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Her heart, which had started beating again at some point, was now pounding wildly in her chest. Clattering behind her ribs.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ she muttered in a stricken voice. ‘Not now.’
Though she noted that she didn’t say not ever.
Hayden regarded her for a moment, and then he dipped his head simply.
‘Then we won’t.’
‘We won’t?’ she echoed weakly.
It was that simple?
‘We’ll talk about what I’m going to be doing for the next few weeks around the clinic,’ he continued smoothly. ‘Work-related topics that won’t make you feel uncomfortable.’
And what did it say that she wasn’t sure she liked that superficiality either?
‘You’re going to be working around the clinic?’ she managed. ‘I thought your purpose out here was to survey the area around the vast training ground the military has been gifted? I understood that your quid pro quo was to put in some road and light aircraft infrastructure so that the region won’t be so cut off and isolated when the rains come and the ground becomes a quagmire?’
‘It is. But the mission has been extended to include some wat-san work.’
Water and sanitation?
‘You mean like inspecting old boreholes that have stopped working around the region? Maybe stripping them down and rebuilding? Checking the generators?’
None of which would mean he was right on site, where she could round a corner and bump into him at any time.
‘That...’ He dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘But also we’ve been asked to construct some flood defences for the clinic. The idea is that we’ll dig a series of drains around the old town to allow for expansion from the facility you have now into a main hospital once the buildings of the former town have been repaired. The drains will gravity-feed water into a four-or-five-metre-deep soakaway.’
‘I see.’ She tried to swallow past the lump in her throat.
Nerves.
She’d psychologically worked herself up to be within a few hundred metres of the army camp but knowing he could be working right outside the clinic felt like a whole different matter.
And wasn’t that the problem?
She’d known from the start about Hayden the playboy. He’d even warned her himself. But still she’d let herself become too emotionally attached somewhere along the line—and she suspected she knew precisely where that somewhere had been.
Was she now supposed to walk around camp acting as though she knew him no better than anyone else? Bridget wasn’t sure she could handle that.
‘Where have you gone, Birdie?’
His voice snapped her back into the moment and her eyes flew to his.
‘Sorry. Did you say something?’
If she didn’t get a hold of herself then this was going to be the worst three-month medical mission of her entire career.
* * *
‘I asked how your first few days have been?’ he forced himself to ask casually. ‘If it’s different from other projects you’ve worked on?’
And he absolutely wasn’t wondering whether she had been thinking of him as much as he’d been thinking of her, because that made no sense.
None at all.
He still didn’t understand what it was about this particular woman that fascinated him so. He might have enjoyed flings from time to time but he’d never had, or wanted to have, a full-on relationship either.
