Encounter with a Commanding Officer
Something unfurled in the pit of Fliss’s stomach. Something which she didn’t recognise at all but which made her feel the need to regroup. Something which scared her, yet was also perhaps a little thrilling. And then it was gone, so fast that she wondered if she hadn’t simply imagined it.
Slowly, she became aware of Simon speaking with a forced cheerfulness, as though he could sense the undertones but couldn’t compute them.
‘Colonel, this is Major Felicity Delaunay, the trauma doctor who leads one of our primary MERT crews,’ Simon introduced her, referring to the Medical Emergency Response Team which flew out from the camp in helicopters to retrieve casualties from outside the wire.
‘Major, let me introduce Colonel Asher Stirling, the new CO replacing the late Colonel Waterson.’
‘Colonel,’ Fliss choked out, finally finding her voice as she proffered her hand, relieved to see that it wasn’t shaking.
The new Colonel didn’t take it. Instead, he folded his arms across his chest in a very deliberate move.
‘Major Delaunay,’ he bit out. ‘So you’re the doc who thinks she’s so important she’s risking the safety of my men, not to mention the rest of her own crew.’
His hostile glower pinned her in place. She wanted to snatch her own gaze away but found she couldn’t. He was too mesmerising.
Still, a defiant flame flickered into life inside her.
‘Would you care to elaborate, sir?’
She made a point of emphasising the acknowledgement of his superior rank. She didn’t like what he was suggesting, but she had no intention of being accused of insubordination as well.
‘I’m saying your position is on the helicopter, receiving incoming casualties and staying where my men can protect you.’
His voice was deep, his tone peremptory. And Fliss didn’t just hear the words, she felt them too. Compression waves coursed through her whole being. He didn’t just have the rank of a colonel, he oozed it. Authoritative and all-consuming. She had never reacted so innately to anyone—to any man—before. She hadn’t even known it was possible to do so.
She was vaguely aware of Simon attempting to interject but it felt as though there were only the two of them in the room. The CO soon faded out, making some spurious excuse and dashing for the door.
‘Is this about the incident last week when I had to leave the heli to attend a casualty?’
‘As I understand it, not just last week, no,’ the new Colonel continued coldly. ‘My men are there to protect you...’
‘They’re there to protect the helicopter, the asset,’ she cut in.
Waves of tightly controlled fury bounced off him.
‘They are tasked to protect you, but I understand you make that impossible for them on a regular basis. Yet if anything were to happen to you, my men would be responsible.’
‘Your men...’
She stopped and bit her lip, her sense of self-preservation finally kicking in. He clearly only had half the story and if he thought she was just going to stand there without setting the record straight then he could think again. But as much as this dressing-down galled her, she refused to speak badly of his men. They’d been through enough.
Straightening her spine, she jutted her chin out to give the impression she wasn’t intimidated. Instead, it only reminded her just how close to each other they were standing. White heat snaked through her. She had a feeling that when this man spoke, people listened. But Fliss forced herself to push it to the side, forced herself to wonder if he was equally capable of listening.
She was about to find out.
‘Your men are feeling understandably uptight right now, and I appreciate that you’re only looking out for your new unit, but there are two sides to this story, Colonel.’
‘And you’re about to enlighten me?’
It was phrased as a question but the gravelly sound resonated through her, pulling her stomach impossibly taut. This was it. She’d challenged him and now she was going to have to back it up. Either that, or he would dismiss her as weak for ever.
She gritted her teeth but refused to back down. That wasn’t what her uncle had ever taught her. And, besides, a terrible part of her desperately wanted this man’s respect. His esteem.
‘I understand that you’ve recently been promoted to colonel, and that you were a major on the front line before that, so this is a new unit for you, and these are men that you don’t know well yet. I appreciate that you’re only looking out for them after what happened with Colonel Waterson. He was their CO and it was a shock to them. But it was a shock to us all. Razorwire isn’t in a warzone; we have a different mission to whatever we’ve had before. Whatever you’ve had before, on the front line.’
‘And your point, Major?’ he demanded impatiently.
