with open arms. During their second year, asking her to marry him had seemed the logical thing to do. Becoming a real, permanent part of the Stockton family had seemed the most desirable thing he could imagine. He’d loved the time spent with them. With Clara. And Amelia.
Especially Amelia, he’d realized too late.
All the Stockton children were close, but Clara and Amelia shared a special bond, more best friends than sisters. Cole had spent as much if not more time with Amelia than he had Clara after Amelia had started medical school. Had gone from treating her as a kid sister to looking at her and seeing a woman who inspired fantasies.
“What happened?” Richard prompted when Cole stayed lost in his thoughts too long.
Cole inwardly sighed, but kept his shoulders square. He’d known coming aboard this ship would open old wounds. Wasn’t that one of the reasons he’d come? To open those wounds so they could finally properly heal? “Clara and I realized we’d made a mistake in becoming engaged and broke things off. I’ve not seen her since.”
Because Clara had completely changed her life plans and signed up to serve as a flight surgeon, going to helicopter flight school rather than a military hospital or aircraft carrier medical unit. They e-mailed on the rare occasion, but even that had grown further and further apart.
Richard’s brows rose. “That would have been, what? Two? Three years ago?”
“Yes.” Two long and torturous years where a single weekend had forever changed the course of his life. Two long and torturous years in which he’d tried to forget the Stocktons. Yet here he was, seeking out the Stockton he couldn’t forget. He glanced around the surgical suite, taking in the neutral tones of the room. Dull gray bulkheads and metal cabinets of sturdy construction. “Tell me, where are the laparoscopic instruments? I’ll put together a laparoscopic appendectomy set to my preferences. Then I want to go through and make sure the staples match the handles and check out the rest of the equipment so I don’t run into any surprises midprocedure.”
Accurately sensing Cole’s desire to change the subject, the corpsman explained the day-to-day basics in the surgical ward.
Not much different from what he’d expected, even better equipped than some of the sites he’d worked at prior to being deployed. Yet he couldn’t recall his palms sweating and his heart racing at any other new assignment.
He knew the reason why.
The same reason he’d finagled his assignment on board this ship when doing so could cost him everything.
Amelia Stockton.
Chapter Two
LATER that morning, Amelia grimaced at the oozing wound on Corporal Wright’s left inner thigh. “How long has the area looked like this?”
He shrugged his brawny shoulders. “Yesterday the spot was a little red. Today it looks like I got shot and the place festered all to hell.”
The abscess looked nothing like a real gunshot wound, but she didn’t bother explaining that to the eighteen-year-old. She hoped he never had reason to learn otherwise.
She turned to the cabinet that contained the appropriate supplies, pulled out a bottle of one percent Xylocaine, and drew up a syringe full of the numbing agent. “Are you allergic to any medicines?”
“I’m not allergic to anything.” He shook his head, eyeing the syringe with pale-faced dread but trying not to show his dislike of needles. “What are you planning to do, Doc?”
“I’m going to open the area, drain the abscess, then pack the wound with special sterile packing gauze that will stay in the opened area for a few days.”
The corporal swallowed, his gaze lingering on the syringe. “Will it hurt?”
Amelia could laugh at the irony of his question. The men she dealt with had been through so much with their training, could endure great hardships, yet wave a needle and syringe in front of the biggest, baddest of the lot and he just might turn green in the face.
“Just a stick and some burn when the numbing agent is injected. After the medication, you shouldn’t feel a thing,” she explained.
She swabbed the area with an antiseptic solution then stuck the needle bevel up into the raised red area, numbing the overlying skin. Once she’d finished injecting the area, she dropped the used syringe into a sharps container then smiled at her still-pale patient.
“While the numbing agent is taking effect, my nurse, Tracy, is going to set up a surgical tray so I can open the area and drain the abscess. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll get this taken care of.”
Tossing her protective gloves into the appropriate waste receptacle, she left the small exam area and went into the room that served as the medical office.
Her gaze went to the computer on her desk and she winced.
Unless her sister was out in the field, she’d have an e-mail from Clara. She didn’t want to tell her sister that her runaway groom was on board, that for the next few months Amelia would be working alongside him, spending more time with him than she’d like.
Than she’d like?
She didn’t want to spend any time with Cole.
None. Never again.
If she’d never met the blasted man that would have been just fine.
Better than fine.
Her life would have been better. Less haunted by twinkling blue eyes and a sexily timbred voice that belonged to a man she’d once idolized. How could fate have been so cruel as to assign him to serve on the same ship?
“Need help?”
She spun, coming face-to-face with the source of her agitation. “Not from you.”
His brow arched.
“Sir,” she added, in deference to his higher rank.
Cole’s gaze narrowed. “That’s not what I was getting at.”
“No? Not tossing around your weight, sir?”
“No.” He said the word slowly, studying her.
Hello, she was not a bug under a magnifying glass and could he please just go jump overboard? Anything, just so long as she didn’t have to look at him, didn’t have to remember.
Her fingers clenched into tight fists. “Then what were you getting at, Dr Stanley?”
He crammed his hands into his pants pockets. “I suppose asking you to call me Cole would be useless?”
“You suppose correctly, sir.”
Her eyes had to be tiny slits of disdain because she was holding back none of her anger, none of her frustration. However, she desperately held back all of her hurt, all of the pain she’d felt at his sudden absence from her life two years ago when he’d been such an integral part of her very being for the majority of her university days.
