THE backlash was only to be expected.
She deserved it. But Owen Hawkins deserved to suffer as well. How dare he provoke and, yes, dammit, attract her enough to have distracted her from her time of remembrance and personal grief? She hated the man. By the time Charlotte reached the safety of her motel unit she was disgusted with herself. And with Hawk.
How dare he suggest that she should just forget about Jamie and go and find someone else to be the father of her children? He had disparaged the idea that she and Jamie would have been together forever. He had hijacked her grief and shocked her into anger.
No wonder she had been vulnerable to the physical signals he clearly had no compunction in sending her way. That explained the flashes of desire she’d experienced and the appalling temptation to explore them. Thank goodness she hadn’t let it go any further. She hadn’t really admitted to anything, had she? And if Hawk was assuming she had, she would have no compunction whatsoever in quashing any hopes he might be fostering.
She intended to start first thing the next morning but a sleepless night made it impossible to focus on anything but the job in hand. Her exhaustion prevented any emotion other than the desire to get through the day to surface. Hating someone was out of the question because she was just too damn weary. Fortunately, Hawk didn’t present even a glance that needed quashing. It was as though their conversation had never occurred. As though they had never made any kind of footprint on personal ground. It was weird but Charlotte was simply too tired to try and decide whether it made her feel relieved or disappointed that she had not had the chance to make her feelings about him crystal clear.
Charlotte slept on the journey back to the city and she left work with a wave of what was unmistakably relief. She had two days off now unless her pager sounded to signal a job too big for Hawk to handle alone. Laura was also due for her days off. They could get out and enjoy themselves with no male company to create any kind of hassles. Or they could just relax at home. The company of a real friend was just what Charlotte needed at present. She might even confess to the possibility of being attracted to Hawk. Laura wouldn’t hesitate to convince her what a bizarre notion that was.
Except that Laura wasn’t there. She had left a message on the phone to tell Charlotte rather breathlessly that she wouldn’t be home that night. She didn’t come home the next day until late in the morning and that was only to throw things into a bag. She was a woman on a mission.
‘What on earth’s going on? Where on earth were you last night?’
‘At Jason’s house.’
‘What? Isn’t he that fireman who doesn’t realise you exist as anything but a paramedic?’
‘That’s the one.’ Laura brushed past Charlotte to head for the bathroom. ‘I’d better not forget my toothbrush.’
‘You’re not moving in with him, are you?’
‘Kind of.’
Charlotte followed her friend into the bathroom. ‘This is a bit sudden, isn’t it? I mean, being attracted to someone is one thing. Dating them is something else. And I don’t know what moving in with them out of the blue is!’
‘It’s not like that.’ Laura grinned at Charlotte. ‘Jason’s got a baby.’
Charlotte could find nothing to say to that.
‘He didn’t know he had one,’ Laura continued happily. ‘Until it got left at the fire station for him to take care of. Nobody knows where the mother’s gone. Working hours will be OK because Mrs McKendry, who’s the housekeeper at the station, has fallen in love with the baby but Jason couldn’t possibly cope for the rest of the time.’
‘So he’s landed you with babysitting?’
‘I offered.’ Laura pushed her toilet bag into the space in her suitcase. ‘She’s a really cute baby. Her name’s Megan.’
‘And she has a really cute father.’
‘Who’s actually noticed me properly for the first time.’
‘As a babysitter?’
‘As someone he needs,’ Laura corrected. She paused long enough to meet Charlotte’s gaze. ‘Yeah, I know. I’m probably being used but right now I don’t care. I get to be with Jason. To help him. I’ve never had an opportunity to have anything more than a passing “hello”. At least this way we have a chance to get to know each other.’
‘How long will you be gone?’
‘I have no idea.’ Laura sounded remarkably cheerful at the disruption to her life. ‘The mother might turn up on the doorstep again any day so I’m just planning to make the most of whatever time I get.’ She paused again. ‘Will you be OK?’