‘My point, Colonel, is that your men—my QRF—are jumpy at the moment. I know why—a helicopter is a big target for anyone on the ground with rocket launchers, and the QRF don’t want us to hang around too long. But we’re not in a warzone, Colonel. We’re on a Hearts and Minds mission and I think your men have forgotten that in the wake of Colonel Waterson’s death. They never had a problem with my getting off the heli before, and they won’t again in a few weeks. And the reason I jump off is because the casualties who can’t get to the heli in time might not make it if we just abandon them.’
There it was, she noted triumphantly.
The flash in his eyes suggested her words had hit home. She’d suspected that, of all people, this new Colonel wasn’t the type to leave a fallen man behind. And she was right; he’d reacted as soon as she’d said the word abandon.
Still, he clearly wasn’t about to give in that easily. And that didn’t surprise her.
‘My men informed me that the casualties weren’t in immediate danger.’
‘With all due respect, sir, your men aren’t trauma doctors. I am. Just because there are no bombs out here, no IEDs, with fatalities and casualties requiring multiple amputations, doesn’t mean there aren’t urgent cases.’
‘I am well aware of that, Major,’ he ground out, his eyes drilling into her. ‘I’ve carried a fair few men to a MERT over the years.’
‘Yes, but usually from the front line, I understand. Out here, we have non-combat injuries to deal with, from Road Traffic Accidents to local kids in gas bottle explosions around their home, from peace-keeping troops with appendicitis to local women in labour requiring emergency medical intervention. It might not always look fatal to your battle-hardened troops but fatality comes in less obvious guises. And I made a judgement call each time.’
And she’d been right each time too, not that she was about to offer that information up. It would have far greater impact when the Colonel found that out for himself. And she knew without a doubt that he would.
‘Indeed?’ The Colonel raised his eyebrows at her.
His mind was not entirely swayed but he was clearly considering her position. She suppressed a thrill of pleasure. It was a victory of sorts. And all the sweeter because, for a second there, she’d almost lost herself to a side of her character she had never before known existed. A side which wasn’t immune—as she had so long believed—to the tedious and feeble vagaries of an instant physical attraction.
But she had fought it, and she had won. Hopefully she’d managed to convince the new Colonel to get his men to back off for the last few weeks of her tour of duty and, with him being infantry and her being medical, there was no reason she’d have to see him again.
Relief mingled with something else which Fliss didn’t care to identify.
It was all short-lived.
He stepped in closer, almost menacingly so, and instinctively her eyes widened a fraction, her breath growing shallower.
He picked up on it immediately, but it was only when his eyes dropped instantly to her rapidly rising and falling chest, his nostrils flaring as she heard his sharp intake of breath, that Fliss realised he was as affected by her as she was by him.
Her? The girl Brody Gordon had referred to as Fusty Fliss? Attracting a guy as utterly masculine as the Colonel? It hardly seemed possible.
And then she realised what this uncharacteristic moment of weakness was all about for her. It wasn’t some incredible, irresistible attraction at all. It was merely the fact that Robert’s rejection had exposed unhealed wounds from her past which she had scarcely buried beneath the surface. Old rejections and feelings of inadequacy that her mother, her grandparents and boys like Brody Gordon had cruelly instigated.
She wanted to pull away from the Colonel now, use the revelation to her advantage. But it seemed that even knowing the truth wasn’t helping her to resist him. He pinned her down, his eyes locked with hers, inching forward until they were toe to toe and her head was tilted right up to hold the stare. For several long seconds Fliss was sure she stopped breathing.
And then, finally, he broke the spell.
‘I must say, Major, my interest is piqued.’ The fierce expression had lifted from his rough-hewn face to be replaced by a look which was simultaneously wicked and challenging. White heat licked low in her belly.
‘I understand your next forty-eight-hour shift begins at oh-six-hundred tomorrow?’
‘That’s right,’ she acknowledged carefully, a sense of foreboding brewing in the tiny office.
‘Good. Then I’ll accompany you for the first twenty-four hours and we’ll see what we discover, shall we?’
