The Army Doc's Christmas Angel

by Annie O'Neil

  When he was done, he handed the phone back to Mabel then chatted a bit more with Adao. Told him how he was still toying with the idea of becoming an astronaut one day. Pointed out what fun going through airport security was now that he had an “iron” leg. Told Adao how lucky he was they were both lefties. Some of the best people he knew were lefties, he said with a wink, before turning to give her a meaningful look.

  She was a leftie.

  Was there anything the man didn’t notice?

  Finn was so good with him. It was mesmerizing to watch the pair of them as Finn ever so casually noted Adao’s heart rate. Blood pressure. A little bit of swelling that had developed around the joint. There were multiple factors to consider in these early days after the surgery. Joint contracture. Pathological scars. Cardiovascular response to what had been, ultimately, a traumatic event. Residual limb pain. Phantom sensation, edema, and the list went on. All of which Finn nimbly checked while keeping up a light-hearted conversation about Adao’s favorite British football players.

  It turned out Adao didn’t have any. His heart lay with the Spanish.

  “What?” Finn feigned receiving a dagger to the heart and only just managing to pull it out. “Not one British player?”

  Adao shrugged and grinned. He liked who he liked.

  Standing there, watching the pair of them banter, Naomi felt an acute sense of loss. She could’ve kissed this man. This gorgeous, warm-hearted bear of a man.

  Would it have been a mistake?

  Most likely.

  She didn’t deserve a fairy-tale moment like that, let alone the promise of the happiness that could follow in its wake. From what little she knew about Finn, and the stony silence he’d maintained as they’d walked back to the hospital from the river, he wasn’t exactly in the market for love. Neither was she, for that matter.

  Lust. That’s what it had been. A hit of seasonal lust that had taken them both by surprise.

  That he was able to treat her as if absolutely nothing had happened between them was proof he compartmentalized his life. Just as she did.

  Work.

  The sports center for him. The riverside runs for her.

  Home.

  She tipped her head to the side and scrunched her eyes tight, trying to imagine him in a houseboat, and came up with nothing. The first thing that popped into her mind was a huge man cave carved into the side of a soaring mountainside. Accessible only by foot. Or yak. She easily pictured it all decked out in shaggy woolly mammoth hides and zebra skins. Did it make sense? No. But then again... A huge fire would be roaring in the center of it, with Finn presiding over the place as if he were the king of the jungle. Or the mountain range?

  “What’s got you so smiley?”

  “What?” Naomi shook her head, startled to find both Finn and Adao looking at her as if she’d lost her marbles.

  Oh, crikey. She’d gone all daydreamy right in front of the man she was meant to not be daydreaming about.

  “Nothing. Just thinking about...” Her eyes darted across the ward to where a Christmas tree was merrily blinking away “I was just thinking about the Christmas party and how much fun it will be.”

  “Christmas party?” Adao spoke the words as if he’d not let himself imagine such a delight.

  Naomi grinned.

  “Absolutely.” Evie was really outdoing herself if the rumor mill was anything to go by. “It’s in a couple of weeks, I think. And...” she held up two sets of crossed fingers “...if everything goes well with your recovery and we get your physio under way, I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t be able to go.”

  Adao looked to Finn for approval.

  Finn smiled and gave the little boy’s short head of hair a scrub with one of his huge man hands. “You heard the lady, mate. You focus on getting better and in a couple of weeks’ time you might be showing Santa your new prosthesis.”

  For the first time the mention of the false arm elicited a smile from Adao. “I would very much like to shake Santa’s hand,” he said.

  “Well, then.” Naomi’s heart was buoyed at the fierce determination lighting up the little boy’s eyes. “That’s what we shall focus on.”

  Her gaze shifted to Finn, whose eyes were already on her, his expression unreadable. What had she expected? Him to be all doe-eyed? Hardly. She’d turned him down. He was getting on with his life as if it had never happened and what lay deep in those moonstone-colored eyes of his would remain a mystery. No matter how much curiosity was getting the better of her.

  She gave Adao a quick wave goodbye and headed toward the stairwell, fighting the growing sensation that running away from Finn could be one of her biggest mistakes to date.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AN EMPTY GYM.

  No music.

  Just the pounding of his heart and the sound of his breath.

  The best part about an exhausting workout was that there was no room in Finn’s head for anything other than the weights in his hands and the resistance his body was or wasn’t giving as he pushed himself to the next level.

  There wasn’t one spare second to consider just how close he’d come to kissing Naomi the other day.

  Or if he’d been counting: six days, twelve hours and a handful of minutes ago.

  But he hadn’t been counting.

  Or popping round when she was giving Adao one of his physio sessions, taking careful note of how gentle she was with him. Sensitive to how lonely and lost the boy was feeling.

  Neither had he been so much as giving the slightest thought to those beautiful, full lips of hers. The slight tilt of her eyes rimmed by lashes so thick and long he could almost imagine them butterfly-kissing his cheek.

  Almost.

  But he wasn’t thinking about things like that.

