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She hurried up the corridor before she could stop herself. Her mind was screaming for her to stop but her traitorous body wouldn’t listen, intent instead on rushing headlong into her past. If the ground had opened up and sent her twisting and spinning, hurtling downwards to the centre of the earth, she couldn’t have felt more shocked.
She caught up with him as he reached the double doors at the far end of the corridor. Placing her hand on his arm, she pretended she didn’t feel the terrific jolt of electricity as she made him turn back to her. He stared at her fingers on his forearm but he didn’t shake them off, and she couldn’t seem to make herself let go.
As if she was frightened that, if she did, he would slip away from her again.
She had imagined this moment a hundred—a thousand—times over the years. She’d played it over and over in her head. She’d rehearsed what she would say until the words were honed to a shine even more impressive than that on a pair of bulled army parade boots. But at this moment her faithless mind had gone blank.
She was a doctor, an army major. She’d fought in dangerous combat zones and saved countless lives. She’d had hundreds of men and women under her command. However, right now she felt like the eighteen-year-old whose heart had just been shattered into a million tiny fragments.
And Mattie still didn’t know why. She just knew that it wasn’t because he’d been a couple of years older than her and so had grown tired of her, the way people—usually jealous girls in her year, though never her own family—had always warned her he would do.
She had no idea how long they stood, immobile, staring in silence at each other. Fourteen years had done nothing to diminish the effect Kane Wheeler had on her. If anything, his hold seemed to be greater than ever right at this moment. She couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, she couldn’t even breathe.
Seeing him had been like wallop to the solar plexus. All her worst, long-buried fears had screamed up to the surface, bursting through her like an explosion of lust.
‘Go back to work, Matz,’ he growled eventually.
The low growl—the voice she hadn’t heard in fourteen years and the only one to have ever called her by that name—spiralled through her like the hottest, deepest coil of smoke. If she hadn’t been gripping his arm, she was certain that her legs would have buckled beneath her.
Mattie gritted her teeth, hating herself for her weakness, and hating Kane even more for doing it to her.
And yet...there was another chunk of her that didn’t hate him at all, that had never hated him.
Kane Wheeler.
Her first love. Worse, in some respects, her only real love. And wasn’t that the kicker?
Fourteen years, her fair share of boyfriends and George—her ex-fiancé, and the kindest, sweetest man she’d ever known—but, in the end, none of them had come close to prising open the death grip hold that Kane still had on her heart.
Kane. The man who hadn’t even wanted her back, hadn’t loved her, and who had so easily, so devastatingly, betrayed her.
All the more shameful, then, that her heart was currently hurling itself—with suicidal recklessness—into the wall of her chest, practically winding her.
‘Practically a decade and a half, and that’s all you have to say to me?’
‘What would you like me to say?’
Scores of questions cracked through her like thunderclaps, each one echoing more loudly than the last. Mattie bit every one of them back.
‘Why are you here, Kane?’
‘I already answered that,’ he told her calmly, and she might actually have believed him if it weren’t for that hectic glitter in his all-too-familiar eyes.
Pools of deep, rich brown that actually seemed to turn black sometimes, when his emotions ran high.
Like now.
Her heart slammed forcefully against her chest wall yet again, and she pretended not to notice. Yet, despite all her internal commands to move away, her legs wilfully ignored them, and her arm refused to drop away.
‘What about you, Mattie? What brings you here, so far away from where you should be?’
Where she should be?
‘Do you mean on operational duty?’ Mattie frowned.
She could have told him about Operation Strikethrough. About the fact that she’d been chosen out of any number of majors in the Royal Army Medical Corps to run end-to-end simulations in support of light and armoured infantry, trying new tactics for the first time since the end of the Cold War. She almost did tell him, out of sheer pride. Just as she almost told him that, at the end of the three-month exercise she would be due for promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel.
But something had stopped her.
