200 Harley Street: The Tortured Hero Read online

  Olivia had been in his head and his dreams for the past five nights and now she was here, busting his balls. He refused to look at her, to answer her, until he was totally chilled.

  When the cool-down period ended he finally pushed the seat back into the starting position, took his feet out of the foot plates and grounded them on the floor. He picked up his towel from beside the machine and dried off his head, nape and chest, then looped it around his neck and hung onto the tails.

  ‘You’re joking, right?’ he said as he finally turned his head to look at her.

  His eyes had gone from dull to downright chilly and Olivia suppressed a shiver. He seemed even further away than ever. ‘I don’t know you any more, Ethan.’

  Ethan returned her gaze unflinchingly. ‘You know me.’

  God, if anyone knew him it was her. Not even Aaliyah had known him so warts and all. She’d only seen the good side of him, working side by side with him in a remote civilian hospital, swept up in the life and death of it all.

  Easy to be heroic.

  It was Olivia who had seen all the ugly stuff too.

  Olivia looked away from the intensity of his eyes, her gaze dropping to the floor. She didn’t want to think about the truth of his words. She shrugged. ‘Maybe you had a girl in every port?’

  Ethan’s hands gripped the towel harder. There’d been very few women since Olivia and no one serious. Not until he’d totally lost his heart to Aaliyah anyway. ‘I wasn’t in the freaking navy, Olivia.’

  Olivia toed the thin floor-covering. ‘So you’re clean?’

  Ethan nodded. ‘Yes. And I take it you are also—and still on the pill?’

  It was Olivia’s turn to nod. ‘Good,’ she said, prising her eyes off the ground. ‘I guess we’ve had our talk, then.’

  But they didn’t get all the way to his face. Her gaze snagged on the bulk of an exposed quad. A quad deeply furrowed by the criss-cross of pink scar tissue, each deep fissure naked of the dark blond hair covering the rest of his thigh.

  ‘Oh, God, Ethan...’ she gasped, looking up at him and then back down at his legs, seeking the other exposed quad too, shocked at the state of them. ‘Bloody hell...’

  Ethan quickly whipped the towel off his neck and threw it across his lap. ‘It’s nothing,’ he dismissed, cursing himself for not thinking. His gym shorts came to just below his knee—more than adequate cover—but he hadn’t counted on the hem riding up to expose his injuries.

  Or for her to be here.

  The only person who had ever seen his scars apart from the myriad doctors and nurses who had treated him in hospital was Lizzie, who’d had the unenviable job of dressing his stubborn wounds as his home care nurse.

  Olivia felt hot tears spike at her eyes. This was not nothing! No wonder his legs had almost given out on him that first time they’d seen each other again. She felt awful. They’d both been naked together the other night and she’d been more interested in having him inside her than worrying about his wounds or checking out his body.

  Before she knew what she was doing she’d dropped to her knees beside him, pushing the towel aside. ‘Ethan,’ she whispered, looking up at him and then looking back down, one tentative finger following a deep ridge from one side of his thigh to the other.

  She remembered that he’d said gunfire had caused his injuries and looking at them objectively, as a doctor, she knew it to be true. She’d seen too many bullet wounds in Africa.

  Dear God, the pain he must have gone through.

  And then without conscious thought she was lowering her mouth to where her finger had been. Kissing him better. Knowing that it was too little too late. Hating that he’d been so terribly wounded. That she’d judged him so harshly.

  Ethan looked at her downcast head. The brush of her lips against the numb edges of his wounds and the caress of her honey-brown hair was strangely erotic.

  He wasn’t strong enough for this.

  He’d just spent an hour trying to exorcise the memory of her. Trying to recapture the essence of Aaliyah. Her stoic, haunted beauty. Her steady, calming presence.

  ‘Olivia...’ he murmured, shutting his eyes, touched by her empathy, aroused by the visual of her bent head over his legs, the feel of her mouth hot against his thigh. Hating that something so obviously emotional, that gouged at his gut, also yanked at his groin. How could something so innocent be so sexual?

