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He could recall with all too startling clarity the occasion her hair had grazed his forearm at some point when they’d been examining the same chart, and a jolt of electricity had snaked its way up his biceps, across his shoulder and right through his chest. Or the deep shiver that had run through Rae’s body when she’d reached across him for the ultrasound machine and his breath had lifted the hairs slightly on the back of her neck.
She’d lingered just that fraction too long and he, foolishly, hadn’t been able to help himself repeating the action.
He caught himself shortly after that; tried to remind himself of exactly who Raevenne was, and precisely why Rafe had employed him.
These moments of weakness wouldn’t be happening again. He refused to let them.
‘Which is why we need to deliver the baby by C-section before the abruption is complete.’ Rae shouldered the door open as they hurried to scrub in. ‘I’m guessing you didn’t do many C-sections in your time as an army trauma surgeon?’
‘It wasn’t really a common procedure, no,’ he demurred. ‘Although I have assisted in a couple. All of the field hospitals I worked in treated civilians as well as allied and enemy soldiers, although usually for injuries. But some of the civilians were pregnant women and sometimes the injury meant the baby was coming out whether we liked it or not.’
‘Okay, well, now you get to see it day in and day out. Then it’s up to you to decide whether changing speciality to OBGYN is for you.’
Something unexpectedly hot wound through him at her clipped tone.
How much of his recent events did she know?
Tucking the question to the back of his mind, Myles scrubbed up and followed her into her operating room. He knew that, even after this, she still wouldn’t go to the ball until she’d checked on her last patient, the seven-months-pregnant woman who had been admitted with significant bleeding after falling off a ladder while trying to decorate a Christmas tree for her three-year-old daughter.
* * *
Exquisite.
Her fitted dress showcased every delectable curve to perfection without being too revealing, her dark hair swept off her neck and piled artfully on her head like the rich, chocolate mirror coating of the dessert he already knew was her favourite indulgence after a long, gruelling shift.
It was only one of a multitude of insignificant facts he should not have taken the time to learn about her at all. He’d told himself that moving into her house with her was a sensible precaution after the break-in. That it was his job, that Rafe was paying him to be as vigilant with his sister as they’d always been out there.
Deep down he suspected there was something far less noble—and something far more primal—behind his decision.
He had never understood Rafe’s misplaced sense of protectiveness towards Rae after the tape had come out. Yet now, here he was, watching Rae circulate the ballroom, with something reeling and circling his chest that he feared was all too close to that same protectiveness.
Her passion for the charity shone out of her like a glorious, golden light, buoying the guests and instilling them with the pre-Christmas spirit on what was otherwise a dreary November night.
A night which was all about raising enough money to buy Christmas gifts for displaced and refugee children, and ship them worldwide in time for the special celebrations.
Though why Rae needed anyone else to help her was beyond him—surely her enthusiasm alone could have filled up this ballroom ten times over.
She was charming guest after guest as though she didn’t know that they would delight in making vicious, cruel comments behind her back as soon as she’d left. He watched them do it.
Could practically hear their ugly, bitter laughter from across the room.
His hands clenched in the pockets of his tuxedo. Forget two-faced, most of these people were more like forty-faced. They didn’t deserve so much as the time of day from a woman who had, up until an hour ago, been delivering triplets in the most complicated birth he’d seen to date.
There were women here he could well imagine had been primping and preening all day, at least, just to be seen at this supposedly philanthropic event. Rae, however, had shucked off her operating garb, dashed in and out of the shower and dried her hair courtesy of a quick blast crouched under the hand-dryers, and had been in the car ten minutes later applying her make-up and dictating medical notes.
Yet she eclipsed every single person in the room.
She shimmered amongst them, delicate and breathtaking. Like the most glorious butterfly flitting amongst a deadly cluster of predatory dragonflies.
The army had honed his observation skills to perfection over the years, yet it had felt as fascinating, as game changing, as it did right now. He took in everything, his mind processing it and trying to make sense of it all. From the close-knit team back in the hospital who, to his surprise, clearly adored their hard-working Dr Rawlstone, to the guests who barely retracted their claws as they fawned over Rae at this ball.
Only one thing stopped them from being rude to Rae’s face. They might feed off her long-time bad-girl reputation, but she was still a Rawlstone and these people knew the value of that. Which was why they laughed and fawned over her, and pledged hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands in some cases, of dollars to the charity that Rae so earnestly promoted.
And all those vainglorious men, who laughed so uproariously when their jealous partners sniped about Rae, all the while not so secretly coveting her. Men who took every excuse to touch her, who undressed her with their eyes, who would sleep with her in a heartbeat only to, he was sure, turn around and plead they had been involuntarily seduced by her.
There was no reason whatsoever for him to feel aggrieved on Rae’s behalf.
Certainly not for the shards of possessiveness that lanced through him when he was least expecting them. The way his hands itched to run over her unequivocally sexy, feminine form. Or the way he felt altogether too hot, too wired, too greedy, as he struggled to drag his eyes from the way she sashayed around the floor.
