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He didn’t know how he did it, but he finally tore himself away from her and moved back around the desk.
‘When do you leave?’ he asked.
The hurt that made her whole body slump almost wrecked him.
‘Elle, I’m asking as Fitz. Not as a colonel. I’m not using protocol as an excuse. I know what you said last time.’
It was the only concession he could make to her, and he was relieved when she nodded, dredging up a faint smile, acknowledging it for what it was. He wasn’t shutting her down like he had last time. He was buying himself time. And she was prepared to sell it to him.
‘We leave at dawn. It’s a couple of hours’ drive so we’ll get most of tomorrow and then all of the following day. We’ll head back the day after.’
‘Okay.’ He nodded.
So tomorrow he’d either be heading back to Razorwire, putting Elle into his past for good, or staying here and riding this attraction out until he could finally let her go.
He barely had the night to decide.
* * *
‘He can’t be serious?’
Fitz could hear Elle’s muttered objection as she stood alone, her back to him, in the deserted square outside the hospital, the sunrise giving an almost halo effect to her flame-red hair. She was far enough from the hospital that she couldn’t be heard, but close enough that she could watch the convoy go through its final preparations without standing out against the backdrop of the building.
‘Something amiss?’ he asked casually as he walked up behind her, and she spun around with a startled cry.
She eyed him cautiously, as though recognising his less controlled, less distant attitude but still uncertain what it meant.
‘There’s a three-vehicle engineers’ convoy alongside my medical one, Colonel,’ she said, as she indicated towards where the vehicles were parked, less than a couple of hundred metres away, one of which was a four-by-four towing a boring rig.
‘Indeed there is,’ he agreed brightly.
Was it wrong that it gave him such a perverse pleasure to beat her at her own game?
She narrowed her eyes a fraction.
‘May I ask to what purpose, sir?’
‘You may. Although given that there’s no one immediately around I think we can dispense with the formality at this time, don’t you?’ he countered lightly. ‘Anyway, I realised that accompanying the mobile medical unit into the local communities could be advantageous to my men. As part of our mission in this area, the Royal Engineers are to be responsible for digging new wells and building schools throughout various communities in the region. After all the conflict over the last few decades, the people here are naturally suspicious of non-locals but they do accept the medical units.’
‘So you want to accompany us to trade off our good reputation?’ she asked slowly.
He grinned, knowing she couldn’t fault his logic.
‘And gain their trust more easily in order to perform a couple of test drills at each site you visit, yes. Furthermore, padding out your convoy will make you less of a target and mean only one lot of force protection will be required.’
Not that anyone was particularly expecting trouble in a non-combat area but a security detail was more about appearances.
‘I see. So...?’ she started, then paused, concluding feebly with another, ‘I see.’
She still thought it was about his fears over the safety of her convoy after his mother’s car crash. She wasn’t entirely off the mark, though it wasn’t the car crash that haunted him when he thought of Elle. The idea of her being out there, risking some of the most severe dust storms the region had experienced in a decade, brought fear and old demons to assail him. He knew all too well the impact of one of these dust storms on a military convoy. And he was fairly certain that Elle was only heading up that convoy as an excuse to get away from site, from him, for a couple of days. After the way he’d treated her, he could understand it.
If anything happened to Elle the way it had to Janine...all because of him...
‘I just... I don’t know if we have time,’ Elle hazarded. ‘Setting up your rig and doing your test drills will take time. We were intending to make this a brief dash. Get out there, vaccinate, head back.’
‘Indeed? Only yesterday you gave the impression you might be out there for a couple of days.’
She flushed.
