Charlotte Hawkes - Tempted By Dr Off-Limits

The last time he’d even talked about his family—other than to trot out the one, practised sentence that his mother and sister had died a long time ago—had been to Janine. And even then he hadn’t told her the full story, just enough to satisfy her questions after her colonel father had already told her about the car crash.

He’d certainly never told her about those three years when it had just been his mother, his sister and himself in that tiny, cramped flat. The happiest three years of their lives together until his old man had walked back in that night.

‘Suffered? Past tense?’ Elle asked. ‘Did she grow out of it? I think it’s somewhere around ninety percent of children with childhood absence epilepsy can grow out of it by about the age of twelve, although I understand they can sometimes have other types of seizure.’

‘No. She died.’

Elle held his gaze steadily, her expression changing.

‘I’m so sorry. What happened?’

Old, familiar guilt had resurrected itself, and was pressing on his chest like a flatbed truck was crushing him. Images assailed Fitz. Him getting home, the car gone, the phone lying smashed on the floor, the shattered furniture, leaving the house turned upside down. And everywhere the stench of booze. The stench of him. The man who was Fitz’s father in name only.

‘Car crash. She was six, nearly seven. My mother died too.’

He braced himself for the look, pity coupled with discomfort as they quickly changed the topic. Instead, he simply saw quiet empathy, a calmness and genuine interest. It seemed to slice through all the layers of protective armour he’d spent years pulling into place.

‘Fitz, how awful for you. So it was just you and your father?’

‘He was driving.’ Fitz tried to swallow the words. Elle was a stranger and this was no one’s business except his. ‘Drunk. I was the only one left.’

Instead, they kept pouring out, as if they’d been waiting for this moment—for this woman—for half his lifetime.

‘Is that why you wanted to protect me from the drunken bloke who was hassling me at the bar, and his mate?’ she asked softly. ‘So, how old were you?’

‘Sorry?’ he stalled.

This was the longest he’d allowed himself to think about it in a long, long time. And he didn’t want to. Not here. Not now. Not ever.

‘How old were you when your family died?’ she repeated steadily.

‘You ask a lot of questions for a damsel in distress.’

‘I wasn’t in distress. I had my thumb-lock, remember?’ Another smile that twisted in his gut. ‘But that’s not to say I didn’t appreciate the solid back-up.’

‘Well, then, that makes me feel better.’ He managed a wry smile.

He should have known better than to distract her. Her gaze never wavered and he was compelled to address her unanswered question.

‘Seventeen. But it was the night of my eighteenth.’

He should have had happy memories of the time but all he had was one of his mother and his sister lying in that hospital mortuary. To this day he didn’t know which of the mass of bruises over his mother’s face had been caused by the crash itself and which had been the result of his drunkard father’s cruel fists. Fitz struggled to breathe, let alone regulate his voice, which sounded a million miles away when he spoke.

‘Listen, this isn’t something I like to talk about.’

A beat passed before Elle answered, but not before reaching out to run a hand over his cheek as if she actually cared. And the oddest thing was, he felt like she did.

‘Maybe you should talk.’

‘I don’t need to talk,’ he bit out.

She gave an apologetic shrug, but it didn’t stop her from continuing.

‘I’m sorry. I know it’s probably none of my business but I’m a doctor. I can see the signs when someone has repressed things for a long time. Especially soldiers who think they’re too tough to need to talk and repress all kinds of bad incidents.’

‘What makes you think I’m a soldier?’ he asked sharply.

‘Those spare gym trousers you gave to the boy in there after his seizure had made him lose bladder control? I couldn’t help noticing they were military issue. And there’s just something about the way you handle yourself. I’m guessing Infantry?’

The way she smiled, polite but with none of the openness or interest of earlier, made him sure that discovering he was military had put her off. Ironically, his experience with women was that it was usually the other way around.

‘Not Infantry but, yes, I’m army. A colonel,’ he confirmed, technically not a full colonel, a lieutenant colonel, but he doubted that would make a difference to her.

Neither would the fact that until a couple of months ago he’d been a major in a different Royal Engineers regiment. Now he was at the start of his two-year posting as commanding officer of his very own regiment.

Yet right now all he could think was that something about the army meant that Elle was about to walk away from him, and a part of him desperately wanted her to stay. He wondered if she had a brother, a father who had served and been hurt. Or worse.

‘You don’t like it that I’m in the army, do you?’

‘No, no. It isn’t that. It’s...complicated.’

‘Too complicated to finish that drink with me?’

She sucked in a deep breath, as though trying to make her mind up about something. It was unsettling how much he wanted to spend more time with her. A drink, an hour, maybe the rest of the evening, whatever she was prepared to offer. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d ever wanted to spend time with any woman like this. But at least now her determination to leave had faded and she was looking decidedly undecided.

‘After the last hour, I’m guessing both of us would benefit from a bit of fun now,’ he pressed. ‘A bit of a laugh? A drink? Maybe a dance?’

‘I don’t dance.’ She frowned uncertainly but didn’t refuse him.

She was torn. He still didn’t know exactly what had put her off before but she was clearly as attracted to him as he was to her.

It didn’t make sense. He’d had short-term relationships and a handful of one-night stands over the years, all with attractive women of varying intelligence, but there was something different about Elle that seemed to pull at his gut and not just at the other, more...obvious part of his anatomy. Something glowed, like a whisper of wind over dying embers, inside Fitz; somewhere that had been a gnawing void for longer than he could remember.

He snorted silently inside his head. It was physical attraction, pure and simple. It was just the unusual circumstances of their meeting that had given rise to such a fanciful notion. The unexpected memory of his baby sister and the life he’d long since forgotten.

He hadn’t really wanted to come out tonight, the eighteenth anniversary of his mother and sister’s deaths. Its echoes of celebration seemed cruelly hollow. From today, his life had been devoid of their love and laugher and warmth for longer than they had been a part of it. Hardly a night for letting loose.

But he didn’t have a choice. It was a long-standing tradition with the men with whom he’d gone through Royal Military Training Academy—officer cadets over a decade earlier—to come on a final night out before a tour of duty. To have reneged on it would have raised questions Fitz didn’t want to answer.

And so he’d come, and from the minute he’d walked in and headed to the bar to buy the first round, his gaze had snagged on the arresting woman with the stunning red hair. A glorious, waist-length curtain of vibrant golds and reds and coppers that had evoked long-buried memories of the vivid autumn day over a decade earlier when he’d returned, exhilarated and hooked after his first ever tour of duty. It had tugged at something primal, deep inside him, yet...something he still couldn’t quite identify had also held him back from approaching her immediately.