LITMIR.BIZ

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looks if he happened by. Swooning involved paling, so that could seem legit.

      But she definitely should not be breaking out in a cold sweat and considering whether her heart rate had reached a fast enough pace to require cardioversion.

      Before she could muster the courage for a mad dash to her office, another blast of his voice ricocheted up the corridor, cutting escape from her mind.

      Not laughter.

      Not words spoken with joy. His voice trembled with alarm and the hoarse expletive that followed either shook her or the building.

      A breath later came a terrible bellow for help.

      “Quinn...”

      Her heart lurched, and by the time her thoughts caught up with her body she was running again, down the long hallway.

      He’d sounded far away, but she couldn’t tell how far. As she pounded past each open door, she slowed down to peek inside for signs of distress, then spent time dodging people as they limped and rolled out of their rooms.

      The residents turned further down the hallway, and she relied on their reactions to direct her.

      Three rooms from the far end on the right-hand side, a door stood open and people were gathering around it, forcing her to wiggle through.

      “Sorry. Sorry...” she said in passing, and didn’t stop until she was through the door.

      Even from behind, even despite the changes seven years as a soldier had made to the breadth of his shoulders, every atom in her body recognized him, crouched over someone on the floor.

      Her Quinn. Her husband.

      No. Once, maybe. Not anymore. As she absorbed his presence, the rest of the room came into focus.

      The bed sat upended and had a raggedly cut bed sheet tied to the bars of the headboard.

      Hanging.

      She moved around Quinn and crouched over the patient on the floor. His skin was still tinged cyanotic.

      “Lieutenant Nettle?” She said his name and reached to check the pulse of his carotid, narrowing her focus to the most urgent place: her patient, not her ex-husband.

      Before she could count ten seconds, a large hand clamped onto her wrist, yanking her gaze from her watch’s face to Quinn’s.

      The shock of recognition blazed across his heartbreakingly handsome features, made only more devastating by the years that had passed. His caramel hair, once short and smart, had begun to grow out, but it was his stormy gray eyes that slapped her like an accusation.

      She forced her gaze away, down at the patient, mentally scrambling for what she should be doing.

      “Don’t.” She said the only word she could wrench from her mind and, seeing pink returning to Nettle’s face, pulled her arm away and stood back up. “I want him off the floor.”

      “I want his neck stabilized first,” Quinn bit back, but the incredulous way he looked at her said he was having as hard a time navigating this sudden overlap of two realities as she was.

      But he was handling it better. Of course Nettle should be stabilized first. “I’ll... I’ll get a brace.”

      In contrast to the way her body had responded to his laughter, what dug its talons into her now was far darker even than that rise of panic that had bid her run.

      Guilt. Sorrow. Anger. Fear.

      Nasty beasts that tore at her competence, her professionalism.

      * * *

      The familiar tang of fear and rage settled like rot at the back of Quinn’s throat.

      Prior to his tours, that acrid combination had hit so infrequently he couldn’t have named the emotions without examination. Now he knew them the second they descended. The only thing he didn’t know was which person before him had summoned them this time—the best friend he’d found dangling by his neck, or the ex-wife who’d abandoned him.

      He knew one thing: Anais didn’t deserve the space in his head right now, even if she well deserved his rage. Ben was the one who mattered.

      “Be still, man,” he said, as Ben struggled beneath his hands, then looked at Anais. She could come back into his life as quickly as she’d left it, but that slapdash, incompetent disguise wouldn’t fool anyone.

      She stood still, staring at him as if she’d lost all her sense.

      “Collar,” he repeated to break through her shocked expression.

      Don’t think about her shock. It couldn’t be anything more than fear that he’d yell at her—out her, maybe—but right now she only mattered inasmuch as she could help Ben.

      He quickly smoothed his hands down his thighs, drying the suddenly sweaty palms, and then fixing them around Ben’s head to keep him from moving it as she finally broke into motion out of the room.

      Discipline had been drilled into him after the King had ordered Quinn’s divorce and enlistment. He’d learned to follow their orders and he’d taught his body to follow his own. Self-discipline would see him through this, no matter how wrong it had been to see Ben hanging there, no matter how wrong it was for him to finally see Anais again like this, no matter how wrong it was that she’d changed so much. Falsely brown hair, eyes, tanned skin... Wrong. All of it.

      The resolve to speak evenly was all that let him banish his anger as he turned his attention to Ben—who obviously didn’t know who she was. “What’s the doctor’s name?”

      “Anna,” Ben answered.

      A brown name for a bizarrely brown makeover.

      Grasping for the only way he knew how to face such a situation, he attempted some levity to try and take the bleakness out of his friend’s eyes. “The good news is, your arms still work great. I’m fairly certain I’ll have a black eye later.”

      “You should’ve left me be,” Ben said, his voice a painful-sounding rasp that could only come from an injured throat.

      “I don’t think so,” Quinn muttered and then looked at the door. “Rosalie would be doomed to treason if I had, after she’d murdered me slowly in retribution.”

      Where the hell had Anais gone to get the brace—across town?

      “What are you even doing here, Doc?”

      “You’ve been avoiding my calls worse than my ex-wife,” he said just as Anais came back into the room, the sounds of tearing straps accompanying her ripping the collar open, and perfectly complementing the color draining from her face. She’d heard him. Good.

      He focused back on Ben, and that anger instantly diminished. “I came to see you, idiot.”

      Quinn accepted the collar and fitted it around Ben’s neck for stability. Only when it was in place did he help Ben into the wheelchair.

      Having tasks to do helped. Not looking at Anais helped. If he looked at her, the way his heart thundered in his ears, he’d say or do the wrong thing. That was something about the military that had worked for him—he’d never had to worry about how to say something, just whether he should say it or not. Soldiers appreciated blunt honesty more than diplomats. Something his brother Philip would remember after Quinn’s first royal function.

      “You should’ve let me hang,” Ben said again, the words sinking into the middle of Quinn’s stomach.

      He shook his head. “I came to see you before I met with the King, which should give you some idea of my priorities right now. You’re the last person in this room I’d let hang.”

      She’d hear that too. And she’d hear this... “Maybe even the last person in the world, though I might have to make an exception for any of GQ’s cover models. Even May’s, and you know how that ended.”

      Petty.

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