ground out. ‘Because why change the habit of a lifetime?’

‘Why indeed?’

She didn’t care that he was staring at her as though she were a fleck of contemptible mud on the toe of one of his polished army boots. Really she didn’t.

Not, she imagined, that he would ever tolerate any form of dirt on his parade boots.

And it didn’t twist inside her to know that he, like pretty much the rest of the world, actually believed that she had ever had any part in that vile sex tape. There was no reason for this shameful heat that spread over her cheeks. She’d long since mastered the art of pretending that it didn’t get to her. If she could fool the press, the public, then she could certainly fool Myles.

Tilting her head that little bit higher, Rae forced herself—however many knives stabbed into the dark hollow where her soul had once been—to meet his glower.

As if she were simply playing the game he evidently thought she was playing, although her voice damn near cracked when she answered him.

Myles narrowed his eyes but she ignored it.

‘Well, now we have those pleasantries out of the way—’ she rolled her eyes to make her point ‘—I think it’s time for me to go. I have a lecture to get ready for. Doctor or not, I find the press prefer glamorous photos to dowdy shots.’

‘Is that so?’ Myles pursed his lips and she knew he was thinking of the sex tape.

Just as she’d intended, she told herself.

It was the only way.

Other than Rafe, Myles was the only other man alive who she’d ever wanted to impress. She couldn’t explain it, but in some perverse way she would prefer he hated her for the choices he thought she had made, than know she was so pathetic that she’d let someone like Justin play her.

She scowled at him, and in that moment something crossed his face, pulling his features and making her look again.

She realised abruptly that he didn’t look as well as she’d initially thought. Or, more accurately, he looked physically incredible, but non-physically...?

Her heart kicked before she could stop it and it was all she could do not to reach out and touch his tense, strained face. His eyes were darker than she remembered. Bleaker. Grim and laced with pain.

Her head swam with echoes of her half-brother’s words outside the doors just before they’d entered the room. That Myles needed their help.

She had known that Myles had spent most of his career as a battlefield trauma surgeon with a specialty in plastic surgery—specifically with burns from bombs, IEDs and mines. But hearing that Myles had been caught up in it, injured so badly that he’d chosen to leave the army altogether rather than fly a desk, was sickening.

It had been awful hearing Rafe tell her that Myles, having been authorised to return to operating, had turned down lucrative job offers with hospitals up and down the UK, as well as opportunities in multiple top US hospitals.

It had taken her a while to understand what Rafe had been suggesting.

‘I think that right now Myles needs to see other specialties of medicine.’ Rafe’s caginess had snagged her attention. ‘I need you to help him, Rae.’

It was the closest she’d ever heard her half-brother get to a plea.

‘Let him see a different side to being a surgeon. One which doesn’t involve suicide bombers, and maimed kids, and putting your closest buddies in a body bag.’

She’d felt sick on Myles’ behalf.

She could have told her brother that being an OBGYN wasn’t all hearts and flowers; that death touched this area of medicine, too. But somehow it didn’t seem the same. Especially when she remembered the look on Rafe’s face when he’d told her that a lance corporal, a mere kid, had taken his own life that day, and that he feared Myles blamed himself.

‘Is he right to?’ Rae had asked abruptly.

She hadn’t meant to, but she’d suddenly found that she was shaking and this was the only way she could stop it.

‘Of course not.’ Rafe had looked momentarily annoyed, before making a clear effort to soften his tone. ‘Please, Rae? You’d be solving two problems for me. You would be getting a bodyguard we can both trust. And you would potentially be helping the man who showed me how to be the best leader and soldier I could possibly be.’

The pain on his face had got to her. But it was nothing like the expression she was looking at right now on Myles’ face. Fifteen years ago she would have ached to steal that pain away for him. But not now, she told herself firmly. Not now.

Rae wasn’t sure she believed herself or why the words sounded so hollow in her head.

But still, she would do what Rafe had asked her to do. Not just because it was her half-brother asking, but because, deep down, they both knew she liked to fix people. She couldn’t fix her own life so she concentrated on others’. It was probably one of the reasons why being an OBGYN suited her so well. There were always dark moments but in this field the outcome was more often positive, especially when it entailed bringing a new life into the world, and into the arms of an ecstatic mother.