  He wasn’t letting himself notice that when she walked into a room the world felt a little bit nicer.

  Or the soft curve of her neck.

  How watching her work with patients was seeing someone answering a calling, not doing a job.

  Or the gentle swoops and soft curves her body revealed even in the athletic gear she almost always wore to work.

  * * *

  Finn strode over to a press-up bench and took off his prosthesis. A challenge. That’s what he needed. He dropped to the floor and did a few press-ups, unsuccessfully trying to rid his brain of that instant—that bit of other-worldly time and place—when he’d been absolutely sure they’d both moved toward the other.

  Two lost souls finding solace in each other.

  Only he had no idea if she really was a lost soul or not. Something about Adao had well and truly shot her emotions up to explosive level. Then again, he never saw her raise her voice or offer anything less than a smile to every other member of staff.

  Maybe it was him. Maybe it was the combination of the pair of them. Maybe it was the fact he’d never come to terms with pushing his ex-wife so hard the only choice she’d had in the end had been to leave him.

  “Mr. Morgan!” The door to the gym was pushed open and Theo appeared. He was dressed in running gear. In his usual swift, efficient manner he took in a sweaty senior surgeon, a discarded prosthesis, a look that could kill and said, “Want a spotter?”

  No. He wanted to be left alone to wallow in his misery. Only...he didn’t really.

  Blimey. Since when did misery actually love company?

  Theo crossed to the press-up bench and eyed the weights Finn had loaded on the bar. He clearly knew better than to wait for an invitation.

  “Looks like you’re weighted light tonight.”

  Theo had the world’s best poker face and he was playing it hard right now. He knew Finn only pressed weights that challenged him at the highest level.

  “I could lift this with my pinky,” Finn grunted, not even caring that Theo was his boss. Not right now anyw
ay.

  “Well, then. Show me.”

  Finn craned his neck before lying back on the bench. Rather than address the obvious—his unusual decision to work out stripped back to his true self—he threw a question at Theo. “You look like you could pound out a few frustrations yourself.”

  Theo sucked in a sharp breath. “That obvious?”

  “Only to a seasoned doctor.”

  Theo huffed out a mirthless laugh. “You mean like all the other doctors we’ve got wandering round Hope?”

  “Something like that.” Finn lay back on the bench and wrapped his hands round the bar. “Only...to...the...rest...of...them...you...look...achingly...handsome.”

  To Finn’s relief, Theo took the jibe as it was intended and chuckled. Something to break the tension that had added more than a silver hair or two to Theo’s temples.

  Ivy wasn’t getting any better. Quite the opposite, in fact. No amount of testing, Doodle visits or letters to Santa Claus were making a blind bit of difference.

  Theo’s hands floated just under the bar as Finn cranked out three rounds of three lifts before pushing himself up. “You want a go?”

  Theo eyed him for a minute as if he were being asked to a duel then did the standard guy response. “Get up, then. You’re on my bench.”

  “Your bench?” Finn guffawed loud and hard then made a show of wiping it clean and presenting it as if it were a throne. “Your majesty.”

  Theo flicked him a look that said, Enough with the servitude, mate, then settled on to the bench.

  True. It was Theo’s bench. His gym. His hospital. But the last thing he’d ever seen the man be was proprietorial or smug about his financial status. Billionaire. What the guy was was a worried dad. And letting off steam had to be hard when your little girl’s health was deteriorating right in front of your eyes.

  “How’s the diagnostician getting on?”

  “Madison?” There was a bite in his voice when he said the name and he ripped off three quick rounds, pressing the same weight Finn had.

  Impressive.

  Or emotion-fueled.

  Easy to see there wasn’t much point in asking him if Madison had made much progress. His heart went out to Theo, seeing his little girl, the only one left in his family, go through so much pain right in front of him and feeling utterly powerless. It was one of the reasons he’d stripped himself of his own friends and family. No one to lose. Then, of course, there was the flipside...nothing to gain.

  “Want to do another round?”

  Theo lifted the bar and began pressing again. The determination on his face reminded him of his own once he’d decided to retrain as a pediatric surgeon. He’d poured everything he’d had into becoming the best. Apart from work, he’d barely imagined wanting to properly live again—let alone love again. And while he was nowhere near loving Naomi, he barely knew the girl, he felt more connected to her on a visceral level than he had with anyone.

  Maybe it had taken this long for him to figure out who the hell he was. His whole life he’d worked toward becoming a soldier. Then he had been a soldier for five incredible years. Then in one solitary instant everything he’d thought he’d become had been taken away from him.

  Why would his wife and family want a fraud?

  And then this beautiful, mysterious, happy, sad, talented and obviously conflicted woman had walked into his life and another bomb had gone off.

  For the first time in over a decade, taking the risk seemed better than going back down that soul-sucking rabbit hole he’d swan-dived into after his life had changed forever.

  Theo clanged the bar back into place, sat up and stared right through Finn.

  Um...

  “Christmas plans?” Finn asked.

  What the—?

  King of casual chitchat he was not.