Her whole body shivered.
‘You can’t do that; you don’t have the authority. You’re not my commanding officer. You’re not even medical.’
‘No—’ he seemed unfazed ‘—but I am the CO of the infantry unit which provides your protection unit and, since they are my guys, I do have a reason to be on that heli. I hardly think your buddy Simon is going to object when I run it by him. Do you?’
‘It’s my heli, my run. I could tell my CO it wouldn’t be appropriate.’
She was grasping at straws and they both knew it. The wicked smile cranked up a notch, and so did the fire burning low in her core. He dropped his voice to a husky rasp which seemed to graze her body as surely as if he’d run callused fingers over the sensitive skin of her belly.
‘And on what grounds exactly are you going to object?’
He had a point; she could hardly tell Simon that she didn’t want to be in close confinement on a heli with the new infantry CO because there was an inexplicable chemistry between them that, when she was around him, made her body heat up and her brain shut down.
She was trapped and they both knew it. Worse, Fliss was left with the distinct impression that a tiny part of her actually liked it.
Clenching her fists and spinning around as Simon finally bustled back into the room, Fliss studiously ignored the terrifying voice which whispered that the truth was, she just might have experienced her very first lust at first sight.
CHAPTER TWO
CROUCHED IN THE corner of the cramped, sweltering, noisy Chinook—kitted out as a full airborne emergency room, its engines the only thing one could smell or hear—Ash fought down the nausea which was threatening to overwhelm him.
He’d seen the MERT in action too many times to count during his seven tours of duty over the last decade, several back to back. He had an incredible respect for the doctors and medics who ran what was, essentially, an airborne operating room. Many of his men, his friends, were still alive today because of the swift, skilled actions of MERT teams. But although he’d carried many casualties to the heli as part of the infantry team on the ground, the only time he’d actually been on board had been when he himself had been seriously injured.
Ash kept his eyes firmly open. If he closed them, the sounds were too brutally familiar. If he closed them, the scents, the turbulence, transported him right back to that day. If he closed them, he could almost feeling his life ebbing away.
Instead, he studiously watched the attractive blonde major who was running this flying operating room with impressive command and focus. Even now she was diligently prepping any last pieces of equipment. He could imagine her as the focused, methodical doctor, but he still couldn’t imagine her ever breaking the rules to save a soldier, the way his new unit had claimed she’d done on more than one occasion.
But that wasn’t the reason he was here, was it?
From the minute she’d walked into that room yesterday, she’d somehow slipped under his skin and he’d found himself reacting to her in a way that made him feel out of control. And for Ash it was all about being in control. About not allowing himself to feel. Because feeling meant being at the mercy of emotions. And that wasn’t something he permitted.
He’d kept an iron grip on his emotions for two decades now. They were a liability he couldn’t afford. Not since the beatings, the push and pull from the miserable care home to the squalor of foster homes, to his dad, who’d somehow convinced the authorities he’d stopped the drinking, right up until the cycle had started all over again. Only Rosie and Wilf had shown him another way. They’d been the only foster parents able to take on that angry, out-of-control kid that he’d been and show him love, and hope, and a way out.
A darkness unfurled in him, snaking its devious way up to constrict his chest painfully until he found it hard even to breathe. Controlling his emotions, keeping people at arm’s length, had been an important lesson growing up and it was even more important now. Out here on a tour of duty and waiting, at any time, for a phone call to tell him the inevitable had happened, that Rosie had finally lost her fight and he would have to fly home for what was likely to be the worst funeral of his life.
Perhaps it was no wonder, then, that he’d reacted as he had done when the Major had strode into that office yesterday. Even now, at the mere memory, awareness crackled through his body, dancing over the darkness which had filled him a moment ago as though it was nothing. As though that forbidding fear couldn’t compete with the light-hearted lust which toyed playfully with him. As though it knew that once, just this once, he could be tempted to cross the line and consider a hot...fling with someone like the Major, just because it offered him the promise of distraction, a release from the tension of waiting. Of not knowing.
That’s not going to happen.
