Burnt (11 page)

‘I wasn't going to send them straight up there. I'll go up and test it out and then you guys can come up if it's safe, okay?' he said, already reaching up to take hold of the ladder.

‘Seb, you shouldn't be doing that yet; you're still healing,' Bec warned him.

Flashing a grin, he shook off her concern and heaved himself up into the fork of the tree. He reached the platform and poked his head up through the opening. It was strange – he remembered this tree being a lot higher. He and Marty had felt like rulers of the universe up here – untouchable. He shook his head as he scanned the structure. Man, those were the days.

‘Is it all right, Seb?' a small voice called impatiently from below, bringing him back him from his reminiscing.

‘Hang on, wait till I come down and I'll help you up.'

After a few minutes of reaching out and guiding the two girls up onto the platform, he turned and reached for Bec's hand, lifting an eyebrow in silent challenge as she eyed him doubtfully. For a minute he thought she might refuse, but then, hesitantly, she placed her small hand in his larger one and allowed him to help her up.

His gaze dropped to the length of exposed tanned thigh that her modest white denim shorts revealed, and felt a surge of awareness run through him. He could picture the lean, supple body she'd had as a teenager and could remember how it drove him to distraction back then, but looking at her now, he suddenly realised how much better a woman's body got with age. Her curves were rounder; she didn't have the streamlined agility of a teenager, but the gentle, sexy, fuller-in-all-the-right-places figure of a woman.

He dropped his hands to her waist as she came level with him at the fork in the trunk. The space wasn't wide enough for two adult bodies and the position pressed them firmly against each other. He watched her struggle to keep a neutral expression in place as he deliberately held her for longer than necessary.

‘Oops. I guess there's not enough room up there for all of us at the same time.'

A flash of annoyance crossed her face, before her gaze finally met his. ‘Then why did you pull me up here?'

A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he tightened the grip on her waist, enjoying the gentle curves beneath his hands and her softness against his body. ‘What?' He shrugged innocently. ‘I thought you'd want to be close to the girls.'

‘And yet it appears that it's not the girls I'm close to.' Her observation would have held more bite if he hadn't detected the slight tremor beneath it.

He saw her gaze shift slightly to his left, just above his shoulder, and her eyes softened. He knew what she was looking at. It had caught him off-guard just a few minutes before, on his way back down the tree. ‘Do you remember when I carved it?'

Bec gave a jerky nod, and blinked rapidly.

Their initials scratched in the smooth bark of the tree had been his pledge. A grand gesture of an adolescent's undying love. He would have scoffed at the naivety of the action, except that as he'd let his own gaze wander over the jagged lines of their names, his heart almost exploded against his rib cage and he couldn't dismiss it in as cavalier a fashion as he'd have liked. She could feel the steel of the muscle under his warm skin where her hands rested on his forearms in order to keep her delicate balance in the tree.

He was so different to the boy she'd once been so close to. This was a man, and not just any man – a man who'd been in battle and who had stared death in the face more times than she could ever imagine. And yet, looking deeply into his eyes, she'd found the boy she once knew.

The happy burble of the creek as it ran over the white gravel nearby faded away, and the birds stopped singing – there was nothing but Seb surrounding her. Her body ceased to care what year it was, what day, moulding itself to his and adapting to the new lines and ridges of his body.

By the gentle softening of his eyes. she knew that he, too, had left the here and now. Gone was the hard, cynical glint she'd come to expect and in its place was a reflection of her own longing, her own need – her own hunger. She could feel the warmth of his breath against her lips and her eyes fluttered closed as she waited for that first electrifying contact she knew was about to come –

‘Mum, are you coming up here, or what?'

Rebecca's eyes flew open and she stiffened against the flood of embarrassment that washed over her. What was she doing? Her kids were three feet above her, on a bloody timber platform! They could have fallen off the edge and killed themselves while she practically made out with the man who'd walked away from her without a backwards glance twenty-odd years ago. What kind of mother was she?

‘Easy,' Seb warned gently, his arms tightening around her as she upset their balance in the fork of the tree.

Yes! Far too easy, s
he thought bitterly. ‘Girls, don't move – just stay still. I'm coming up to help you get back down. It's time we were getting home.'

Twisting to make her way up to the next branch, she heard Seb chuckle. But her efforts to find a foothold only managed to push her backside harder against his taut midriff, and she smirked when Seb let out a surprised grunt behind her at the abrupt contact.
Yeah, that wiped the cocky smile from your face, didn't it, buddy?

Heaving herself up, she was reaching above her head for the next branch when she felt his warm hands slip from her waist to her hips, trying to steady her. Distracted by the movement, her foot slipped and she slid down the trunk to land in front of him – leaving behind a large portion of the skin from her shins on the ungainly descent.

A long string of swearing flooded out under her breath, her accusing gaze flying to meet his as his big frame begin to shake silently.

‘I thought I'd heard most of the ways you could use that word until now. You'd make a good platoon sergeant, with that mix of profanity,' he said.

‘I hate climbing trees,' she snarled.

Wisely, he clamped his mouth shut and swung back to the ground, reaching up to help her down. ‘I'll go back up for the girls. There's a first-aid box in the back of the car, won't be a tick.' He began climbing before she could argue. Her stinging grazes reminded her they needed attention and she made her way carefully to the ground.

Within minutes, her two excited children were clambering over each other to be the first to tell her all about the fort and how high it was, and how far they could see.

‘Mum, can we come back again?
Please?
'

Saved from answering – and from putting Seb in an awkward position – she began to dig through the first-aid box for some antiseptic cream.

Warm hands took the kit from her and gently pushed her back to sit on the edge of the four-wheel drive's open tailgate as Seb took over patching her up. ‘You've picked up a few splinters – some of them look deep. I'll take care of them back up at the house.' He applied the antiseptic and covered the deepest grazes with a gauze patch and tape.