Charlotte nodded. This was no time to try and discuss any personal issues regarding the man she had to work with. Laura was clearly far too focussed on a different representative of the gender. ‘Keep in touch,’ she instructed.
‘Sure. How did the night with Hawk go, anyway?’ Laura was already moving towards the door. ‘Did he try and hit on you?’
Charlotte managed a brief but not particularly amused chuckle. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Just as well for him.’ Laura grinned. ‘Does he know you used to do martial arts?’
‘No.’ The thought of trying to protect herself from Hawk physically was a joke anyway. He was a powerful man. He could pursue her and pin her against a wall any time he felt like it.
Good grief! Charlotte watched Laura drive away and tried to berate herself for letting her imagination run wild. Was her body suffering withdrawal symptoms severely enough for her to start having sexual fantasies at the drop of a hat now? Getting pursued and pinned against a wall indeed. To prove how ridiculous it was, Charlotte closed her eyes and actually allowed herself to visualise the scenario. She opened them a few seconds later. That had been a very bad idea. Had her imaginary self been unable…or completely unwilling to resist?
A day on her own was also a bad idea. Charlotte did her best to distract herself. She changed into shorts, a singlet top and trainers, and went jogging but it wasn’t physical enough. When she reached the bottom of a large hill she stepped up the pace. By the time she reached the top it was painful to try and breathe. Perspiration trickled in uncomfortable rivulets as Charlotte paused and leaned forward, her hands on the railing of someone’s fence as she tried to pull in enough oxygen to stop the rest of her body hurting so much.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ Charlotte straightened and smiled at the concerned stranger. She kept to a more moderate pace as she turned for home but she didn’t rest when she arrived. Not long after her shower, she was in need of another one, having decided to clean out the old woodshed at the back of Laura’s house and chop the pile of wood that was large enough to have been sitting, accumulating spiders and dirt, for a very long time.
She hadn’t told the stranger the truth, had she?
She wasn’t all right.
‘What bothers me more?’ she asked a particularly large spider. ‘The fact that I’m attracted to Hawk or the fact that I noticed it right at the time I never think of anyone but Jamie?’
The spider vanished under the heap of newly split logs and Charlotte used the axe to lean on. She was physically exhausted again but it wasn’t slowing her brain down one little bit.
And how could she have been stupid enough to encourage herself to have some kind of sexual fantasy about the man? She was suffering flashbacks now. Like his face looming closer. When he wasn’t looking grim about something or other, Hawk had very soft-looking lips. Mobile. And just full enough for the top one not to disappear when he smiled. What would it feel like if those lips touched her own? To her horror, Charlotte found herself touching her own lips with a gentle brush of a middle finger as the now familiar butterflies beat their wings so hard against the inside of her abdomen it felt almost like a physical pain. She balled her hand into a fist and went inside to have another shower.
‘It should be a cold one,’ she muttered aloud. The involuntary smile that followed her words was ironic. If someone had told her even a couple of months ago that she would be contemplating a cold shower to distract herself from sexual desire she would have believed herself utterly if she’d reacted by saying something like, ‘Not in this lifetime.’
Housework couldn’t release the tension that Charlotte still needed to get rid of the following day. She vacuumed, she dusted, she cleaned the bathroom. She attacked the linoleum on the kitchen floor with a scrubbing brush and it wasn’t until she paused to push damp tendrils of hair away from her face that a vaguely positive thought emerged.
Maybe, just…maybe, this wasn’t a bad thing. Charlotte knew about the stages of grief. It had been part of her training as a paramedic. Crash investigators had it as part of their courses as well. Shock and denial were foremost as nature allowed the reality of the loss to sink in slowly. Charlotte had looked and acted like a robot for several days after the news of Jamie’s death.
The pain had been unbearable. The tears, anger and even rage had come in waves and had disturbed every aspect of Charlotte’s existence. She hadn’t eaten or been able to sleep, she’d experienced palpitations and even something that had felt like asthma. The attacks had gone on, intermittently, for months. Then there had been the depression and guilt. The endless ‘if onlys’. Jamie should have been with her that night. Not out drinking with his mates.
