of her way to avoid any kind of serious discussion, but there was part of her that wanted to share this bittersweet new feeling. ‘Finding out it might be difficult has made me realise how important it is—how’s that for irony?’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, the doctor didn’t say it was impossible, just that it could take a long time and it was best not to leave it too long.’
He reached across the table and took her hand.
‘So when are you going to start trying?’
Sophie looked at her phone again and looked up at him with a determined smile. ‘In about twenty-seven and a half hours.’
The second hand quivered slightly as it edged wearily around the clock face. Sitting on a plastic chair in Intensive Care, watching it with wide-eyed fatigue, Kit kept thinking that it wouldn’t make it through the next minute.
He knew the feeling.
He had been here since late afternoon, English time, when the emergency medical helicopter had finally landed, bringing Sapper Kyle Lewis home. Sedated into unconsciousness, with bullets in his head and chest, it wasn’t quite the homecoming Lewis had looked forward to.
Kit sank his head into his hands. The now familiar, tingling numbness was back, stealing up through his fingertips until he felt as if he were dissolving.
‘Coffee, Major Fitzroy?’
He jerked upright again. The nurse in front of him wore a blue plastic disposable apron and was smiling kindly, unaware of the stab of anguish her question caused. He looked away, his teeth gritted.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Can I get you anything for the pain?’
He turned, eyes narrowed. Did she know that he was the reason Lewis was in the room behind him, hooked up to machines that were breathing for him as his mother held his hand and wept softly, and the girlfriend he had spoken of so proudly kept her terrified eyes averted?
‘Your face,’ the nurse said gently. ‘I know you were seen to in the field hospital, but the medication they gave you will have worn off now.’ She tilted her head, looking at him with great compassion. ‘They might only be superficial, but these shrapnel wounds can be very painful as they heal.’
‘It looks worse than it is.’ He’d seen his face in the washroom mirror and felt dull surprise at the torn flesh and bruising around his eyes. ‘Nothing that a large whisky wouldn’t fix.’
The nurse smiled. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you one of those here. But you could go home now, you know.’ The plastic
apron crackled as she moved past him to the door of Lewis’s room, pausing with her hand on the doorplate. ‘His family’s here now. You’ve looked after these boys for five months, Major,’ she said gently. ‘It’s time you looked after yourself.’
Kit got a brief glimpse of the inert figure in the bed before the door swung shut again. He exhaled heavily, guilt squeezing the air from his lungs.
Home.
Sophie.
The thought of her almost severed the last shreds of his self-control. He looked at the clock again, realising that although he’d been staring at it for hours he had no idea what time it was.
Almost six o’clock in the evening, and he was almost three hundred miles away. He stumbled to his feet, his mind racing, his heart suddenly beating hard with the need to get to her. To feel her in his arms and lose himself in her sweetness and forget …
Behind him a door opened, pulling him back into the present. Turning he saw Lewis’s girlfriend come out of the room, her thin shoulders hunched, her pregnant stomach incongruously out of proportion with the rest of her. Slumping against the wall, she looked appallingly young.
‘They won’t say anything. I just want to know if he’s going to be OK.’ She spoke with a kind of sulky defiance, but Kit could see the fear in her face when she looked at him. ‘Is he?’
‘Wing Commander Randall’s the army medic here. According to him, he’s over the worst now,’ Kit said tersely. ‘If soldiers survive the airlift to the camp hospital their chances of survival are already ninety-seven percent. He’s made it all the way home.’
Her scowl deepened. ‘I don’t mean is he going to survive. I mean is he going to be OK? I mean, back to normal. Because I don’t think I could stand it if he wasn’t …’ She broke off, turning her face away. Kit could see her throat working franticallyas she swallowed back tears. ‘We don’t even know each other that well,’ she went on, after a moment. ‘We’d not been going out long when this happened.’ A sharp gesture of her head told him she was referring to the pregnancy. ‘It wasn’t exactly planned but, as my mum says, it was my own fault. Just got to get on with it now.’ She looked at Kit with dead eyes then; inky tears were running down her face. ‘And what about this? If he’s … I dunno … injured, I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? But whose fault is that?’
Mine, Kit wanted to say. All mine.
What right did he have to forget that?
Sophie’s eyes snapped open.
She lay very still, staring into the soft summer darkness, all her senses on high alert as she listened out for a repeat of the sound that had woken her.
Or maybe it hadn’t even been a sound. Maybe it was just a feeling. A dream perhaps? Or an instinct …
She sat up, struggling from sleep, the hairs rising on the back of her neck. The blood was swishing in her ears, but outside she could hear the usual sounds of the city at night—traffic on the King’s Road, a distant siren, a car moving through the square below.
And then something else, closer, inside the house. A muffled thud, like something being dropped, followed by the soft, heavy tread of someone coming slowly up the stairs.
Sophie froze.
Then, with a muttered curse, she kicked off the covers and scrambled to her feet on the bed, looking frantically around for a weapon and finding herself fervently wishing she’d taken up cricket or baseball. Her heart was galloping. It was no good—there was nothing remotely suited to fending off an intruder within reach, and she realised that she should simply have rolled off the bed and hidden underneath it …
A shape appeared in the doorway, filling it, just as Sophie’s
pounding heart seemed to have filled her throat. It was too late to move now, too late to do anything but brazen it out.
‘Don’t move,’ she croaked. ‘I have a weapon.’
With what sounded like a sigh the intruder took a step forwards.
‘Where I’ve just come from we don’t call that a weapon. We call that a TV remote.’
His voice was hoarse with fatigue, sexy as hell and instantly familiar.
‘Kit!’
It was a cross between a shout of jubilation and a sob. In a split second Sophie had bounded across the bed and he caught her as she hurtled into his arms, wrapping her legs
