The Bodyguard's Christmas Proposal Read online

  ‘Good,’ she managed curtly. ‘So now that’s established, this way, please.’

  He dipped his head curtly and, with a final check of the door of the private room, he followed her down the corridor to another treatment room as Kat heaved a relieved sigh—at least it would keep her on the right side of Ayanna Franklin, the hospital’s head of PR. But then, as the door closed behind them and Kat swung back only to find Logan watching her, she realised her relief was short-lived. Because she felt his gaze everywhere, heating her in places she had forgotten even existed.

  Enough.

  Hadn’t she just established that he had someone in his life who he cared for? And who cared for him? So what was she playing at, imagining he was looking at her?

  Furious with herself, Kat straightened up, as though the action could somehow shake off the alien sensations.

  No matter what happened, she wasn’t going to go off lusting after some unavailable male. It was time to stop talking, get her head down, and concentrate on the task she was supposed to be doing—tending to her patient.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she asked.

  The information in her notes was quite good medically, if a little scant in parts which might have revealed unnecessary information pertaining to the identity of his group. But that was no surprise given that Seattle General was renowned for maintaining the privacy of its highest-profile celebrity clients. Even a B-lister with a sprained wrist from a minor vehicular incident could have the media splashing the story over the front pages on a slow news day.

  ‘I’m not after any information relating to your...companions,’ she said carefully. ‘I just want to hear your recollection of events.’

  Knowing how much Logan recalled would give her some idea of whether he might have sustained any unreported head injuries. Although there were no evident signs of anything on his skull. No bleeding from his ears. No indication of disorientation.

  Except in herself.

  ‘We were traveling at approximately seventy kilometres per hour on a relatively straight section of road when we entered a dip with unseen black ice, and the vehicle slid, hit the curb, left the ground and rolled twice before coming to a halt on its side.’

  ‘All right.’ Kat nodded.

  ‘I exited the vehicle through the side window and, having assessed the likelihood of the gas tank leaking and the vehicle bursting into flames, I took my...companion with me. I assessed him for injuries, saw the laceration to the femoral artery. The driver, Giorgio, made sure our female companion got out safely, too.’

  ‘Good...’

  ‘I tended to the femoral laceration for approximately twenty minutes during which time the medics arrived and transported us to the hospital.’

  ‘By using your knee over the proximal right iliac artery to slow flow velocity to the CFA.’

  ‘Is that a question or a statement?’

  She blinked at him.

  ‘Both, I suppose. Okay, I need to check your pupils and then I’d ask you remove the top half of your clothing.’

  For now there was no need to ask him to remove the trousers. Unlike the ripped, blood-soaked shirt, the only mark on the trousers was where his knee had been rammed into the older man’s injury.

  Worse, and more shamefully, she wasn’t sure she had quite psyched herself up for the sight of him and his thunderbolt thighs. Still, as her eyes watched him shrug smoothly out of his jacket and shirt, Kat found her mouth going drier by the second until, finally, she was faced with the most chiselled, masculine chest she’d ever seen.

  Muscles on muscles. Lean, hewn and flawless, leaving her heart in a dither over whether it could pound out the most energetic beat of its life or whether it should simply stop altogether.

  He was surely too impossibly perfect to be real.

  Her mouth felt parched, her skin tight and hot, and even her fingers were tingling with the ridiculous urge to reach out and touch those ridges and contours. And then he turned slightly and she caught the jagged edges of a scar; an old bullet wound by the looks of it.

  A tiny imperfection, which somehow made him all the more beautiful, and rare.

  Her guess would be that he was some kind of a bodyguard for whoever the VIP in that room was. And she couldn’t shake the knowledge that she was going to need all her professional level-headedness to get through the next half-hour or so in one piece.

  * * *

  Logan didn’t like it when the nurse—Kat, her manager had called her, hadn’t she?—fell so quiet. It made him wonder what was going on behind those expressive eyes.

  And then he didn’t like it that he even wondered such a thing. She was pretty enough...more than pretty, interesting, he conceded grudgingly. But there was no reason for him to notice.

  Look what had happened the last time he’d really noticed a woman. A trickle of bitterness threatened to weave through Logan, but moments before it did, it was instead washed out by a crashing wave of love. Love in the form of one four-year-old little boy.

  Whatever hassle and grief Sophia had brought into his life, he wouldn’t change a single moment of it if that meant losing the best thing he’d ever known—his son, Jamie.

  ‘So...’ The nurse cleared her throat. ‘Let’s get you sorted so you can get back to standing outside your...companion’s door. I understand from the notes that you aren’t from Seattle.’

  ‘Actually, I am. Born and raised,’ Logan surprised himself by saying.

  ‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘You’re back, visiting?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  It was a stock response, so why was he having to clamp his mouth shut from saying anything more? What was it about this woman that almost had him opening up in a way that he never did? That had him about to tell her that he was home for good? Finally.

  He was bringing Jamie from Isola Verde to the USA, to the very place where Logan himself had grown up, to try to give his son—or, if he was honest, both of them—a fresh start.