Furiously, he shoved the idea aside. He never mixed personal relationships with his career. Not out here. Not within the Army. It had too much potential to become...messy.
Yet his eyes slid inexorably across the heli to the commanding Major. She made him react to her in the basest of ways. Yet she also challenged him mentally. He hadn’t intended to give her the dressing-down that he had, anticipating instead that he’d voice his concerns and find out what she had to say before making a judgement. Instead, he’d allowed his attraction to her to override his usual common sense.
But, instead of meekly surrendering, she’d looked him in the eye and refuted every one of his statements clearly and confidently. And that had piqued an interest in Ash. Before he’d known where he was, he’d bagged himself a ringside seat to all the shouts her MERT would respond to over the next twenty-four hours.
This wasn’t helping.
He dragged his attention away from her and concentrated on the four-man QRF team made up from his new infantry unit. The Major had been right about them too. It hadn’t taken him long yesterday to find out that his new unit was particularly wound up about the incident which had claimed the life of Colonel Waterson. He would do well to boost their morale and he had no doubt that, given half a chance, the Major would happily instruct him on that too.
And now he was back to her. Again.
But now, for the first time he could ever recall, his iron grip, honed over the last two decades, was slipping. His focus threatened. And all because of this one woman.
His gaze slipped back to the by-the-book Major as he tried to work out what was so different about her. So prim and proper, she was certainly attractive with those barbed Nordic blue eyes and blonde hair pulled into such an eye-wateringly severe yet generous bun that his fingers had actually itched to reach up and release. To slide his fingers through the silk curtain and soften the strait-laced doctor, even a fraction.
What the heck was wrong with him?
It was the last thing Ash needed. Not just because she was General Delaunay’s niece but because this was the first role Ash had taken behind the wire, in the relative safety of Camp Razorwire. He certainly felt on edge at the prospect of facing the next few years behind a desk instead of out in the field. Out where he belonged. Barely a month ago he’d been a major himself, on the front line and leading his company as he risked his own life alongside his men. Now he was a colonel, in charge of a battalion and destined—maybe not on this tour of duty, but on a future one—not to lead his men but to send them into potential danger zones.
How the hell was he supposed to get used to that?
Behind a desk wasn’t where he functioned best. All his career he had experienced the adrenalin kick, the fear, the buzz, and he’d been in control.
Now, as galling as it was to admit, he felt lost.
Suddenly, the heli filled with dust as it dropped, the rotor blades churning up the ground covering and drawing it into the back on the air currents, blinding them all. Ash buried his nose into his combat jacket like a filter so that he could breathe. And then they landed, rough and abrupt, and the dust was sucked quickly instantly out, leaving the aircraft clear again.
It took everything Ash had to fight his instinct to jump out of the back ahead of his QRF to help secure the area around the heli, safe zone or not. As two of his men secured the rear, where soldiers were already running across the open ground carrying a litter-bound casualty, the other two men leapt up to man the ramp-mounted and side-mounted machine guns respectively. They were smooth and slick and Ash nodded to himself in satisfaction. It was what he’d expected, but still, it was good to see.
‘RTA on the Main Supply Route,’ the young team medic for the soldiers’ unit rushed ahead to the heli to brief the MERT, yelling over the din. ‘Local guy driving a flatbed truck across the bridge running perpendicular above us when he suffered a tyre blow out and lost control. Nothing he could do, his truck jack-knifed and he crashed through the barrier and landed on our convoy. We’ve got three casualties.’
Even as he finished, the soldiers had already reached them with the first casualty and the Major and her team efficiently hauled the litter on board and began their medical care. Just behind, two soldiers were helping the injured local man to hobble to the heli, an open fracture to one arm and clearly shaken. Walking wounded, that was always preferable. The teams would settle him in a seat and then pass him on to the camp hospital for care. But, even from across the helicopter, Ash could see that the first victim had significant crush injuries. He wasn’t a doctor but Ash had enough experience to know. All vital signs were absent and, to all intents and purposes, the soldier was gone. But it wasn’t the MERT’s place to call time of death; they didn’t have the authority. That could only be done when they returned to Camp Razorwire and a team from the hospital came out.
