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‘Gets me out of his face. He likes yes-men around him, and I’m not one of those.’
‘No,’ Mattie snorted. ‘You’re not. So, if we really want to hack the guy off then we just need to make this the most enviable phase of the exercise.’
‘Couldn’t hurt,’ Kane agreed.
‘No more...this...’ She waved her hands between them, hoping Kane understood all the words she couldn’t bring herself to say aloud.
Chemistry. Passion. Lust.
She refused to acknowledge any other L-word because that, obviously, wasn’t applicable here.
‘It’s still going to be there, Matz,’ Kane answered in a low, only half-regretful tone that spiralled heat straight through her to pool right between her legs. ‘We just have to move past it.’
‘Ignore it,’ she suggested.
‘Use it to our advantage.’ He shrugged. ‘We understand each other in a way no one else will understand. Anticipate each other.’
‘Even now, over a decade later?’
She already knew the answer, yet some perverse part of her wanted to hear him say it.
‘If you have to ask the question then think back to last weekend in that hotel room,’ he growled deliciously, ‘and then decide how well I know you.’
It was thrilling. Exhilarating. And entirely the opposite of what they were trying to achieve.
‘This isn’t exactly moving past it.’ She arched her eyebrows at him, even as she bit her tongue to stop herself from flicking it out to moisten her dry lips.
He countered her with a look that was so sensual she wanted to walk round the desk and straddle him, there and then.
‘Then start trying,’ he told her.
‘Fine.’ She didn’t need to tell him that it seemed the more they tried, the harder it became. ‘Tomorrow morning we’re running a medical scenario on a MERT if you want to come. I’m sure you’ve observed before but might help give you an idea of what goes on when your guys hand over the injured soldier to us. We’ll be running two casualties from the same scenario with very similar injuries.’
‘What is the benefit of that?’ he asked curiously.
‘The casualty who is slightly more severely wounded will receive textbook treatment on the ground before our MERT team arrives, whilst the casualty who’s slightly less severely wounded will have mistakes made by the combat medics.’
‘Okay.’ Kane nodded. ‘So that way, when we run the simulations in my setting for my men, your teams will already be prepared for any less than optimal treatment on the ground?’
‘That way we can be sure the test is on your men rather than my medics. Which is the goal of this new phase.’
‘Call it a pre-phase.’ Mattie offered a smile. ‘The original first phase, which is the one we’d already planned, is geared around testing the medical support chain for the battle group rather than the medical knowledge of either your guys or my medical staff.’
‘Which it is still intended to be, it’s just a matter of whether we need to find new grid locations. And the pre-planned second phase, which should also be changed, is going to be a full mass casualty event, same grid locations as those already planned with the Engineers.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
HE HADN’T INTENDED to join her, yet Kane found himself falling in step as they ran over the rough terrain together.
He’d been following her for four miles so far, ever since his alarm had gone off half an hour earlier and he’d decided to see if a run would clear his head. At first he’d thought it better to stay back, off Mattie’s radar. But following that delectable body, clad in tight running gear that moulded itself to every delicious curve, had definitely not been helping to keep his libido in check.
At least running alongside her meant he couldn’t stay just the right distance behind her, ogling her like some kind of hyped-up teenage boy. It’d been altogether too tempting to pull her into the nearby treeline and take her up against one of those silver birches. All he could think of was the way her long legs had appeared even longer, reminding him of the way she’d wrapped them around his hips that night at the hotel. Locking them over his back and using them to pull him deeper and deeper inside her.
God, he was losing it again.
Concentrating on his running, Kane willed his body back into submission. No easy feat when her ragged breathing was now causing a slightly different memory. The damned woman was enough to drive him insane.
And he wasn’t even sure she knew it.