  She had to stop. Or he was going to do something he regretted. The loathing he felt for himself cranked up another notch.

  ‘Olivia!’

  Olivia raised her head and looked at him as she sat back on her haunches. He looked torn, and the flecks in his eyes were glowing again, like the flash of fire in her opal ring. ‘I hate that this happened to you,’ she said. ‘I just want to be able to...take it all away. To go back...’

  Go back to the beginning. To stay and fight for him rather than storming out in a fit of pique. Even if he had deserved it. Maybe he wouldn’t have joined up. Maybe she could have helped mend the rift between him and Leo.

  Ethan shook his head. ‘You can’t,’ he said, fighting against the compassion he saw in her eyes.

  ‘How did this happen?’ she whispered.

  Ethan shook his head. His heart was clinging desperately to Aaliyah, to the promises he’d made her, but other parts of him wanted to scoop Olivia up, press her into the hard floor of the gym and fill the entire cavernous room with her cries.

  To forget about how it had happened.

  But he’d hurt her once before and he wasn’t going to screw up his life—or her life—again with the mess that was in his head. There’d been enough loss in his life and he wasn’t going to spread any collateral damage.

  He wasn’t a good bet. He knew that.

  But she needed to know that.

  He didn’t want her to see him like this—as some man crippled by what had happened to him. As an object of sympathy. He didn’t want her sympathy. She needed to stop thinking of him as some wounded man and remember how he’d crushed her heart into the dust.

  Pulling himself together, looking down at the ugly ridges that marred his skin, he was glad now though that she had seen them.

  They were his constant reminder that he’d let Aaliyah down. That he didn’t deserve a woman’s love.

  A tsunami of anger rolled inside him. She wanted to know how it had happened? Fine.

  ‘There was this woman,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘Another doctor. Aaliyah. Aaliyah Hassan.’

  Olivia swallowed at the way he said her name. There was a softness there—an affection. He’d sure as hell never said her name that way.

  ‘I was working with her in a remote hospital in the south,’ Ethan said. He paused and took a swig of water from the bottle on the ground beside the rower. ‘They got a lot of civilian and military wounded through there,’ he said, staring into the bottle. ‘I was kind of...seconded there with some other medical personnel for quite some time. She was...amazing.’

  Olivia didn’t need him to say it. The truth of it was in the melting of his eyes and the way her stomach fell. ‘You loved her.’

  Ethan looked at Olivia. ‘Yes. We were engaged to be married.’

  Olivia was surprised how much it hurt and immediately castigated herself. Had she thought a decade later he’d be pining away for her somewhere, regretting his actions?

  They’d both got on with their lives.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The area where the hospital was situated came under attack one day. We had to evacuate. It was...carnage.’ Ethan shuddered at the memory. ‘Aaliyah and I and a team from the base worked for hours on the evac, with shells landing all round us. It was almost done—we just had two criticals and another six patients to get to safety—and I told Aaliyah to go with them, that I’d wait behind. But they
’d been her patients and she didn’t want to leave them. She told me to go. There were some of my guys there for her protection, so I left.’

  Olivia shut her eyes. She knew how this was going to end even before he finished—even before she looked down to see him kneading the scarred flesh of his thighs as if he was trying to pull it off his bones.

  ‘I told her I’d be back for her in thirty minutes.’ He looked up from his legs at her. ‘They only had to wait another thirty minutes.’

  Olivia nodded as she opened her eyes. ‘You didn’t get back in time?’

  Ethan raked a hand through his sweaty hair. ‘I did. We did. Two ambulances got back within thirty minutes. I was pushing one of the gurneys across to the entrance. Then this gunfire came out of nowhere, slamming into my legs, and I was falling to the ground. And then a shell slammed into the building and it just blew...it was...flattened. And I don’t remember anything after that...not until I woke up in a field hospital.’

