The Bodyguard's Christmas Proposal

by Charlotte Hawkes

  He needed to break this silence between them.

  ‘Great sex.’

  Her brows pulled into a frown.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We had great sex. Not just sex,’ he deadpanned.

  She hesitated.

  ‘What are you doing, Logan?’

  ‘I’m lightening the mood.’ He shrugged, his heart hammering.

  ‘Oh. Well...’ She wavered, clearly trying to pull herself together. ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘You don’t? It was the way you screamed my name that gave it away.’

  She blushed faintly and he found it surprisingly becoming. Still, she wasn’t backing down.

  ‘I may need another demonstration just to be certain.’

  ‘I’m sure I can oblige,’ he drawled.

  ‘You don’t need to get home for Jamie?’

  ‘Jamie is going to spend the next couple of days on a road trip with his grandparents whilst I’m on call tomorrow, and I have that hospital fundraiser on the twelfth.’

  ‘I keep forgetting about that.’ She pulled a face. ‘I can’t say I enjoy fundraisers either. And before you say it, yes, there are plenty of things that I enjoy.’

  ‘I know there are. Running and ice-skating for a start...’

  ‘Right.’ She bobbed her head gratefully. ‘Great sex with you, for another.’

  This time there was nothing subtle about her flush. A stain of fiery red spilled over her cheeks and extended down into the soft T she was wearing. It made him want to rip it off her and explore exactly how far.

  It was the effect she’d been having on him ever since they’d first met. Yet having her tonight hadn’t satiated that driving need. If anything, it had only deepened the thirst.

  ‘That’s one hell of a blush for someone who was so bold in that shower.’

  ‘Maybe I felt more confident there,’ she tried to quip.

  ‘And you don’t now?’

  ‘Not when we’re talking about hospital fundraisers.’ She was diverting the conversation, but he let her. ‘I never really know anyone and it’s all about networking.’

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her to go to the ball with him. As his date.

  Logan stopped himself just in time. He might have realised that he was only lying to himself by pretending that this thing with Kat was no strings, that some traitorous part of him didn’t want more, but that didn’t mean coming out to the entire hospital as a couple.

  The question still remained: how much more did he want? How much more did Kat want?

  Up until a month ago he’d had no intention—no desire—to even date. The ground was shifting so fast beneath his feet that Logan could hardly keep his balance. Yet there was a vast distance between a one-night stand and taking a colleague on a date to a work fundraising ball.

  He refused to think beyond that because anything more—never mind with a woman he’d met a scant few weeks earlier—was truly preposterous.

  Of course it was.

  And yet...there was no escaping the fact that Kat got under his skin a way no one else—not even Sophia—ever had.

  His head felt insanely jumbled. But it wasn’t the worst sensation. He watched her reaching for another spoonful of chicken with stem ginger and one of egg fried rice, already knowing just how she would fold the two together on her plate until it was mixed just the way she liked it.

  She was definitely edging her way into his life and he couldn’t seem to make himself object to it. If anything, he was beginning to...grow accustomed to it.

  Kat looked up unexpectedly, flushing as she caught him watching her. And then, flustered, she blurted out a question he hadn’t been prepared for.

  ‘Have you visited your...employer recently?’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘The whole hospital knows you visit him regularly, and it isn’t in your capacity as an ER doctor. Why?’

  Logan wasn’t sure if he stopped breathing.

  ‘I’m not sure...’

  ‘It’s just small-talk, Logan,’ she said pointedly, apparently pulling herself together as she threw his earlier words back at her.

  He could concede her point. He had asked her personal questions about herself whilst never having told her anything significant about his own personal life.

  In a career of being a military trauma doctor, and then another as a bodyguard to King Roberto, he had long since perfected the art of a poker face. Yet right here, right now, sitting across the table from a woman who made him feel...things...he hadn’t felt in years—or ever—he found he couldn’t deceive her.

  He didn’t want to.

  ‘Which question do you want me to answer first?’

  Kat stared at him.

  ‘Any. I know you visit the man you brought in, even though he’s in a coma now. I wondered if...if you felt the accident was somehow your fault.’

  It floored him, how well this woman seemed to read him.

  ‘Maybe I do. In a way,’ he began slowly. ‘My head knows that’s nonsense, but my heart and my gut sometimes think I should have done more.’

  ‘No,’ she refuted. ‘I read the report. The parts that weren’t redacted anyway. There was nothing more you—anybody—could have done.’

  It felt better than it should, hearing her say those words.

  ‘I know that,’ he conceded slowly. ‘Most of the time.’

  ‘But you still feel guilty?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  She bobbed her head.

  ‘I guessed as much. But try me.’

  And as he sat there, watching her, he wondered if it was time to finally let go of his past for good.

  ‘Like you said,’ he began, awkwardly at first, ‘I was a military trauma doctor before I became a bodyguard, and I did multiple tours of duty.’

  She waited silently when he paused. Not pushing him. Just waiting until he was ready.

  Logan drew in a deep breath.