What about idealisation? Charlotte asked herself as she mopped up the last of the soapy water from the floor. Holding to the past and revering it as the best. She knew what the textbooks would say. When energy was locked into the past, there was none available to develop the future. She had moved on, though, and had learned to live with the loss. She still had times of feeling sad but the devastating disruption was over. She was getting on with her life.
Or was she? Really? Charlotte emptied the bucket of water and then wandered around the small, quiet house looking for another task. What about those other stages? Like realisation—when you could see the weaknesses in past situations and accept that there was bad as well as good and that you could hope the future would hold good as well as bad. Realising that there was still room for similar things in your life and developing new patterns that allowed their inclusion.
Had she ever reached that stage? Or had she been trapped by idealisation and been endlessly revisiting previous stages in the cycle to varying degrees without ever taking that final step? It happened often enough but Charlotte wouldn’t have believed herself caught. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to find a partner for life. It was lonely enough having two days without Laura in the house. But she had always known that nobody could compete with Jamie, could measure up to everything he had offered both emotionally and physically. Had that been some form of denial?
It certainly seemed to be the message her body was trying to convey right now. She wasn’t about to have a relationship with Owen Hawkins. Charlotte had been perfectly sincere in saying that her job meant more to her than that. But maybe he had come into her life for a reason. To demonstrate that it was possible for her to feel physically attracted to someone. To show her, finally, that it was time to let go. To start living again. Her body was telling her in no uncertain terms. Perhaps it was time for her heart to give her the freedom to take that step.
It was a big thought. Too much to contemplate other than in small bites. Charlotte couldn’t see anything else in the house that needed cleaning. She could go and chop the last pieces of wood but she needed more than spiders for company. She needed something that could jolt her out of this unfamiliar and unwelcome introspection. Going in to work had always been her salvation in the past but that wasn’t an option. Hawk was at work and spending time with him right now was something Charlotte really didn’t want to deal with. This was all his fault. OK, if this was the point in her life that marked a new start, maybe she would thank him at some point in the future for the emotional turmoil he’d caused. Right now, she still resented it. And him.
The solution was as simple as it was brilliant. Charlotte made some phone calls and an appointment for 7 p.m. that night. She drove a little way out of town, showed the appropriate person her licence and then signed in for thirty minutes’ use of a high-powered gun. She put on her ear-muffs and goggles in the cubicle she was allocated, loaded her gun and checked through the sights to find her target. The torso-shaped target had circles painted on its chest and it seemed a long way away. It had been too long since Charlotte had indulged in the hobby she’d found when doing weapons training for the police force.
Her first shot hit the target’s head. At least she hadn’t missed just in case someone was watching. Charlotte carefully avoided catching a glance from anyone into the occupied cubicles on either side and tried to ignore the ache in her shoulder from the kick of the gun. A muffled shot came from the person on her left and their target flipped back out of sight for a second to signify that the bullet had gone into dead centre of the marked circles. It was a great shot and Charlotte heard a restrained whoop of delight coming from the marksman. She turned to give her neighbour a congratulatory smile and the man’s eyes widened with something like alarm beneath the goggles.
‘Charlie!’
Lip-reading her own name was easy. Deciding how she felt about running into Hawk so unexpectedly was rather more difficult. Charlotte pulled one side of her earmuffs up as she saw that he was saying something else.
‘What?’ It was hardly a friendly greeting but Hawk was smiling.
‘I said why didn’t you tell me you liked shooting? I come here all the time and I haven’t had anyone to compete with since Cam left.’
Oh, no! Now she had to prove herself all over again. So why was she feeling so pleased by the prospect? ‘You’re on, buster,’ she told Hawk. ‘And the loser has to buy the beer.’