Not that you’d know it from the Major’s poker face; there was no sign of defeat in her expression, nothing to knock the morale of the soldiers on the ground, who wanted her to save the life of their buddy. Instead the MERT were doing their job and starting care, the Major already checking the casualty’s airway and giving oxygen as the team began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It meant a lot out here, in the middle of vast nothingness. Back on the front line, it would have been exactly the kind of mental boost the guys would need. A reluctant admiration sparked in Ash.
Suddenly, a movement in his peripheral caught Ash’s attention. A third team carrying a casualty, stretcher-bound like the first, was rounding the bend approximately one hundred metres away. Even from that distance there was evidence of heavy blood loss but what worried Ash more was the long metal rod protruding from the casualty’s abdomen. There was no way they would be able to get the soldier onto the heli like that.
In an instant, Ash had sprung out from his corner and jumped off the ramp to dart, body low against the downdraught of the rotors, across the open ground. There was definitely a sandstorm coming in; he’d spent enough time out in the field to be able to sense it before almost anyone else. Reaching the litter, he was relieved to find the casualty on his side, delirious but mercifully still alive.
‘Set him down gently, lads,’ Ash commanded quietly but firmly enough to counter their resistance out of loyalty to their friend. ‘He’s not going to get on board like that.’
Ash watched as, for a split second, understandable desperation to get their buddy to the heli warred with following a senior officer’s instruction. It was only when he heard the voice over his shoulder that he realised the Major had followed right behind him carrying an emergency kit bag.
‘The Colonel’s right, lads. I need to check your buddy out first and we’ll go from there.’
Pushing briskly through, the Major settled next to the litter and pushed lightly to encourage the soldiers to set it down on the level ground.
‘What’s his name?’ she asked.
‘Hollings.’
‘Corporal Hollings.’
‘Okay—’ she nodded, checking the lad’s vital signs ‘—and his first name?’
‘Oh, right. It’s Andy.’
‘Andy, can you hear me? You’ve got the MERT here now; we’re just going to get you ready for transport, okay?’
Ash watched as she began to administer oxygen, all the while calming the other soldiers and creating some space around them.
‘We’re going to need to cut the rod down to a more manageable size prior to transport.’ She lifted her head to look directly at him. They both knew the MERT wouldn’t be able to wait.
Quickly, Ash dropped down until they were close enough to murmur without broadcasting. ‘There’s a sandstorm coming in.’
‘We need to get him out of here as quickly as we can.’
‘I’ll handle it. How long do you need?’
‘Longer than we’ve got,’ she muttered grimly. ‘Radial pulse is weak, thready. He’s not moving air around and there’s pressure in the pleural space. I can carry out a needle decompression but it’s only a temporary measure. All the good kit is on the heli. Because of the location of the rod I can’t get him into a supine position. And that’s without knowing for sure what damage he might have caused internally.’
With a curt nod, Ash raced back to the heli to relay the information, telling them to leave now but to call in the other MERT. At least that way it would have the wait time. The Major had better be able to do what was necessary in that window. Once the storm closed in the helis wouldn’t be able to fly and travelling by road would take too long.
He had to admit, though, that he’d seen a lot of good trauma doctors in his time, but the Major had something extra about her, an edge, which he couldn’t help but respect.
‘Any sheltered locations around here?’ Ash demanded as he ran back to the casualty, which the Major had already moved further back in anticipation of the dust cloud the departing helicopter would raise.
‘There’s a couple of abandoned buildings about half a click away, but they’re boarded up. We’ll have to bust a way in.’
With any luck the MERT would be back before the sandstorm hit. But if they were unlucky, they were going to need a decent place to wait it out, especially with the casualty.
‘Grab any kit we might need and show me,’ Ash commanded one of the soldiers.
‘Okay, when we cut the rod the vibration could cause more internal damage, so you and you hold it absolutely steady,’ she was instructing firmly, calmly, ensuring everyone knew their role whilst still efficiently moving along the task. ‘And you cut right here, understand?’