Encounter with a Commanding Officer. Charlotte Hawkes

doesn’t sound like mine.’

      In fact, he sounded the complete opposite. Robert had been solid, steady, dependable. The pressure increased on her chest. She’d been attracted to the fact that, like her, he was dedicated to his career, driven to achieve. She’d thought they were a perfect match. A logical couple. A practical choice.

      Look where that had got her.

      ‘Well, if anyone would be immune to the Man Candy Effect it would be you,’ Elle teased, oblivious. ‘You’re probably the most highly principled person even I know.’

      ‘Yeah, yeah, Fusty Fliss.’ The old nickname slipped out before Fliss had time to think about it. ‘I remember.’

      ‘Where did that come from?’ Elle exclaimed, setting her plastic cutlery down in surprise. ‘I haven’t heard anyone call you that since first year of uni.’

      Colour heated Fliss’s cheeks. She hadn’t meant for Elle to realise she’d been feeling a little vulnerable lately. It was a weakness Fliss wasn’t proud of, and didn’t want to reveal. Even to her best friend.

      ‘Brody Gordon,’ Fliss mumbled. ‘And you’re right, the guy was an idiot. I don’t know why I even said it. Just forget it, okay?’

      Ducking her head, she resumed her breakfast but her appetite was waning. She might have known her friend wouldn’t let it drop.

      ‘Is this about Buttoned-Down Bob?’ Elle demanded. Too close to the bone for Fliss’s liking.

      ‘Don’t call him that.’ She kept her voice soft, trying to play the topic down. But Elle was like the proverbial dog once it had a juicy bone in its sights. ‘He’s a respected surgeon. A good man.’

      Elle wasn’t having any of it.

      ‘He’s also as boring as they come. Everything he did was so painfully predictable.’

      ‘Breaking up with me via a Dear John letter whilst I was stuck out here, at Camp Razorwire, in the middle of vast nothingness was hardly predictable,’ Fliss pointed out.

      ‘All right, but, that aside, he was so numbingly characterless. And, before you tell me I’m wrong, tell me that losing him has broken your heart.’

      A restlessness rolled around her chest, along with something else when she thought about Robert—something she didn’t want to identify.

      ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’

      ‘You’re side-stepping,’ Elle said, not unkindly. ‘Tell me your heart broke when you read his words. Tell me you rushed to the phone to find some way to communicate with him and find out what went wrong.’

      ‘You know I didn’t,’ Fliss muttered, the restless rolling increasing like the rumble of thunder before a flash of lightning.

      ‘Then tell me you love him, you miss him, you don’t know how you’re going to get by without him.’

      She knew what Elle was trying to say but it wasn’t as simple as that.

      ‘Just because I’m not racked with despair doesn’t mean I didn’t love Robert in my own way. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t hurt.’

      Yet she couldn’t explain it to her friend. No, theirs hadn’t been a great romance like Elle had with her own fiancé and childhood sweetheart, but it had been comfortable. He hadn’t looked at her with shame like her grandparents had, and he’d never raged at her like her mother had. Life with him had been predictable, yes. But Fliss had appreciated that. She’d thought they both had.

      It had hurt to read his letter and find out that even Robert needed more from a relationship, to see in black and white that even he found her too emotionally distant. The worst of it was that she knew he was right. The heaviness in her chest felt like a rising reservoir of water, its swirling dark depths drawing her closer to the edge. She’d chosen Robert because she’d thought they had the same life goals, and because she’d thought she couldn’t be hurt. But his letter had felt like a painful echo of her childhood rejection.

      ‘I did care for Robert,’ she told her friend quietly. ‘But I was never in love with him. It isn’t his fault that I couldn’t give him more. It’s mine. I don’t have that capacity in me, Elle. I don’t do passion and emotion and intense love.’

      ‘Bull,’ Elle snorted. ‘You just haven’t met the right guy. Trust me, when you do, you’ll forget all these daft rules and fears of yours. When you find the one, you’ll know it.’

      ‘Like you and Stevie?’ Fliss said softly.

      A shadow skittered unexpectedly over her best friend’s face and Elle suddenly looked a million miles away—or, more likely, three thousand miles. Concern flooded through Fliss as she placed her hand on her friend’s to draw Elle’s focus.

      ‘Elle, is everything okay?’

      Elle blinked, the instantly over-bright smile not fooling Fliss at all.

      ‘Of course I am. I’m just trying to help you move on from Buttoned—Sorry, Robert. And maybe have a bit of fun in the process. And, since Man Candy is off-limits to me, I have to live vicariously through you.’

      Fliss bit back the questions tumbling around her head. The Army dining hall was hardly the best place to grill her best friend but she knew she had to talk to Elle the first chance they got.

      ‘Just promise me you’ll think about it? One crazy fling. There’s no better time than now and, by the sounds of it, there’s no better choice than Man Candy.’

      ‘You realise, of course, that even if I did fall over on my way out of here today, bump my head, change my personality and decide that hot sex is indeed going to sort out all my problems, then there’s still the issue that he’s an infantry colonel and therefore nothing to do with our medical unit and, with around eight thousand of us out here in Razorwire, we’re hardly likely to cross paths.’

      ‘So, you are at least open to the mere possibility of it?’

      Fliss rolled her eyes.

      ‘If that’s what you want to take from what I said, then fine.’

      ‘Good.’ Elle nodded, swiping half a round of uneaten toast from Fliss’s plate. ‘By the way, did I mention that Simon wants to see you for an oh-eight-hundred briefing?’

      Fliss groaned. Colonel Simon Johnson was the Commanding Officer of their medical unit. A brilliant surgeon and, like a high proportion of the medical team, a civilian volunteer. This was his second tour to Razorwire and Fliss both respected and liked him, but right now, after a forty-eight-hour shift, all she’d been looking forward to was eating her scram and then heading for the Army cot-bed which was calling to her from the shipping container she and Elle shared.

      It was because of her tiredness that it took her a moment too long to register Elle’s affected air of innocence.

      ‘Wait, I have a briefing? What for?’

      ‘Hmm? Oh, the new infantry Commanding Officer replacing Colonel Waterson is arriving.’

      ‘Ah.’

      Both women fell into a few seconds of respectful silence. They’d only met him once, but Colonel Waterson’s death had been a shock. Razorwire was in a non-combat environment, its task to help local communities rebuild and improve. But the former infantry colonel hadn’t been content to stay behind a desk and had flown out, on a spurious task, to a danger zone some six hundred miles away. His death had knocked the rest of the camp, not to mention rocked his own unit who were now being dragged into an internal investigation which, though standard, had the effect of further dragging down their already low morale.

      Fliss could only hope that the arrival of their new Commanding Officer would help the infantry unit to heal. Not least because that particular infantry unit provided the protection units, or Quick Reaction Forces, for any other teams travelling outside