  Ironic that today was supposed to have been his last day ever as royal bodyguard to Roberto Baresi—the King of Isola Verde. More than that, though, King Roberto was a good man, underneath it all. And he’d been more than just an employer to Logan. Over the years, the older man had been a kind friend, too. Now he was in that room along the hall. Possibly dying. The fallout was potentially catastrophic—and not merely the political ramifications.

  Logan hated that he was stuck here, in another room, not doing his job as bodyguard to the King.

  Not that he could tell this nurse—Kat—why he’d been so reluctant to leave his employer’s door, of course. The fact was that only a handful of people in this hospital were aware of exactly who their VIPs were, and even fewer of them were aware of the connections the Baresi family had to one of Seattle General’s own consultants.

  Not that he was about to be the one to spill that secret.

  As the adrenaline rush that had carried him through the car crash, and the aftermath, was beginning to wear off, the sudden realisation that he’d been inches from losing his employer—and maybe even his own life—on the very last day of his assignment hit him.

  And then what would have happened to Jamie?

  The ugly question was there before he could snuff it out.

  When the nurse had brought up the idea of someone out there who loved him, the rush of love and fear had been overwhelming. What would Jamie have done if that car crash had gone a different way?

  In that one instant, his four-year-old son would have lost his father. Wasn’t it enough that, for all intents and purposes, he’d never had a mother? What kind of start to life would that have been? His mother abandoning him and his father being killed because of a stupid area of black ice?

  Jamie’s grandparents would have looked after him, of course, as they had so often during the whole of his little life. But it was hardly
the same.

  Logan slammed his mind shut. But not fast enough to stop something dark, and ugly, from reaching out with its long, twisted fingers and scraping through him. He hadn’t been the best father he could have been, away so much with work. But now he’d quit as a royal bodyguard. Now he was coming back to Seattle for a new life.

  Not just back to where he’d been born and raised. But back to his medical career. Back to being a doctor.

  As much as he’d known that being a bodyguard instead of a doctor had been the right call—his head hadn’t been in the right space after that last, hellish tour of duty—a part of him had also missed the rush of the medical environment.

  He just hadn’t anticipated that his first tour of Seattle General’s ER would be as a patient and not as a doctor.

  Which was why it was professional curiosity, he told himself, and nothing else, that kept his eyes glued to Kat as she bustled crisply around the room. Selecting kit, arranging things, making certain she had everything just so, like she was on some kind of mission.

  ‘Right, I’m going to run my hands over you to check for any areas of discomfort.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ he commented.

  It was completely out of character, but the words had come out before he could bite his tongue. Then Kat wrinkled her nose and he couldn’t have said how, but he knew that was her trying to conceal her embarrassment.

  He found that oddly appealing.

  And then she began to check him over and his mind emptied until all he could think of was the feel of her hands all over his body. Without warning, something rushed him and he realised that he had yet another reason to want to get out of this room—away from Kat, the ER nurse—as soon as he possibly could.

  ‘Have you any pain?’ she asked.

  ‘None,’ he lied.

  He could tell she didn’t buy it for a moment.

  ‘Things will go a lot faster if you’re honest.’ She eyed him critically, a flash of that feistiness again, and he didn’t know why but it made something kick deep inside him.

  Focus.

  ‘What makes you think I am?’

  ‘Perhaps the fact that you have tiny shards of glass in your skin,’ she retorted, and as his eyes moved to her lips again, he wondered what she’d do if he leaned forward and caught that tart mouth with his. ‘But we can deal with those.’

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  Logan gritted his teeth.

  ‘Just clean them up and I’ll be out of here.’

  He might have known she’d ignore that.

  ‘Now the main pain,’ she continued. ‘Is it your back? Your shoulder? Your neck?’

  It was all three, if he was going to be honest. The right side of his neck and shoulder were sore, and his head was beginning to pound, as though the pain was running from his back right up to the top of his skull.

  Mainly because of the car crash, though he suspected it wasn’t helped by the need to fight this sudden, wholly inappropriate attraction to a woman who was not only his nurse now but who would be his colleague in a matter of weeks.

  Nonetheless, his right hand and arm were beginning to stiffen up, and even his right leg was aching. His professional assessment was that he’d torn his trapezius muscle. He imagined it was her assessment, too.

  ‘Like I said,’ he ground out, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re clearly medically trained,’ she said archly, ‘so I think we both know what’s likely happened. And that you aren’t fine.’

  ‘Fine, I have a bit of whiplash, but there’s little that can be done but give it time to heal. Fortunately, I’m fit and healthy, so I should be okay.’

  ‘There’s downplaying it, and then there’s that,’ she commented. ‘But if that’s the way you want it, that’s up to you. Either way, I’m going to be sending you to CT to ensure there are no internal injuries.’

  But there was something in her tone that got under his skin. A compassion that he knew he didn’t deserve.

  What had happened to him had been luck rather than good judgement. He’d risked his life because that was his job. When, really, his main job these days should be his young son.

