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so hard. He wanted to get back to her. He was caught in the horror of a battlefield and she was there but not there. If he could just reach her, everything would be all right. Couldn’t she hear him shouting? That he was trying, dammit. Doing his utmost to get to her.
Maybe she had heard. Maybe that was why she was holding his head and pulling it down. Pressing her lips against his with such intensity.
God … he recognised this form of escape. Distraction. Release. An affirmation of life. Passionate sex that carried no strings because if you got involved you only risked more of exactly what you were using it to escape from.
How did Anna know?
It didn’t matter.
Luke could feel the force that had taken over his mind receding. He was in control again but instead of pulling away his lips moved over hers and his arms went around her body. He drew them both into the shadowy area between the bench and the giant pot plant.
He let his hands shape her body. Feeling the trim curve of her waist and the neat rounds of her buttocks and then up, beneath the layer of the tailored jacket. Up to the solid anchor of her shoulder blades and then around to the softness of her breasts. He cupped them and brushed his thumbs across the nipples that he could feel like tiny pebbles beneath the silky fabric of her blouse.
And all the time his lips moved over hers. Encouraged when they parted beneath his. Excited when his tongue made contact with hers. Aroused beyond belief when she responded, her tongue dancing with his and her hands touching his body.
This was Anna, for heaven’s sake! At work. The place where she had no personality or, at least, no personal life anyone was allowed to encroach on. Had she been drinking? No. She’d refused alcohol at the party because she had work she still needed to do. They were both sober. Sober enough to realise that this was totally inappropriate.
How long had they been standing here, locked in each other’s arms, lost in a flash of physical release that had exploded like a cork from a champagne bottle?
Too long. Not nearly long enough.
Had anyone seen them?
He had to stop but it was too hard not to taste her for just a moment longer. To hold her against the length of his body and imprint the feel of her into his brain. He would need that memory and it was too important not to make sure that it stuck.
He was kissing her back.
Anna had only intended to distract him. A brief, hard kiss that was supposed to have the same kind of shock effect that a slap on the face might provide to someone in the grip of hysteria.
But after that first stunned beat of time he had kissed her back. His lips had softened and moved beneath hers and his hands had touched her body and something inside Anna had simply melted.
He hadn’t seemed to hear her voice or know she was there as she’d followed him. Maybe he didn’t actually know who he was kissing. She could be anybody so she didn’t have to be Dr Bartlett, did she?
She could just be Anna.
An old version of herself, even. One that had been lost too many years ago to count. The young girl who had dreamed of finding true love. A prince who was going to think she was the most wonderful person on earth. Who would love her for being exactly who she was. For ever.
And layered on top of that dreaming girl were flashes of everything she’d discovered about herself later. The yearning for a soul mate. The ability to give love and the need to receive it. Wild things like a need for physical release. All the things that had had to be buried so that they couldn’t become a torment.
For just a few seconds Anna let herself sink into this astonishing kiss because she knew she would never experience anything like this ever again and she wanted to remember it, but the insanity began to fade and maybe she transmitted a tension that had nothing to do with desire. Something changed, anyway. She couldn’t have said who actually broke the kiss and pulled away.
Maybe they both did.
For a long, long moment they stood there, still close enough to touch but not doing so. Staring at each other. Anna could see it was Luke looking down at her, not a tormented soul who was caught in a different reality. He knew who he was. Where he was.
And who he had been kissing.
Oh … Lord …
Anna swallowed hard. How on earth was she supposed to handle this? And not just the kiss. She’d witnessed another flashback incident. He’d said it wasn’t going to happen again but it had. OK, so he wasn’t in the middle of surgery and it hadn’t endangered anyone, but there was no way her conscience would allow her to make excuses or ignore the implications of this.
She had a professional responsibility here and she had just complicated it to the nth degree by not thinking and by doing something as outrageous as kissing her new boss.
Then again … maybe that gave her a way in. An opening to talk about what had happened and what they were going to do about it.
She took a deep breath.
‘Feeling better?’
She knew. Too much.
Luke could feel himself closing off. Slamming mental doors in an effort to protect himself. To protect her?
‘Maybe I should ask you the same thing,’ he said coolly.
‘Sorry?’
‘You kissed me.’ He managed to sound offhand, as though it hadn’t blown him away. Like it hadn’t meant anything at all.
He could see the way her eyes widened in shock as though he’d physically slapped her. The way she collected herself and looked away.
‘You needed distraction.’
She couldn’t know. Not everything. Not that she was already a distraction that he held onto every single night. That she represented a kind of rope that he could use to haul himself back to where he needed to be. A link that he had now tied firmly into the horrors of the past but one that led back to the present. To the future. A rope that he just needed to run his hand along to save his sanity. He would get where he intended to go eventually, as long as he could feel it running beside him.
The rope had been formed largely due to the intrigue that the contrast between what this woman was like at home and at work had sparked. Appreciating the fact that she was an attractive woman had woven another strand into it. But this … this blinding demonstration of what physical passion she was capable of did more than thicken the rope. It had come alive. It was warm and soft and he could stay glued to it with no effort at all. He didn’t even need to touch it because a part of his mind could see it. Glowing.
‘It was the Christmas crackers, wasn’t it?’ Anna asked. ‘That sound like gunfire. You had some kind of flashback, like you did that day in surgery.’
‘Nonsense.’ It was. It had to be because if it wasn’t, it would mean he would lose his job and that was all he had to fill his future.
And if he lost his job, he would lose Anna.
‘I didn’t like the noise,’ he admitted stiffly. ‘I told you I didn’t like parties. I left because I’d had enough. The noise of the crackers was just the last straw.’
‘Do you actually remember leaving the canteen?’
‘Of course I do.’ And he did, in a vague, dream-like way. A background that had faded rapidly as he’d got sucked into the flashback. He remembered that Anna had been following him and … ‘I … bumped someone,’ he said aloud. ‘They spilled their drink.’
That surprised her. ‘You didn’t look like you were aware of what you were doing.’
‘I was … angry.’
‘Why?’
‘The party. The noise. All that food and drink and the silly costumes. It’s all such a waste of