  Olivia didn’t need him to say the words. It was obvious that his fiancée had died in the building. ‘And you feel guilty?’

  He glared at her. ‘You think I shouldn’t?’ He snorted.

  Olivia knew a lot about this kind of guilt. Survivor guilt. ‘You think you should have been in that building instead of her?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted her out. I’d been trying to get her to evac with the others all day.’

  ‘So...you’d be dead instead of her?’

  ‘Yes,’ he snapped.

  Olivia tried not to flinch at his answer. She for one was pleased he hadn’t been in the hospital when it had been flattened.

  Ethan sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe things would have been different, would have gone down differently.’

  Olivia nodded, knowing intimately how that question had haunted her. ‘Do you think me being with my parents that day would have made a difference?’

  Ethan felt the question slice like a stiletto between his ribs. The thought of Olivia burning to death with her parents was too horrific to contemplate. ‘That’s not the same thing, Olivia.’

  Olivia cocked an eyebrow at him. They both knew it was exactly the same thing. ‘Do you think I should feel guilty about that?’

  Ethan looked at the floor. ‘Of course not.’ He looked up at her. ‘Do you?’

  She shrugged. ‘I did. For a long time.’

  ‘And how did you get past it?’ In the beginning his guilt had been paralysing. And even now, particularly since Olivia, it was too much for Ethan to bear.

  ‘I realised I wasn’t living.’ Olivia drew in a shaky breath. It had taken her a long time to come to terms with that. ‘And my parents wouldn’t have wanted that any more than they’d have wanted me there with them in the vehicle that day.’

  Ethan stared at the woman in front of him. She’d been through a harrowing time a few years back. Had made the same kind of choice that he’d had to make. But she’d grown up in a stable, warm, loving environment and had always been well-adjusted.

  He hadn’t. He didn’t have those kind of emotional building blocks. For all that he’d loved his mother, the truth was that she’d been a vain socialite who had rarely been at home and his father had been first a bombastic, domineering taskmaster who’d thrived on the rivalry he’d whipped up between his sons, then later a morose drunk.

  Olivia waited for him to say something but his dull brown eyes seemed lost somewhere in the past. ‘Do you think Aaliyah would blame you?’ she pushed. ‘Would want you to be blaming yourself?’

  Ethan looked down at his legs, at the scars that reminded him every day of Aaliyah. Of how he’d let her down. Of how he’d failed.

  He stood abruptly, the towel slipping off his shoulders. ‘Don’t say her name,’ he said.

  He couldn’t bear to hear Aaliyah’s name coming from Olivia’s mouth. They were so mixed up in his head he couldn’t deal with another variation.

  Olivia blinked at the vehemence in his voice, striking right into her heart. She pushed out of her leaning position, standing up straight. ‘Ethan?’

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded, glaring down at her.

  ‘To help you. I understand what you’re going through.’

  Yes, keeping out of his way would be wiser, but she couldn’t walk away from him right now.

  Not when he looked so gutted.

  Ethan’s lips curled. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said contemptuously, aware he wasn’t acting or sounding rational but unable to stop himself. She was looking at him with those eyes, all warm, gooey and compassionate, as if he deserved her empathy, and it made him even more incensed.

  Because he didn’t.

  ‘Whatever it is you think I deserve, I don’t,’ he said. ‘I loved her and I left her to die. Hell, Olivia, I used you to make my brother jealous. You once said that my relationship with Leo was toxic, but you know what? I think maybe it’s just me that’s toxic. Me that destroys everything good in my life. Maybe I’m just my father’s son? On the path to self-destruction. I’m damaged goods, sweetheart.’

  Olivia couldn’t bear the raw pain in his voice but she knew Ethan needed to get this stuff off his chest. ‘Were,’ she said.

  ‘No, don’t do that, Olivia.’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘I know that look. Even when I was destroying you ten years ago, when you realised what I’d done, you looked at me with those disbelieving eyes. Like I really wasn’t a bad person. Next you’ll be dropping by to check on me and cooking me dinner. Don’t build castles in the air over me. I don’t deserve it. What I did to you, what I did to Aaliyah, they’re imprinted in my brain. I can’t just forget.’

