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Indeed, even in the UK he was just the man who had finally helped her to offload her inconvenient label of being a virgin. Nothing more.
And certainly not the reason why she reached out and took the gloriously red bottle from her roommate, murmuring her gratitude and wondering what...anybody else might make of it.
* * *
Hayden held the neck of his beer bottle in his fingers and leaned on the pillar, only half tuned in to the conversation going on beside him between his second-in-command and the charity’s mission leader as he watched the rest of the reception play out in front of him. Pretending he wasn’t looking out for her. The woman who had haunted his thoughts for the better part of the past week.
No matter what he’d said, that night in his hotel suite, about drawing a line between what had happened between them in the UK and how they would be out here in a professional capacity, he’d found that his thoughts had wandered back to Bridget too many times to count over the last few days.
How many times had he woken up, his body hard and ready after worryingly vivid dreams of her? As though nothing would ever sate him the way that this woman had done.
He was, therefore, intensely grateful that his army camp was separate from the charity’s medical compound. Whilst they were making use of th
e buildings in an abandoned village while the army effected some of the repairs for them, his Royal Engineers, along with a logistics unit and some other support troops, were no more than a couple of hundred metres away on the opposite side of a dried-up riverbed.
It wasn’t much of a divide in terms of terrain, but it was the psychological divide that he needed. The reassurance that he could focus on his task in hand. The confidence that he wasn’t going to run into Bridget on a daily basis.
Because whatever else that night back in his hotel room had done, it had convinced him that one night with her wasn’t nearly enough. It hadn’t sated this smouldering need inside him—it had stoked it up.
He wasn’t entirely convinced that anything would douse it, bar taking her to his bed. Again, and again. And it didn’t matter how many times he told himself that he didn’t mix work and pleasure. Or that virgins weren’t his thing. Or even that, as much as his parents had made their relationship work, he’d still seen how it had affected his mother, being married to a military man who had been away more than he’d been home. He’d promised himself long ago that he would never put any woman through the same.
Now he was fighting the nonsensical notion that he’d only found it so easy to stick to that promise because he’d never found the right woman before.
‘What do you think, Hayd?’
The question crashed through his thoughts. Pasting a polite expression over his features, he turned to his companions.
‘Say again?’
‘I was explaining to Mandy that the surveys we’ve been conducting all week have primarily been recces to determine whether the intel sent to us back in the UK matches the actual set-up on the ground before we can decide which pieces of infrastructure should be our priority.’
‘Yes, I completely understand.’ Mandy, the charity’s mission coordinator, bobbed her head enthusiastically. ‘I just wanted to make sure you understood that the ground conditions you’re seeing now are vastly different from the conditions we encountered when we first arrived here a couple of months ago.’
‘In the wet season?’ Hayden forced himself to focus. To stop looking out for a woman whose presence should have no impact on him whatsoever.
‘Right,’ Mandy agreed. ‘This part of the country gets muddy, swampy. We’d intended to be in a month earlier, but we had to postpone it because even the airstrip had been close to being reclaimed by the mud. The dry riverbed you see out there now was close to overflowing. The locals build roads each year but each year they get washed away when the floods come.’
‘So your concern is that we’ll focus on what makes sense now, without appreciating the terrain could look very different in six months? Or eight?’ Hayden confirmed.
‘Yes. I’m just conscious that the army is only here as a bit of a Section 106.’
‘I’m sorry?’
She shot him a look that was only half-apologetic, but he was beginning to like her anyway. She was direct and down to earth, and he’d always found that much easier to work with than trying to guess what someone wasn’t saying.
‘You know...a bit of quid pro quo. You’re getting a training area in this region on the basis that you put in a little infrastructure. And I’m very grateful for that, believe me. But I’ve been working out here for a long time, mostly in the main hospital a few hours’ drive away. It matters to me—to this charity—that we make the most of you whilst you’re here. Put in the base work that will most benefit the villages here on a long-term basis.’
‘Which is why I’m more than happy to take on board any and all advice you give us,’ he told her sincerely. ‘Aside from the fact that I want to do as much as possible to help the people of this region, it’s also in the army’s interests to do so. So if you want to accompany me on a recce tomorrow, and perhaps let me run you through where I’m up to so far, I’d be happy to get your feedback?’
‘Great.’ Mandy gave a pleased smile. ‘I’d really appreciate that. I think it’s going to be a pleasure to work alongside you, even if not on a regular basis. If you’ll excuse me, I should make a social round of my people. I see a few of the new volunteers and I want to introduce them so that handovers are easier.’
‘Of course,’ Hayden agreed, as his second-in-command asked to join her.
Then, stepping back, Hayden watched as they left.
‘Welcome to Jukrem, Hayd.’
He knew he shouldn’t care, and yet he turned around almost eagerly.
