Free The Doctor's Lost-and-Found Bride by Kate Hardy

wouldn’t be right here, right now.’
    She swallowed hard. ‘We can’t change the past.’
    ‘But we can learn from it.’
    ‘And if it all goes wrong again? I don’t think I could face picking up the pieces a second time.’
    ‘I don’t think either of us is in a fit state to make any sort of decision right now,’ he said softly. ‘But we do need to talk.’
    She blew out a breath. ‘About the other elephants in the room? There are quite a few of them.’
    ‘Too many to deal with all at once. But if we tackle them one by one we might stand a chance of sorting it all out.’
    ‘One by one,’ she repeated.
    ‘When we’re ready. But right now I think you need comfort—because you’re one of life’s fixers, and you take it personally when you can’t make something right. Even if nobody else could’ve made it right, either.’
    Since when had he figured her out that well?
    ‘I need comfort, too,’ he said softly. ‘Stay with me tonight, Marina.’
    ‘That’s your idea of slowly? Asking me to spend the night with you?’
    ‘No. I’m trying to be honest. Right now, I think we both need this.’
    ‘All cats being grey in the dark.’ So this was just comfort. Sex. A way of celebrating life when you’d just had to face death.
    ‘Absolutely not .’ His voice was very clear. ‘I wouldn’t have done this with anyone else in the department, Marina, and neither would you.’
    She couldn’t deny the truth of that. She hadn’t slept with anyone since Max, even though she’d had offers.
    Had he?
    It was none of her business what he’d done since she’d walked out. But the idea of Max making love with another woman cut her to the quick. ‘I can’t stay. I can’t go to work tomorrow in these clothes.’
    ‘I have a washer-dryer. I can put your stuff through the machine overnight, and your clothes will be clean for the morning. And I have a spare toothbrush.’
    It was an easy solution. And she was oh, so tempted. She normally wore dark trousers and a white or cream shirt at work, so it wasn’t as if it would be obvious that she was wearing the same clothes. She could stay, spend the rest of the evening in bed with Max, exorcising some of their demons. Comforting each other.
    Making love . Because it wouldn’t be just sex—not for her.
    ‘The sensible thing,’ she said, while she still had a few vestiges of self-control, ‘Would be for me to go home.’
    He cupped her face with one hand, tracing her lower lip with the pad of his thumb. ‘We’ve had a rough day; it’s not the time for being sensible. You need to be held and so do I.’
    ‘But you’ve seen worse than today if you’ve been working for Doctors Without Borders.’
    He frowned. ‘How do you know about that?’
    ‘Rosie told me.’ She paused. ‘Why did you go?’
    ‘I thought we weren’t talking about any of the elephants. Besides, I promised to feed you.’
    ‘Why did you go?’ she repeated.
    He shrugged and sat up, drawing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms round them. ‘If you really want to know, it felt like the right thing to do. You’d gone to London, and I didn’t want to stay in Bristol without you. There were too many memories and I was miserable. I hated going home to that empty flat. To me it showed I was a failure, that I couldn’t make my marriage work.’
    She couldn’t let him take complete responsibility for the break-up. That wasn’t fair. ‘It wasn’t just your fault, Max. There were two of us in that marriage, and I was the one who left.’
    He reached out to touch her cheek for a moment. ‘Thank you for that. But I still felt a failure, and facing it every day was too much for me. I couldn’t fix my own problems, but working for Doctors Without Borders meant I could make a difference to other people’s lives. And I really needed to feel that I could do that. That I could fix something .’
    She could understand that. Wasn’t that part of the reason why she worked in emergency