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CHAPTERSIX
Mia’s face was once again a sickly gray. “I’m seriously freaking out because of how certain you sound regarding the need to standbehinda victim when their throat is cut, because there’s an outward spray of blood.” She chewed worriedly on her bottom lip.
Darius wished he could say something reassuring to her, but the truth was, he couldn’t. His years in the army hadn’t all been spent using a gun as a weapon. Sometimes he used a knife, other times his bare hands. But he wasn’t about to tell Mia any of that. Any more than he had been able to talk to his brothers about specifics regarding his missions, or why he had left the military. That was part of the reason his head had ended up such a fucking mess.
Maybe if he’d been able to talk about those last few days before he was sent home, he might have been able to rationalize what happened.
Although he doubted it.
He knew he would never be able to unsee what he’d seen. Or stop having nightmares about it happening again, in slow motion, more nights than he cared to think about.
“Why were you so adamant you wouldn’t go to the hospital for an X-ray?” he probed.
“I see what you did there, when you turned the subject back onto me,” she derided.
He wouldn’t have expected any less of her. “Well?” he challenged.
She shrugged. “I feel fine, and I just really don’t like hospitals.”
“Why not?” Darius sensed there was something behind that dislike that she wasn’t saying. “Mia?” he prompted at her silence.
She turned her gaze away from his. “I had to have my tonsils out when I was four. At the time, they kept you in hospital for a week after the operation, and no one could be spared from the… There was no one to stay with me at night or visit me every day,” she corrected huskily.
Darius’s guess would be that no one could be spared from the orphanage to stay with her at night or visit with her in the day.
“What about family?” he prompted.
“I don’t have any,” she answered in a tone that warned against asking any further questions on the subject.
Not that Darius needed to when he had already read her file.
She shuddered. “I have never felt so alone or frightened in my life. Nor have I ever voluntarily spent time in a hospital since.”
Which was a pretty fucking awful thing to happen to a four-year-old child who had already been abandoned only months after she was born.
Darius hated that Mia’s childhood had been so lacking in love and affection. Especially when it was in complete contrast to the love and warmth he’d received growing up, from a loving mother and father, along with the comradery and goodhearted rivalry of his five siblings and cousin.
He was also feeling a little uncomfortable, having read Rufus Wynter’s file on Mia, that he now knew things about her she hadn’t told him herself.
But he didn’t feel guilty enough to reciprocate.
He might find himself drawn to Mia in a way he never had been with any other woman, but he wasn’t about to start confiding his deepest darkest secrets to her.
Nor was he about to let her be alone and frightened through this current trauma in her life. “In that case, you’ll be staying in one of my spare bedrooms until this situation, whatever it is, has been resolved,” he informed her firmly.
She eyed him mockingly. “Oh, will I?”
Darius nodded. “That way, I can also do as the doctor says and keep an eye on you throughout the night.” Even if knowing she was lying in a bed just down the hallway from his own was going to be a torture more brutal than any he had ever known. And he’d once been a prisoner of the Taliban.
Mia gave a decisive shake of her head. “I don’t think so, thank you.”
“You have a boyfriend who can do that?” It had only just occurred to him that might be the case.
Because Mia was his, damn it.
“No boyfriend,” she dismissed. “Nor do I have a family, but I share a house with four other girls. All of whom, if I ask nicely, will gladly check on me during the night to make sure I’m still breathing.”
“What the fuck…!” Darius exploded before scowling at the grin curving her lips. “Don’t even fucking joke about something like that.”
