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Fitz made a quick assessment.
‘Which means also moving the generators in the next-door unit since they’ll be relying on the HVAC plant room to keep them cool, especially in these temperatures.’
‘What about moving the medical gas supply system here?’ Elle tapped another location on the map, and he stepped close again, so close her fingers accidentally brushed his and his gut kicked in response even as she snatched her hand away.
‘The HVAC could go here—’ the faint, almost imperceptible quiver in her voice betrayed her ‘—and the generators could go there.’
‘What’s on that side of the wall?’
‘The ICU.’
‘Then no. And, anyway, I’d like the generator-housing unit to have bigger blast walls if we’re having to move them closer to the hospital.’ Fitz scanned the ground. ‘Can we take a walk around? I’ve studied the plans back at Razorwire, and I had a good aerial view coming in, but I want to see it for myself.’
‘Colonel.’ Elle and Carl acquiesced simultaneously.
He was used to it, a first-name basis in private but generally formal in public, yet this time it particularly reminded him of how well he and Elle had worked together before. How effortlessly they’d slipped into working together now. How easy she made it.
At every turn she challenged his fears of complications and messiness. She made him wonder whether he could have more after all. More time with her. More of her.
The possibility intrigued him.
And the distraction annoyed him.
Forcing himself to focus on the plans in front of him as well as the geography of the site, Fitz tried to forget that Elle was suddenly here, and concentrated on mapping it all in his head. It was a sixty-bed hospital, with electricity intermittent. So the back-up generators were vital, as was good access from the road to fuel them. He moved around the site thoughtfully, finally coming back to a possibility in his mind.
‘So the proposed ORs were to have been on the other side of this wall?’
‘Yes.’ Elle nodded. ‘On each side of the corridor.’
Fitz consulted the design then glanced over the other end of the site, warming to his work as he always did, and forgetting for a moment that he and Elle had any issues between them.
‘So, hypothetically, if we extended that part of the facility to house them on the other side, we’d have to move the recovery areas too?’
‘Yes. And building room is tighter on this side so, as you said, we’d have to either create more space between the hospital and the proposed location for the generators, or build thicker blast walls.’
‘It could work,’ Fitz mused. ‘I need to look into it in more detail and understand how your internal layout for the hospital works.’
He’d built plenty of bridges, railheads, electricity plants and more in his time, not to mention demolished or blown up a fair few buildings. But this was the first hospital he’d built.
‘I admire your frankness, Colonel.’ Elle beamed unexpectedly when he told her as much, and a thousand explosions went off in Fitz’s chest, like an unused pyrotechnics display at the end of an army year.
It was impossible not be drawn into those vivid emerald pools.
And that smile.
It was ridiculous that he’d been missing that smile so profoundly. He didn’t miss smiles. He didn’t miss people.
She made him feel things he’d never felt before and he couldn’t afford that. The last time he’d tried to pretend that he was normal, that he wasn’t missing fundamental pieces of a human being, he’d ended up causing immeasurable pain. He could still recall the distraught expression on Janine’s face, the pain, the hurt, the recrimination in her eyes when she’d screamed at him that she’d have been better off never meeting him in the first place.
He was broken, and his attempts to fix himself had only ever caused more pain to those around him.
He was only here for a few days. How hard could it be to keep himself at arm’s length from Elle? To refuse to allow himself to give into temptation and seek her out as though that night had been more than it had been?
‘Colonel.’ Carl’s voice interrupted his thoughts. ‘The briefing you scheduled is due to start in forty minutes.’
Had they been that long walking around the place?
‘Right.’ He jerked his head, forcing himself to focus. ‘Thank you, Major.’