  ‘During my last tour there was an ambush. I lost some good buddies and I ended up quitting the forces.’

  ‘And you became a bodyguard? Why not just practise medicine in a civilian hospital?’

  He fought back the images that assaulted him. Demons he had battled so many times over the past few years. He hadn’t thought he’d ever get hold of them, but then Jamie had needed him and he’d had no choice. And the longer he’d pulled himself together for Jamie, the more he’d begun to believe that he could heal.

  Bit by bit, the night-terrors that had woken him, screaming and sweating, had begun to get fewer. To the extent that he’d known it was time for him to move on from protecting Roberto Baresi and return to medicine.

  Yet now, for the first time, it occurred to Logan that the nightmares had practically stopped altogether these past few weeks.

  Because of Seattle, obviously. Not because of Kat. And yet he couldn’t deny that she had played a part in helping him to feel so at home, so quickly.

  ‘I wasn’t ready to return to medicine initially, so a friend recommended this role as a bodyguard.’

  ‘Must have been some role,’ she commented. ‘The hospital rumour-mill is rife with speculation.’

  ‘And your guess?’ he asked, casually.

  Kat looked unimpressed.

  ‘I don’t guess. If people wanted me to know, they would tell me.’

  Logan didn’t care to analyse what shot through him at that. He’d expected nothing less from Kat, and yet he felt vindicated all the same. She was exactly the woman that he thought she was. Compassionate, loyal, discreet.

  ‘I was bodyguard to Roberto Baresi,’ he confessed, and instantly it felt like a weight lifting from his shoulders. ‘He was...is...the King of a place called Isola Verde.’

  Kat didn’t answer. He hadn’t really expected her t
o. Yet it felt good, sharing that burden with her. The guilt and fear he’d felt ever since that car accident. The gnawing worry that he could have done something more. Something to stop the accident in the first place.

  ‘You were a king’s bodyguard?’

  ‘I was.’

  She sucked in a long breath then shook her head.

  ‘Wow. I mean, wow. So that’s why you said your wife married you for the glamourous lifestyle?’

  And suddenly, whether it was because of what he and Kat had just done, and the fact that he suddenly felt different somehow...changed, Logan couldn’t have said. Either way, he found himself talking about Sophia without the slightest bit of the resentment or anger that had threatening to colour his words in the past.

  ‘Sophia was beautiful. Charming. Manipulative.’ He shrugged. ‘Only I couldn’t see it.’

  ‘Why not?’ Kat asked, and there was no challenge in her tone, only interest and care.

  Everything that he knew her to already be. Everything that his ex-wife had never been.

  ‘I was fresh out of a theatre of war. A tour that had gone bad. I’d lost men—friends—and I was in pain. She was skilled in reading people, you might call her a social chameleon. And maybe I also saw what I wanted to see.’

  ‘You had a void, and she presented herself in the perfect shape to fill it?’ Kat guessed.

  ‘That’s a pretty accurate way to put it,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t doubt that she was probably running from her own demons—maybe she still it—but she was attracted to the status I had as a royal bodyguard, accompanying the King wherever he went.’

  ‘I remember you saying it was a glamorous lifestyle.’

  Logan pulled his mouth into a self-deprecating smile.

  ‘The King’s life was glamorous. Mine was not. But I didn’t realise that’s what Sophia had been after until it was too late.’

  ‘Until Jamie was born.’

  Logan thought back to the first moment when he’d cradled his precious son in his arms and how, in that instant, everything had changed.

  ‘I took one look at him—my son—and I realised that none of the baggage I’d been carrying around from my military days was worth passing on to this innocent baby. I realised what I’d been missing for the past few years. I also realised what Sophia really was.’

  ‘Is that when you left her?’

  ‘She left me.’ He shrugged. And, for the first time, he realised it no longer scraped inside him as it once had. She no longer mattered to him. ‘She realised I couldn’t give her the lifestyle she craved, so she found someone better suited.’

  ‘And Jamie?’

  ‘He was a means to an end for her.’ Logan screwed up his fists instinctively.

  Sophia might no longer have any kind of hold over him but it still ate him up inside that Jamie would have to grow up without a mother who loved him.

  ‘Is that why you don’t, can’t—won’t—entertain a relationship with anyone else?’ she demanded. ‘Because Jamie has to be your sole focus?’

  It was insane the way Kat seemed to read him so easily. Or perhaps that was the point, that it wasn’t insane at all. It was all too telling. He wanted to tell her, to open up to her. But how could he tell Kat anything when he was still working it all out for himself?

  ‘So you don’t wouldn’t want to meet someone? Get married?’

  He opened his mouth to say no yet, startlingly, something stopped him.

  A month ago he would have hesitated for a second, the idea of marriage having been locked behind a heavy-set door in some pitch-black, far-away corner of his mind. Oddly, he still couldn’t imagine marrying again and yet, at the same time, that door was visible again. Heavy-set and locked, but no longer in such a dark, remote place.

  ‘Maybe,’ he hazarded. ‘One day.’

  ‘Someone to settle down with in Seattle perhaps?’

