gripping her nails into her palms until they bled and smiling at her parents and pretending she hadn’t heard, that things were normal, that life was fine.
And here, now, the first week of her new life, standing in the dusk in a veterinary surgeon’s car park, with a doctor from the hospital where she wanted to start her new life…
She’d hit him.
The chasm was there, and she was falling.
She stared at him in horror. The yelling had stopped. There was nothing left in her and she couldn’t say a word.
His face stung where her hand had swiped him in an open-palmed slap. The sound of the slap seemed to echo in the still night.
She was staring at him like the hounds of hell were after her.
It didn’t take a genius to know this woman didn’t normally slap people. Neither did it take a genius to know she was on some sort of precipice. She was teetering on the edge of hysteria. She was hauling herself back, but she was terrified she wasn’t going to make it.
What did you do with a woman who’d just slapped you? Walk away, reacting as he’d been taught all his life to react to people who were out of control?
Her eyes were huge in her white face. She was dressed in an oversized theatre gown and blood-splattered jeans and she looked like something out of a war zone.
And he could tell that there were things in this woman’s life that lay behind even the appalling events of the last few hours.
She’d hit him and she was looking at him as if she’d shot him. In his private life he avoided emotional contact like the plague. But with this woman…What was it about her?
Walk away? No.
He took her hands in his and he tugged her forward. He folded her into his arms and held her, as he’d not held a woman for years.
She’d slapped him.
He didn’t care. He just…held.
One minute she was out-of-control crazy. The next minute she was being hugged.
She was rigid with shock, but maybe rigid was too mild a word for it. She felt like she was frozen.
If she moved…But there was no if. She couldn’t move. She didn’t know who she would be if she moved. She would be some out-of-control creature who screamed and hit…
She had to apologise. She had to pull away and say she was sorry, but her body wouldn’t obey. Tremors were starting, shudders that ran all through her. If she pulled away she’d have nothing to hold her. All she could do was let this man—this stranger—keep her close and stop her crumpling.
She was falling into him and he was holding her as she had to be held. She was moulding to him, feeling the warmth and strength of him, feeling the steadiness of his heartbeat, and it was as if in some way he was giving hers back.
She was delusional. Crazy. She needed to pull herself together, but not yet, not yet. For now she could only stand within his arms while the world somehow righted itself, restored itself to order, until she finally found the strength to pull away and face the consequences of what she’d done.
Sam specialised in paediatric cardiology. He treated children and babies with heart problems. In his working life he faced parents on the edge of control—or who had tipped over into an abyss of grief. He never got used to it. He’d learned techniques to keep control of his emotions. To express quiet sympathy, to offer hope when hope was possible, to listen when listening was all he had to give.
But he’d never felt like he did now.
This made no sense. Yes, his dog was hurt. Yes, it had been an appalling evening but if this woman was a trained nurse…For her to collapse like this…
For him to feel like this…
Why? What was it with this woman that was making his heart twist?
He held her and felt her take strength from him. He felt the rigidity ease, felt her slump against him, and he felt her quietly gather herself.
He should move her away but his rigid protection of personal space wasn’t working right now. She was so vulnerable…and yet what she’d done, how she’d acted, had taken pure strength. There was no way he could let her down now, and when finally she found the strength to tug away he was aware of a sharp stab of loss.
She hadn’t cried. She was still white-faced, but she was dry-eyed and drained.
She shoved her hands through her curls, tucking stray wisps behind her ears, and he felt an almost irresistible urge to help her. To fix a tiny curl that had escaped.
He wasn’t an idiot. He’d been slapped once. It behoved a man to stay still and silent, and wait for her to make the first move.
‘I…I’m sorry,’ she managed at last.
‘It’s okay,’ he told her, striving hard to lighten what was an unbelievably heavy situation. ‘I was feeling guilty about Bonnie. Now I can feel virtuously aggrieved at being assaulted.’
‘And I get the guilt instead?’
‘Exactly,’ he said, and tried a smile.
She didn’t smile back. She looked up at him, and he thought, whatever had gone before, this woman wasn’t one to crumple. There was strength there. Real strength.
‘Hitting’s never okay,’ she said.
‘You were swatting flies,’ he said. ‘And missed.’
She did smile then. It was the merest glimmer but it was still a smile and it made him feel…
Actually, he didn’t know how it made him feel. Holding her, watching her…
Why was this woman touching him? Why did he look at her and want to know more?
It was Bonnie, he told himself. It was the emotions of almost losing his dog. That’s all it was.
‘Let me take you home,’ he said carefully, and took a step back, as if she might swipe him again.
The smile appeared again, rueful but there.
‘I’m safe,’ she told him. ‘Unarmed.’ She tucked her arms carefully behind her back and he grinned.
‘Excellent. Would you accept my very kind offer of a ride home?’
‘I’ll stain the Jeep.’
‘I’m a surfer. I have a ton of towels.’
‘I need milk,’ she said.
And he thought excellent—practicalities, minutiae were the way to get back on an even keel.
‘Because?’
‘Because I’ve run out,’ she said. She took a deep breath, steadying herself as she spoke, and he knew she knew minutiae were
