through that area. If one was cut it was quite possible to bleed to death in a short space of time.
It was also possible they might have been able to save her if they’d got to her first.
Mac was pressing a hand to the woman’s abdomen now. It was distended. Even more distended than they might have expected from all the internal bleeding.
‘Oh, God!’ Mac groaned.
Julia didn’t ask. She didn’t need to. The shape was too regular and obviously too firm to be simply an accumulation of blood. The woman had probably only been in the early stages of her pregnancy but there had been two lives lost here.
Mac straightened. He didn’t meet Julia’s horrified gaze.
‘It’s time we went home,’ he said heavily. ‘There’s nothing more we can do here.’
Chapter Three
SOMETHING wasn’t right.
They should have been able to debrief and put things into perspective on the long road trip back to headquarters courtesy of a military vehicle. They could have talked through how impossible it would have been to save that young woman. Even if they’d known she was there, they would still have had to evacuate all the mobile people and the time needed to shift the dead man and then extricate her would have put Ken in more trouble. And they couldn’t have known. There wasn’t even a window that Julia could have looked into from the outside.
These were things that should have been said aloud. Dissected and come to terms with. And maybe then they could have congratulated themselves on a job well done. The fact that ten people had made it out alive when it could have gone in a very different direction and claimed even more victims.
But Mac, for the first time Julia had known him, didn’t want to talk and that was confusing. He was the strongest, bravest man she had ever met. Six feet tall in his socks and without an ounce of fat on his body. His strength alone was enough to inspire confidence Julia couldn’t hope to impart as soon as he arrived on scene. But there was more to Mac than physical attributes. He was so open and honest and always smiling. Smiling so much that he had deep crinkles around his eyes and grooves on his cheeks. She had seen him tired beyond exhaustion. Frustrated enough to be angry. Sad, even, to the point of his voice sounding thick with tears, but she’d never seen him quite like this.
‘I’m stuffed,’ he said, when she tried to get him to talk at the start of their road trip home. ‘I need sleep. Let’s leave the talking till later, OK?’
Which would have been fine, except that Mac didn’t sleep. Neither could Julia, Not after she’d noticed the way he was staring through the window on his side. Lost in thoughts he obviously didn’t want to share and looking so…bleak.
He closed his eyes, later, but he was feigning sleep. Julia could tell because she could see the way his hands were clenched into fists. So tense.
She wanted—badly—to touch him. To find out what was bothering him and—somehow—make it better.
She cared, dammit. Too much.
And so she said nothing. She kept to her side of the back seat and stared out of her window. Her body ached with weariness and more than a few bumps and bruises but her heart ached more.
For Mac.
Ten years.
It had been a decade ago and Mac hadn’t even thought about it for eons.
What was it about that moment that had brought it back so vividly?
The long blonde hair?
The early pregnancy?
Or was it because Julia had been standing so close to him?
It was like pieces of a jigsaw he hadn’t intended, or wanted, to solve had come together out of nowhere.
Mac could hear the suck of heavy-duty tyres on water-soaked roadways along with the rumble of the engine and the background buzz of the radio station the driver was listening to. Runnels of water coalesced on the window and then streaked sideways but Mac wasn’t really watching. He was seeing an altogether different picture.
No wonder he found Julia Bennett so damned attractive on so many levels. It wasn’t just that she was gorgeous and smart and brave. It was that full-on approach to life in combination with an ability to sidestep any hint of a meaningful personal relationship that did it.
Presented the kind of challenge any red-blooded man would find irresistible, it was almost a matter of honour to have a crack at winning such a prize. Or wanting to.
Why hadn’t he put two and two together before this?
Because he’d done his damnedest to forget Christine, that was why. To forget the heartache of absolute failure. To move on and make a success of his life.
‘You OK, mate?’ Julia had asked when they were on the main road and settling in for their journey back to headquarters.
‘I’m stuffed,’ he’d growled. And he was. Exhausted both physically and emotionally. In pain, actually, because something raw had been unexpectedly exposed deep within. He’d never talked to anyone about it. Ever. And if he did, Julia would be at the bottom of any list of potential listeners. He wasn’t about to admit the kind of failure he was on a personal level. Preferably not to anyone but especially not to a woman whom he doubted had ever failed at anything and who would be less than impressed with a man who was nowhere near her equal.
‘I need sleep,’ he’d added tonelessly, turning away from her. ‘Let’s leave the talking till later, OK?’
She accepted his withdrawal and why wouldn’t she? Today had been tough. This was the best job in the world but it took a day when they succeeded a hundred per cent to reinforce that. A job when no one died or got maimed for life. The way through feeling like that was to talk about it, of course. He knew that. Debriefing was ingrained in anyone who worked in careers that dealt with this kind of trauma and degree of human suffering. It was a part of the job, really, to analyse everything that had happened. To take a quiet pride in things that had been done well and to learn from anything else so they could go out and do an even better job next time.
But he couldn’t talk to Julia about this. Not yet. Not when he’d been blindsided by memories and could see danger signs a mile high. Signs that warned him how easy it would be to fall in love with this woman. Hell, he was already quite a way down that track and hadn’t even noticed.
He couldn’t afford to let her anywhere near him right now, when the scab over that failure had been ripped off and he was feeling raw. Vulnerable, even, and Alan MacCulloch didn’t do vulnerable, thanks very much. Imagine if she wasn’t unimpressed with his history. If she accepted him, warts and all. He’d fall. Hard. In a way he’d managed to avoid for a whole decade. Nearly a quarter of his life, come to think of it.
She didn’t want that.
Neither did he.
Julia was looking at him. He could feel it. He could sense her concern, like a gust of warmth crossing the gap on the back seat in the back of this vehicle. She wanted to offer comfort but Mac didn’t want that either. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.
