bag, she made a relieved grab for it. ‘If you don’t mind, I just want to go to bed.’
‘It’s barely eight-thirty,’ he noted with surprise.
‘It’s been a long day.’ Thea shrugged. ‘I figure I could try to sleep. Just hope that, if I do, when I wake up it won’t be this day any longer.’
‘Right.’ He nodded quickly. He doubted she’d slept much in the three weeks since he’d told her that Dan was dead. ‘Of course. I understand.’
She was still standing there, as if waiting for him. Was he supposed to go with her? That wasn’t the agreement they’d made.
‘Um...which room is mine?’
She flushed a deep red and Ben cursed his lack of sensitivity. The sooner he was redeployed, the better.
‘Oh, the second on the right. But we can swap later, if you prefer. I won’t be here much.’
She gave an uninterested nod and, dismissing his words, turned swiftly to head up the stairs. He heard her moving around up there as he tried to still his mind with the banal task of unpacking some of the boxes. The kettle, some mugs, teabags for a start.
He opened the first box and came face to face with a photo of himself and Dan on their first tour of duty together. This was harder than he had feared. Slamming the box shut, he grabbed a sleeping bag and followed Thea’s lead, heading upstairs to the other bedroom.
Ben lay rigid and motionless on his back in the bed, his hands locked behind his head. There was no way he could sleep. He watched the numbers counting up painfully slowly on the clock projecting the time onto the ceiling. Twenty-one hundred hours. It wasn’t just the time. Normally he could sleep on a clothesline, and anyway he’d been to bed at more ridiculous hours in his time on tour. It was more the fact that on the other side of the wall he could hear Thea in her own bed as she shifted, coughed and sporadically sobbed.
He had no idea if he’d done the right thing by marrying her, but he knew he was honouring his promise to Dan and that was all that really mattered. Plus, even if their marriage was fake their friendship didn’t have to be. Thea was grieving, and Ben knew just what she was going through.
Unable to lie there listening to her distress, he got up off the creaking bed and ducked out of his door to knock gently on Thea’s. No answer, but by the sudden silence it was clear that she had heard him. She didn’t respond.
He should leave. She obviously didn’t want him there. But a little voice told him she needed him. He knocked again, then turned the handle, tentatively at first.
‘Thea, is there anything I can do?’
Thea was sitting up, her knees pulled to her chest. Her tense features relaxed slightly as she looked up and saw him.
He crossed the room in a couple of long strides, scooping her up and pulling her into his arms, assiduously ignoring the pretty lacy lemon negligee. One hand secured her to him, the other smoothed her hair gently, and he let her cry it out. Holding her until she finally grew still.
When she did, he shifted as though to lower her back onto the bed.
‘Don’t go,’ she whispered. ‘Please, stay with me...just for tonight....’
‘It’s not a good idea.’
So why was he so tempted?
Lifting herself, Thea searched his face with red-rimmed eyes. ‘Then at least talk to me, Ben.’
Talking. The thing he was least good at.
‘What about?’ he asked, faltering.
‘Anything...’ She hiccupped. ‘Distract me.’
‘Why did Dan always call you Ethel?’ he blurted out, his mind having gone suddenly blank. ‘I never knew your real name was Thea until our date. When I found out you were Dan’s sister.’
Way to go, idiot. Talk about the very person she doesn’t want to think about.
But Thea smiled. A small, fond smile which tore at Ben’s heart.
‘When I was a kid I couldn’t pronounce Alethea, so I used to tell people my name was Ethel. Dan loved it. Even when I started to be known as Thea he still called me Ethel. It was our thing. No one else could share in it.’
‘Right...’ Ben swallowed uncomfortably. He wished he’d never asked. Somehow it had made him feel closer to Thea. He didn’t want to feel closer to Thea. He clenched his fists as the image that had haunted him for the last three weeks swam into his head in high definition.
Dan...cradled in his arms as he lay dying on that hard desert ground.
Their two-man patrol had walked straight into an ambush and the two of them had been alone and pinned down by the enemy, with only a rocky outcrop for protection. Ben had tried and tried to stem the bleeding but it had been just too severe. Time had started to run out for the guy he’d fought alongside twenty-four-seven, for three hundred and twenty days of their last year’s tour of duty. And for multiple tours over the last seven years before that.
Grief hovered in the back of his mind but he refused to let it in. There was no place in his mind for mourning—he had to stay strong for Thea. She didn’t know the half of it. And he was never going to tell her. Besides, wasn’t he the king of shutting out emotions? He’d been doing it well enough for the last decade and a half.
‘Did you ever wonder how we’d never met before?’ Thea asked suddenly. ‘I mean, you were Daniel’s best friend and I was his sister.’
‘Not really.’ Ben paused thoughtfully. ‘Dan was always careful to keep the two sides of his life separate—his personal life and you, and his Army life. I think after your parents died he didn’t have the easiest time of it in the kids’ home. He never really talked about his past to anyone.’
‘Except you?’ Thea observed. ‘Because he trusted you?’
‘Right,’ Ben answered bleakly.
‘But still...’ Thea shook her head, still confused. ‘If he trusted you that much, surely you’d have come with him round to the flat?’
‘No, I never came round.’ Ben shrugged. ‘You have to understand I’m a commissioned officer. Dan wasn’t. Being part of a team and in each other’s company twenty-four-seven is one thing, but socialising back home isn’t that easy.’
‘Because the Army don’t allow it?’
Thea frowned, confused. Ben didn’t blame her. The Forces had their rules, their protocols, and if you were a part of it then it all made sense. It could save lives. But to an outsider trying to understand it might seem strange.
‘They don’t encourage it,’ Ben admitted. ‘We have separate messes for socialising. But the Army do realise that the bonds formed in war time don’t just dissolve when you get back home. So, like some of the others, Dan and I used to go on training runs together, and we headed into the mountains once or twice a year—but always off the base.
‘Right...’ Thea hedged. ‘But when you were deployed together he