  Olivia blinked. Was that what she was doing? Was she building castles? Was she falling in love with him again? A man whose heart was buried in a foreign land with the woman he loved? A woman he couldn’t forget?

  She shut her eyes against the truth of it. No. Please, no.

  It had been bad enough the first time around. Loving a man who hadn’t loved her in return. Only this time she’d be competing with a ghost.

  She was a fool of the highest order.

  ‘What if I can make you forget?’

  Olivia blinked as the words spilled into the tense space between them. She had no idea where they’d come from or even what she was offering. A relationship where he used her again? Or something more platonic, where she helped him work through his guilt?

  And lost a bit of herself every day? Loving him with nothing in return?

  Oh, hell, she was a first class idiot.

  Ethan looked down at her, at the slice of cleavage he could see where the robe gaped. He had no doubt she could make him forget everything in a hundred different ways—she already had.

  But it always came back.

  And he’d just hate himself a little bit more. And so would she—eventually.

  He lifted his left leg and placed his foot on the apparatus beside her, the pink scars stretching as he leaned forward onto the leg. She looked down at them and then looked back up at him, her gaze killing him with her empathy.

  ‘I have these to remind me,’ he said bitterly.

  Then he pushed off the machine, picked up his towel and water bottle from the floor and limped away without looking back.

  * * *

  Olivia swam up and down the twenty-five-metre pool non-stop for half an hour after that, her brain churning as she followed the black line.

  I love him. I love him. I love him.

  She was in love with Ethan Hunter. Again.

  Still.

  Had she ever really stopped? Sure, she’d despised him for a long time, and she’d buried herself in her work until it didn’t hurt any more. But that wasn’t the same as not loving him any more.

  She hauled herself out of the pool, water sluicing off her, sit
ting on the edge in a puddle.

  Stupid.

  Stupid, crazy idiot.

  Even more stupid now, given that Ethan was in love with someone else. A dead woman. A woman whose death had trapped him in a cast-iron cage of guilt and penance where he didn’t think he was deserving of love.

  The mere thought both broke her heart and expanded the love in her chest even more.

  Prime, numero uno idiot!

  He’d made it clear that he wasn’t going to let her in, that his heart belonged elsewhere, and she knew she couldn’t go down that track with him again. She wasn’t going to beat her head against the same brick wall she hadn’t even realised she’d been beating her head against last time.

  She had to have more self-respect than that, no matter how much Ethan’s story tugged at her excessively sappy heartstrings!

  He was right. No castles in the air for Ethan Hunter. Not this time.

  Olivia’s heavy thoughts dogged her all the way up to the clinic after she’d showered and changed. And she was still mired deep in the question of her sanity when she almost ran smack-bang into Lizzie, Leo’s wife and the nurse in charge at the Hunter Clinic, as she stepped into the main section of the building from the basement stairs.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Olivia apologised, taking a moment or two to gather her thoughts.

  Lizzie was in early. It was still barely seven-thirty. She’d crossed paths with the impressive head nurse a couple of times over the past few weeks and had been invited to their place next week for dinner.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Lizzie dismissed with a quick smile. ‘You look a little distracted.’

  ‘What?’ Olivia asked. ‘Oh...no, sorry, just...’ She shook her head. Just what? Inventing new and imaginative ways to murder your brother-in-law?

  ‘Ah,’ Lizzie said. ‘I know that look. It’s a man, yes?’

  Olivia blinked. She was so stunned by the question she heard herself saying, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come on,’ Lizzie said. ‘I have just the thing for that.’

  Olivia glanced at her watch. She still had time, so she followed Lizzie to Leo’s office. Lizzie headed for Leo’s desk and Olivia hoped Lizzie wasn’t going to offer her some medicinal whisky at seven-thirty in the morning.