  “You’re looking at them,” Theo said, lying back down, pressing out one more round then getting up and whirling round on the bench. “This, and trying to find my daughter a Christmas miracle. What about you?” He glared at Finn as if daring him to have better plans.

  “Ditto.” He opened his wide arms to the gym.

  They stared at one another then laughed. “Couple of real players on the social circuit, aren’t we?” Theo pushed himself up from the bench, gave it a swipe with the towel he’d grabbed on the way in. “I’m going for a run.” His eyes flicked to Finn’s good leg. “Want to come?”

  “Nah.” He had a prosthesis that was great for running, but he wasn’t in the mood. He’d come here to test himself. See if he was ready—not just physically—to move away from the past and see how he got on with the future.

  * * *

  Naomi heard the weights drop to the rubberized gym floor before she entered the room. It wasn’t unusual for staff to use the large physio gym, but it was definitely rare to hear such heavy weights in use. Aware that being startled could throw whoever was in there off their stride, she slipped into the gym as innocuously as she could.

  The sight she saw actually took her breath away.

  Finn Morgan.

  Bare-chested.

  Athletic shorts exposing a leg so toned it would’ve made Michelangelo gasp.

  She pressed her fingers to her lips to stop herself from doing the same.

  Finn’s body glowed with exertion as, without even wearing his prosthesis, he alternated between single leg barbell lifts and pull-ups.

  His back was to her, but she could see his focused expression in the mirrors on the far side of the gym. She’d never seen such a display of precision and resolute determination.

  Despite the use of heavy weights, Finn’s body wasn’t over-pumped, like some of the zealous gym rats she’d seen throughout the years.

  No. Finn’s tall form had heft, but it was toned to absolute physical perfection. She could see clear definition in his shoulders and biceps as he pulled himself up and over the pull-up bar with the fluid grace of a gymnast. The muscles in his back rippled with the lithe strength of a lion.

  Parts of her own body lit up as if she were a freshly decorated Christmas tree. She hadn’t felt warm tingles of response below her belly button in just about forever and now Finn seemed to have some sort of remote control on her internal fireworks display—just one solitary glance could detonate an entire evening’s worth.

  When he dropped to the floor and took a double hop across to where he’d laid the heavily weighted barbell, she watched quietly as his internalized focus manifested itself in an extraordinary show of physical strength and courage. Not every man would put himself to the test like this. Not every man would win.

  He’d obviously been working out for a while and when he crouched to pick up the barbell she saw him hesitate before heaving the sagging bar up and over his head. As he held it aloft and looked toward the mirror to monitor his form, his eyes shifted across to her and he threw the weight to the floor with a crash.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I was just going to set something up for a patient.”

  Finn turned to her and said nothing as he reached out an arm to steady himself.

  He dipped to the floor and scooped up a white towel and wiped his face.

  She’d never seen him without his prosthesis. Well. Not glossed in sweat and half-naked, anyway.

  He certainly didn’t need it, or anything else to prove that he was anything less than a powerfully driven man.

  She’d never wanted to touch someone more in her entire life.

  “Do you need these for your next patient?” Finn asked.

  “No.” Naomi held up her wrist as if her timepiece-free arm would remind him it was well after hours. “I thought I’d just get a head start on tomorrow and set up some equipment for my first appointment.”

  Neither of them moved.

  Tension crackled between the pair of them as if a power line
had been torn from its stable housing and set loose in a wind storm. Sparks flying everywhere. No clear place to hide.

  “I’ve got a trick that might help you with your dead lifts.”

  Finn arced an eyebrow. Go ahead, the gesture read. Improve on perfection if you can.

  He wasn’t smug. He was just right.

  Well. Almost right.

  “Your hips. You’re not using them as the power thrusters they’re designed to be.”

  Naomi flushed as she spoke. If he were a patient she would normally move up behind them and...well...they would go through the motions together, but...

  Her throat tickled. She was suddenly feeling really parched.

  Her hand moved along the length of her throat as if it would ease the dry, scratchy sensation. A drink of water would be good about now.

  As if mirroring her thoughts, Finn dipped to the floor again and grabbed a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap and, eyes still on her, began gulping down the water as if he’d just emerged from the desert.

  Her eyes were glued to a solitary trickle of water wending its way through his dark stubble on his throat, shifting along his clavicle, heading toward that little sternal dip between the bones, only to be swiped away by a towel.

  She caught Finn’s grin as he dropped the towel on a nearby bench and shot her a surreptitious glance. He’d seen her ogling him. And he’d enjoyed it.

  “That’s a pretty intense workout you have there.”

  “No excuses,” he said.

  Wow.

  It was that simple.

  Of course it would be. For a man who worked with amputees, not to mention his time at the sports center where the wheelchair-bound athletes pushed themselves to achieve more, do better, try again, and never give up, no excuses sounded like a pretty solid motivator. He was making himself an example for his patients.

  Only...she wondered if they could see the dark shadows flickering across those eyes of his. The man knew loss. The man knew pain. Whether or not she wanted to admit it, they were kindred spirits. But could two souls who had known devastation create something good?