  With anyone other woman, he might have thought that she was fishing. Putting herself up for the role. But this was Kat—not Sophia. Still, he wasn’t sure how to answer that right now.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’

  And he actually meant it. Still, he was conscious that the more he answered, the more edgy and uneasy Kat was becoming. He couldn’t fathom it.

  ‘One day maybe you’ll have a sibling for Jamie.’

  There was something too bright and too hectic in her eyes for Logan’s liking. Like he was saying all the wrong things to her. And yet he’d felt that connection when they’d been in bed together before. Why was she fighting it so hard?

  ‘It certainly isn’t something I’ve given much thought to,’ he answered after a moment. ‘But I guess one day, in the future, it’s possible. I was an only child and it was sometimes lonely. However, that certainly isn’t something I’m considering now.’

  ‘But, one day, it’s a possibility you would want that?’

  And it suddenly occurred to him that when he looked at Kat he thought that perhaps one day, he actually would. There was that damned shifting sand again.

  ‘I won’t rule it out,’ was all he said.

  But when she snagged his gaze, holding it and making some of the raw emotion simmer down, he thought he could read something in her expression that went deeper.

  And as she snatched her eyes away and turned to look out of the window beside her, he suddenly wished he knew how to read this enigmatic woman.

  * * *

  Kat swallowed hard, relieved that she had disentangled her gaze from Logan’s, and admitted to herself, for the first time, that she was in way too deep.

  It had been creeping on so slowly—right from the start—that she hadn’t noticed it. Or she had been able to pretend that she hadn’t noticed it. But she couldn’t keep lying to herself any longer.

  Never mind the just sex agreement. She was beginning to fall for Logan Connors. And that absolutely couldn’t happen. She had to end things now. Before she couldn’t end them at all.

  Misery wound itself through her.

  He wanted a family. And children. Maybe not now, but someday. Yet, no matter how many days, weeks, months passed by, she could never, ever be the one to give that to him.

  She needed to get out now.

  He came over as she was staring out of the window, her arms pulled tight across her chest, staring into the darkness of the night.

  His arms slipped around her easily, his breath tickling the back of her neck, and she had to fight back the sudden thought that she could have happily stayed like that for the rest of the night.

  For the rest of her life even.

  ‘Forget what may or may not be in the future. Can’t we just focus on the here and now?’ He broke the silence. ‘Come with me. Be my date to the ball.’

  She felt like she was cracking open. That quickly.

  That easily.

  ‘We agreed no dating.’ She barely recognised her own voice in that hoarse whisper.

  ‘Fine.’ She could feel him shrug against her back. Controlled. Unconcerned. The exact opposite of the way her own heart was beating so fast in her chest she feared it might beat its way out entirely. ‘Don’t call it a date.’

  ‘You just did,’ she forced herself to point out, whilst he lowered his head further, his mouth grazing the back of her neck and sending her thoughts spiralling.

  ‘Then it was a poor choice of words. I apologise.’ He grinned, and she could feel his teeth skimming her skin. He didn’t sound remotely apologetic. ‘I take it back.’

  ‘You can’t just take it back.’

  ‘Sure I can.’

  And it was terrifying how desperately she longed to accept. It sounded like such an innocent suggestion—a simple date. But the truth was that there was nothing simple about it.

  Going to the hospital ball as Logan’s date would send the entire hospital rumour mill into over
drive, and the last thing she wanted to have was her colleagues gossiping about her.

  But more than that, going as Logan’s date would be as good as accepting that whatever was going on between them went beyond the physical act of sex. It would mean acknowledging that she wanted more from Logan—and Jamie—especially after the comment that old woman had made as they’d been swinging Jamie through the park.

  She could still feel the pain that had sliced through her in that split second. Much like the pain that had sliced through her a few moments ago.

  Wanting so much more that it was like looking into the deepest, blackest abyss, knowing that if she fell she would never climb out again.

  And she couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t. Not after Carrie. Not after all that had happened. She couldn’t risk opening up her heart again, only to go through that pain again.

  ‘Kat?’ His voice broke into her thoughts, soft and concerned. ‘What’s wrong?’

  If she told him, that would be it. Over. And she wasn’t ready.

  She just needed one more night, one more touch, one more taste.

  She had to have that one final memory that she could cherish for ever. Long after Logan and Jamie were out of her life.

  Cranking up her smile to mega-watt level, Kat shook her head.

  ‘Nothing is wrong at all.’

  He wasn’t buying it for a moment.

  So she did the thing she knew that would work. The only thing she knew to be the truth between them.

  Twisting around in his arms and pushing him back so that they could see each other, Kat hooked her fingers under the over-sized shirt and pulled it up and over her head, so that she was standing in front of him completely naked.

  Her nipples pulled tight as the cool air caressed them. But, then, with Logan’s gaze on them they would have anyway.

  And he dropped to his knees, right there, and hooked one of her legs over his shoulder, until she was leaning back against the wall, her hand threading through his hair and her breathing ragged in the mere anticipation of his touch.