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‘Get me Brigade, Corporal,’ Fitz ordered quickly, his mind already engaging.
‘They’re already on the line, sir. In the ops office.’
He didn’t hesitate. He was heading out of the door behind
the young lad before he remembered Elle, and spun around quickly.
‘We will talk,’ he said quietly, knowing the corporal was too far away to hear.
‘Forget it.’ She shook her head, as though it didn’t matter in the slightest, though he’d seen the initial frustration in her eyes to match his. ‘Go.’
Without another glance, he went.
Chapter Thirteen
‘WELL, THAT WAS a really good morning.’ Elle congratulated her team with deliberate brightness as they deposited their theatre gloves and gowns in the bins. ‘Three back-to-back surgeries, and all of them went better than anyone could have anticipated. Nice work, guys.’
It felt good to have such a high mood after the last couple of days. Elle reached for the hand scrub, content to listen to the chattering of her colleagues. The storm had caused a fair amount of damage in communities far and wide and injury levels had spiked, but it finally felt like they were starting to break the back of the influx of new arrivals without compromising care for existing patients.
Stepping through the doors to the main corridor to check on the wards, Elle knew instantly that something was wrong. The low, tense buzz was unsettling and it didn’t take her long to find Jools, already huddled in conversation with a small group.
‘What’s going on?’
There was no need for preamble, they knew each other too well. Jools’s head snapped up in dismay.
‘There’s been a landslide in the Zenghar Valley. That earthquake we had the other day was closer to them than to us and they think it likely caused the slide. Razorwire are sending out Medical Emergency Response Teams, but there are sixty-three confirmed dead so far.’
Fitz.
A chilling fear stole through Elle, its icy fingers closing painfully tightly in her chest. That was where one of his other units was bridge-building.
‘Colonel Fitzwilliam was heading out there to oversee things.’
Jools nodded grimly.
‘The engineers were caught in it, too. We know they suffered a couple of fatalities, but that’s all we know.’
Elle didn’t understand how her jellified legs didn’t buckle under her weight. She wasn’t certain how she made it across the room and around the curtain to collapse in the chair, away from prying eyes. She couldn’t even be sure how her heart remembered to keep beating after initially hanging, frozen in her chest.
What a time to finally realise she was as invested in Fitz as her parents had once been in each other. As though she’d suddenly discovered that tiny last piece of who she was when she hadn’t known, all these years, that a piece of her had been missing. And now, at the fear that Fitz had been injured—or worse—it felt like that tiny, new part of her had just been smashed against an invisible wall and was, even now, shattering into tiny, irreparable fragments inside her. She knew she’d begun to care for him, but when had she begun to care so very deeply?
When had she fallen in love with Fitz?
The stark realisation came out of nowhere.
As insane as it was, a part of her had fallen for him that first night. When he’d been happy to take direction from her with the seizure yet had been able to pre-empt all her needs. When he’d opened up about his family dying in the car crash and she’d seen that very first hint of vulnerability.
Fitz had exuded self-assurance, determination and power right from the start. And it had excited and enthralled her; more than that it had intoxicated her. Yet she’d also seen kindness in him, and been privileged enough to glimpse a sensitivity that had intrigued her. Fitz was everything that Stevie wasn’t.
Everything she’d dreamed a life partner would be.
And she’d been prepared to let him slip through her fingers without even trying to fight for him, simply because convention suggested her break-up was too recent and Fitz had to be a rebound. Because she’d allowed Stevie’s betrayal to remind her of all the mental blows she’d absorbed from her stepmother as a kid, and she’d forgotten to tell herself that she deserved a love that was better than any of that.
It was time she stopped listening to her head and tried listening to her heart.
She leapt up from the chair and rounded the curtain so fast that she almost collided with another body.
‘Elle? Where are you hurrying off to?’ Jools gasped as she darted backwards.
