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What the hell was the right answer to that? She didn’t want to freak him out or scare him off if there was potential for a relationship after the holidays, but she wouldn’t lie to him, either. She did want kids. Eventually. And that eventually time frame was drawing closer with each passing year. She didn’t want to be an old mom. She wanted kids while she was still young, healthy, and energetic enough to enjoy them. “I think so, yeah.”
“You’d make a great mom,” he said, and she had to look away for fear of revealing too much. Afraid her feelings for him would be written all over her face.
She cleared her throat. “I should get going. I have deliveries.”
“I’d offer to help, but I have to meet my dad today for golf.”
She waved a hand. “Absolutely! You’re here to spend time with your family, not work.”
He pulled her in for a soft kiss. “I’d rather work with you. I’ll walk you out before we both end up back in that bed,” he said, a slight hoarseness to his tone.
…
Downstairs, he reluctantly walked Jess through the foyer toward the front door. “Can I see you tonight?” he asked. He’d given up any pretense of playing it cool, and he was thrilled when she nodded eagerly.
Noise from the dining room caught his attention, and he turned to look at the Breakfast with Santa event. He spotted a little girl smiling and laughing with several other children at the table, and his mouth went dry. Dark hair in a long braid down her back. Dark brown skin. Light gray eyes. Thin nose. He squinted and a sharp pain radiated across his forehead.
Ava?
He moved into the dining room, oblivious to the sights and sounds all around him. He thought he heard his name, but it sounded distant…unreal.
All of a sudden, he was back there in Cambodia.
Seeing the little girl laughing and smiling and playing. Healthy, happy…safe. Then the sound of the bullets ringing in his ears. The screams, the blood, the limp, lifeless little body…
He touched her shoulder and as she slowly turned to face him, Mitch’s pulse skyrocketed.
Not her. Of course it wasn’t her. This was Blue Moon Bay. And Ava was gone…
“Hey,” the little girl’s mother said, slapping his hand away. She stood abruptly and glared at him. Everyone stopped to glare at him.
Jesus. He’d lost it for a brief second too long.
“Sorry…so sorry,” Mitch said, turning and leaving the dining room as quickly as possible, brushing past Jess on his way out. Whispers and stares followed him out. He must look crazy. His heart thundered in his chest and his mouth filled with saliva. He was going to be sick.
Racing back up the stairs to his room, he made it just in time.
When he lifted his head from the toilet bowl and stood, his hands still trembling slightly and the nausea in the pit of his stomach still lingering, Jessica was standing in the bathroom doorway.
“You okay?”
His gaze met hers through the bathroom mirror reflection and the concern on her face had his pulse racing even faster. She deserved an explanation for that, but he wasn’t sure he could talk about it. He wasn’t really sure what had happened. Trauma had a callous way of hitting hard and unexpectedly. It rewired a person’s brain and seemed to fire at the synapses at will. He thought he’d been doing okay, moving past it. He nodded. “Yeah, sorry…that must have looked really weird.”
“Did you recognize her?”
“I thought I did,” he said, splashing a handful of water on his face, then turning off the tap.
Jess handed him a towel and he took extra-long drying his face. He hung it on the rack and released a deep breath. “For a second there, I thought she was a young girl I’d…treated overseas.”
Jess nodded.
He followed her out into the bedroom and they sat on the edge of the bed. He’d replayed all of this over and over in his mind for weeks after it happened, his recurring nightmares never missed a detail, but vocalizing it wasn’t going to be easy. Telling Jessica might help relieve some of the heaviness from his chest, though.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said softly, touching his shoulder.
He took her hand in his. “I do.” He forced a deep breath. “We were treating children with malaria in a drug resistant area with a new combination therapy vaccine. The existing strains become resistant to the most effective drug, artemisinin, but societal constraints cause most people to buy their drugs from local dealers, pill by pill, and therefore they never truly get better. So we were combining it with chloroquine, a longer lasting but slower affecting drug. It was going well. Really well. The success rate for recovery was amazing.” He paused.
Jessica squeezed his hand, encouraging him to continue.