‘Are you a nurse like Mum?' Sarah asked, her head tilted to the side as she watched his calm, practised movements.

‘No, but I know a bit about first aid.'

‘Why?'

‘Because sometimes where I go, there aren't any doctors or hospitals close enough to get to if we get hurt. So everyone needs to know how to take care of each other.'

‘Have you ever been hurt?'

Rebecca's gaze went from her daughter's awestruck face to Seb's carefully neutral one. It was strange seeing him relate to her daughters.

‘A few times.'

‘Do you have any
scars
? I fell over in our driveway when I was three and I have a scar on my knee – see?' Sarah bent down and pointed to her small knee, looking up at Seb expectantly.

She saw Seb hide his smile as he crouched down to inspect the tiny white scar. ‘Wow, that's a beauty. No, I don't have any as impressive as that.'

‘Mum said I was really brave. I had to have three stitches, didn't I, Mum?'

‘You must have been brave. Stitches are nasty.'

From her previous examinations, Bec knew he had a lot of scars – some that looked suspiciously like bullet wounds – and there were places where she'd detected skin grafts that had covered the more serious wounds. She met his eyes and they shared a small smile. He clearly didn't want to freak her children out with his multitude of old wounds. His thoughtfulness touched her, but secretly she knew her children would find it fascinating – kids were morbidly entranced by stuff like that.

After packing up the first-aid kit, Seb scooted them all into the car and they headed back to the house.

His father had afternoon tea ready and the girls eagerly began filling him in on their adventures. Rebecca felt as though she'd done nothing but eat all day.

‘While Dad feeds the kids more chocolate biscuits, why don't we go and dig out those splinters?'

Protest though she tried, Seb was adamant she was going to have them taken out, so unless she wanted to throw a tantrum in front of her two impressionable children and make a complete idiot of herself, she had little option but to follow him meekly back into the house.

He seated her on the lounge, positioned a small footrest beside her knee and began to extract the surprisingly long pieces of timber imbedded beneath her skin. His touch was gentle and even though it stung like blazes, she gritted her teeth and bore it without protest.

‘You're very good with kids.'

‘For an “army jerk”, huh?' He grinned without taking his eyes from the task.

‘For a single guy with no kids of his own, I was thinking.'

‘I like kids. A fair bit of our work involves humanitarian operations. We deal with underprivileged kids in small villages. I like being around them.'

‘You're one big contradiction, you know that?' she said, bracing herself for him to dig for a particularly deep splinter.

‘How?'

‘You're trained to kill. You push yourself beyond what's considered humanly possible, and then you turn around and provide medical care for little kids. That's kinda going from one extreme to the other.'

He shrugged. ‘I always walk away from helping kids with my faith in humanity restored. They tell things as it is and even in some of the scariest hellholes on the planet, kids are basically all the same. Given the chance, they'll run and laugh and throw a ball. It helps to balance out the crappy things we have to do sometimes.'

Rebecca stared at the man in front of her and felt her throat close up. As though her silence alerted him to a shift in the atmosphere, he looked into her eyes and she felt a tremor run through her body at the intensity of his expression. She knew all she needed to do was lean forwards and he'd meet her halfway; she could see it in his eyes, the same blaze of awareness he'd be able to read in hers.

It took a disturbing amount of willpower to lower her gaze and ease away from him. He smelt so good, and the heat she could feel radiating from him tantalised her senses and clouded her better judgement, but she managed to grab her fleeing good sense by the hair and drag the potentially volatile situation to a halt. She wasn't looking for a relationship with Seb Taylor. Not with any man, but
especially
not Seb Taylor.

It was somewhat unsettling to realise that she hadn't learnt her lesson the first time around. Her hormones were obviously suffering some kind of memory loss if they were contemplating going down that particular track again.

‘Thanks … for this.' She waved her hand over her shin and the first aid kit spread on the floor by his knee. ‘And for today. The kids have had a ball.'

Even though she'd put some distance between them, a quick glance at his face told her that he'd been all too aware of how close they'd just come to resparking a far from burnt-out ember. Those hazel eyes were watching her, assessing her and weighing up what he was going to do about it.

‘You're welcome.' His hand came to rest on her knee, and Rebecca could feel the warmth off his touch through to the bone.
God help me, I'm only human,
she thought with an urgency that bordered on desperate.

He's only here until he recuperates … then he'll leave again.
The small voice inside was barely a whisper, but she heard it over the rush of conflicting emotions, and it was enough to slap her back to reality.

He was going to leave.

Again.

‘I better get the girls home, they've had a long day.'

For a minute she thought he wasn't going to let her get to her feet, but slowly he eased away a fraction. Without waiting for him to move away completely, she slipped past and made a beeline for the sound of voices outside, where she would be safe from making some kind of horrendous mistake.

Again.

Despite the turmoil raging inside her, Rebecca was able to smile at the scene she found on the side verandah. Her children sat either side of Angus, Sarah on a big chair, legs swinging back and forth as she chatted about goodness only knew what, and Seb's father giving her his complete attention. Natalie munched contentedly on a biscuit and let her younger sister hold court.

Her announcement that it was time to go was followed by a loud chorus of protests – not
all
of them from her children.

Grinning at Angus, Rebecca shook her head. ‘Surely you need a break from all this chatter by now?'

‘Nonsense, I'm just finding out all about a magical unicorn named Trudy.'

Rebecca sent him a knowing smile; if her youngest child didn't end up having some kind of career in writing, she'd be very surprised. The child came up with more stories than she could possibly keep up with. Each day there was a new chapter in her story of Trudy, the Magical Unicorn.

‘Well, we'll just have to save the rest for next time. I need to get home. We've been gone all day.'