  Because he got to go home to his son. How many of his former army buddies had lost that luxury when they’d lost their lives?

  And what was it about today, the accident, this woman, that was all coming together to pry open a dark box inside him that needed to be kept locked? For ever.

  ‘Agreed,’ he ground out, standing up in a rush and taking some perverse pleasure at the shock on her face.

  Let her wonder what had suddenly made him apparently take his health so seriously.

  As far as he was concerned, he’d done so because she’d reminded him of the little boy who was at his grandparents’ home, and even now was waiting for Logan to come home so that the two of them could start their new life together. Jamie had already lost enough with a mother like Sophia, but what the hell would his boy have done if anything really had happened in that car accident?

  He was here to make sure that nothing happened to him for his son’s sake. He was here because it was the responsible thing to do, to let this nurse check him over to ensure there were no internal injuries that the adrenaline was concealing. He was here because the quicker he let her assess him, the quicker he could get back to King Roberto’s room, and make sure that he hadn’t lost his employer—and friend—on the last day of his job.

  He was most certainly not here because any part of him was intrigued by this Kat woman.

  No part of him at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘ANY SIGN OF my bloodwork back for my lady in three?’ Kat asked, as she finished handling a couple more IV bags for two of her other patients.

  It was beginning to grate on her that, three hours after he’d left the hospital, she was still trying to get Logan Connors out of her head. Not listening to the medical advice to go home and rest, it had apparently taken someone from Logan’s party to order him home, which only added to her suspicion that he was a bodyguard.

  A very fit, very on-his-game bodyguard.

  ‘No bloodwork back yet.’ Her colleague shook her head. ‘What’s the preliminary assessment on that lady?’

  Chagrined, Kat shoved thoughts of Logan to the back of her mind and conjured up her patient.

  ‘She presented with lower quadrant abdominal pain, tender to palpation. She also complained of nausea, vomiting, fever, constipation and loss of appetite.’

  ‘Yeah, appendicitis sounds like a good call.’

  ‘Never mind the appendicitis.’ Elsie, one of the other nurses, came scurrying over. ‘I can’t believe you got the hottie hero. What was he like?’

  Kat flashed her brightest smile and tried not to bare her teeth. She didn’t know Elsie all that well, but what she did know was that the woman loved a good gossip—the more scandalous the better.

  Precisely the opposite of Kat.

  ‘Like a patient who has been in an MVA.’

  ‘Yes, but what was he like?’ The nurse gave a staged wink and snorted.

  Clearly, feigning misunderstanding wasn’t going to work.

  ‘He had some whiplash, but he was more concerned about his friend.’ She smiled again but this time only enough to soften her words, and not enough to suggest that she was going to feed them the gossip Elsie so evidently wanted.

  She didn’t miss the scowl the nurse threw in her direction, but she didn’t care. Logan Connors didn’t deserve to be the source of today’s rumour mill just because he looked...well, the way that he did.

  And if she believed this uncharacteristic feeling inside her was a sort of protectiveness—of a complete stranger, no less—then she was more of an idiot that she’d realised. If only she could buy into her own cool, calm exterior, the way everybody else seemed to.

  The truth
was, Logan had left her feeling...odd. Not herself. There was a strange sort of ringing in her ears, or maybe her head, that was drowning out everything else and leaving her focussing internally instead. On images of his impossibly, deliciously honed chest, from its strong, broad shoulders to a six-pack you could bounce a quarter off.

  ‘Seriously, Kat.’ Elsie sniffed disdainfully. ‘I don’t know how you can be so blasé. The guy was an absolute sex bomb.’

  And the rest.

  She could picture it in all too vivid detail, even now. Those ridges that curved so temptingly over his chest, making her fingers itch to reach out and touch them. The smattering of dark hair over hard pectorals that dropped lower, down the centre of his body, and slipped—as though teasing the onlooker—below the waistband of those low-slung tailored trousers.

  God, how her fingers had itched to trace that line, too.

  She had never, in her entire career, lusted after a patient—or anyone—like this. Not even Kirk—the man who had been her rock for ten years. The man who had understood exactly how it had felt to be in and out of hospitals week after week, month after month, year after year. Ever since they’d been fifteen, they’d been each other’s salvation. Each other’s hope.

  And maybe after a decade, and so much sadness, it had been inevitable that they would ultimately grow apart. But had he really needed to cleave her very soul, right at the end? Had he needed to hurl that one, single accusation that he’d known, whatever she tried to argue, she could never dispute? Had he needed to highlight the one deficiency in herself that she knew she could never—no matter what good she ever did—overcome?

  Kirk hadn’t merely betrayed her by those ugly, barbed, poisonous words that he’d sneered; he had destroyed her. He had poisoned every last, tiny, vaguely good thing she’d dared to think about herself, and he’d laid her out for the worthless, undesirable husk of a woman that she was.

  And she’d let him do it.

  Which only made it all the more preposterous that she was allowing herself to get caught up by another man. Even one who looked like Logan. Kat hated herself for such a weakness.