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‘Talk to me,’ she whispered.
Alex shut his eyes. He could hear the tremor in her voice and feel the frantic flutter of her heartbeat against his side like a frightened bird. But with her body pressed against him it was hard to keep her anxiety in focus. He seriously doubted whether he was capable of anything as complex as speech. Breathing at the moment seemed to be a challenge. ‘Do you want to…do you want to talk about the dream?’
‘No!’ Adrenalin still buzzed through her system. She just wanted to cling to him and relegate the nightmare to the dark reaches of her brain.
‘Okay, okay,’ he soothed, patting her shoulder, feeling the fine trembling of her muscles there. ‘So whatdo you want to talk about?’
‘Anything. Anything but that. Say something in Greek.’
He almost groaned. How many times had he heard that request when sharing a bed with a woman? Somehow he didn’t think Isobella had that kind of talk in mind. Alex prayed for restraint. ‘The Iliad, perhaps?’
Isobella’s laugh sounded strained even to her own ears. ‘Maybe not. A fairy tale or a nursery rhyme? Wasn’t Aesop Greek? Maybe a fable?’
Alex sighed and launched intoThe Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing , not stopping to question the irony of his choice. Here he was, lying next to her, her half-naked body superglued to his side, pretending to be some fine upstanding gentleman rescuing a damsel in distress. When the reality was he wanted nothing more than to strip away her clothes and chase the cyclone into the night with a little earth-moving of his own.
She was quiet when he’d finished the story and he wondered if she had fallen asleep. He hadn’t consciously realised but he’d been trailing his fingers up and down her arm as he’d spoken, and they stilled now. He strained to hear her breath, gratified to find that it seemed more modulated now.
‘Tell me about hospital.’
Alex’s first instinct was to reject her request out of hand. He didn’t talk about that time. It was private. He hadn’t told anybody about the dark times, when he’d despaired for his life. Not a soul. He’d never got close enough to another human being to feel comfortable enough about unloading.
But if ever there was a time and a place to do so, now felt pretty right. Her hair was tickling his chin, and the realisation that they were both in unfamiliar territory, both just trying to get through the night, helped. He knew enough about Isobella to know that whatever demons were in her head had to be bad for her to be plastered against him. So maybe she knew something about demons.
And he needed to keep his mind off her leopard print underwear somehow.
‘It was probably one of the most humbling experiences of my life.’
Isobella had closed her eyes, having given up on him answering. She opened them, staring into the inky darkness. ‘How so?’ she murmured.
‘Being the one lying in a bed taught me a lot about medicine that I never would have learned otherwise.’
‘Like what?’
Her breath was warm against his chest. ‘Patience, humility, that doctors don’t know everything.’
She let that sink in. Surgeons weren’t known for their humility. ‘Did you have chemo?’
Alex nodded. ‘I had some node involvement. I had chemo and radium.’
His husky words softened the ugliness of their meaning, but Isobella felt compelled to comfort him anyway. She draped her arm across his chest, her hand resting on the warm round prominence of his opposite shoulder. ‘Sounds bad.’
Alex lay very still as her fingers absently stroked his skin. ‘It was.’
She was quiet for a few moments, absorbing his brief but angst-loaded words. She listened to the suck of the waves on the beach that had so freaked her out in the darkness not that long ago. ‘So what else did you learn?’
Alex thought for a moment. ‘I learnt who my friends were.’
Isobella felt him tense beneath her touch even before the bitterness in his tone affected her. ‘Sonya?’
His lips twisted as Sonya’s betrayal revisited him. ‘She barely waited until I’d been shifted from Intensive Care before she gave me back my ring. Told me she hadn’t signed up for an invalid.’
Isobella gave a horrified gasp. ‘Ouch.’
Alex gave a half-laugh. ‘Indeed. Sonya wanted the glamour of being Dr and Mrs—the prestige of being married to a hotshot surgeon. She hadn’t counted on the worse part offor better or worse rearing its ugly head quite so soon.’
Isobella cringed. ‘I’m sorry.’