Charlotte lost but only just. Her aim improved steadily until she was hitting the central mark just as often as Hawk but she couldn’t make up the lost ground.
‘Your shout,’ he informed her smugly as they handed back their weapons. ‘I like beer.’
‘You’re on call,’ Charlotte reminded him. ‘You’ll have to take a rain-check. And it’s just as well because I’m not used to this any more. I’ve got a thundering headache and a very sore shoulder. I’m going to head home for a long soak in a hot bath.’
Hawk was keeping pace with her as she headed for her car. ‘Are you in a huge hurry?’
‘Why?’
‘There’s something I’d like to show you.’
An odd note in Hawk’s tone earned him a sharp glance. ‘What? Have I done something wrong?’
‘No, it’s nothing to do with your work. Not in that sense, anyway.’
Now Charlotte was curious. ‘What is it, then?’
‘Can’t say,’ Hawk said firmly. ‘It’s something you’ve got to see.’
The lure of the hot bath receded just a little. ‘Will it take long?’
‘Nope. Couple of minutes. And it’s practically on your way home.’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Charlotte could only stare at what was sitting on top of her desk.
‘Don’t worry, you can mess things up again. I just cleared a small space.’
But it wasn’t a small thing. It was huge. Charlotte found she had a lump in her throat and she had to swallow. She glanced up to find Hawk watching her carefully. His expression advertised pride and something a lot more than that. He had done something for her and he wanted her to be pleased.
Charlotte was more than pleased. She was blown away.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she repeated slowly. ‘This must have cost an absolute fortune, Hawk!’
‘It did.’ Hawk tried to sound modest but his face was a dead give-away. ‘I had a few words in the right ears. You would have enjoyed the yarn I spun about poor Stan Jones. The benefits to public relations for the police force did not go unmentioned either.’
‘But…’ Charlotte couldn’t resist touching it now, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. ‘This is state of the art, Hawk. It’s got everything!’ She unzipped pockets on the carry case one after the other and then she turned the machine on and found a menu screen. She shook her head as she scrolled through the options.
‘Twelve lead ECG, pacing capabilities, non-invasive blood-pressure measurement, oximeter, end-tidal carbon dioxide. It’s even got rhythm analysis.’
‘I have no idea what all that stuff means,’ Hawk confessed cheerfully.
‘It means that we’ve got a life pack that’s probably better than most of the ambulances in the district carry.’
‘Good.’ Hawk sounded smug. ‘I only pick the best.’
‘But…’ Charlotte was still stunned. ‘How often are we going to use it?’
‘How much is a life worth?’ Hawk countered. His gaze held something indefinable now. ‘Some people are worth whatever it costs,’ he added softly.
Charlotte had to look away. Was he talking about potential heart-attack victims? Or was he referring to how much money had just been spent on her behalf? A wave of confusion made her stammer a little.
‘H-how on earth are we going to fit this into our car?’
‘We’ll manage.’ Hawk was fiddling with some files lying beside the life pack on Charlotte’s desk. ‘So…what do you think?’ The edge of a file pushed the vase of fake flower pens and Jamie’s photograph tipped over to lie face down.
And Charlotte wasn’t even tempted to reach out and pick it up. ‘I think it’s the most amazing thing anyone’s ever done for me, Hawk.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Thank you.’
There was a moment of silence. An awkward one. If it had been anyone other than Hawk, Charlotte would not have hesitated to give him a hug. But there was no way she could hug Owen Hawkins. It wouldn’t be a friendly gesture of appreciation. It would be something far more dangerous. She didn’t want to touch this man.
She didn’t dare.
‘You’re welcome.’ Hawk straightened from where he’d been leaning on her desk beside the life pack. He sounded as awkward as Charlotte felt. ‘Uh…there was something else as well. A favour I wanted to ask.’
‘Ah!’ Charlotte tried to recapture some of their usual professional tension. ‘I might have known there was a catch.’
Hawk’s smile was brief. ‘I wanted to ask you if you could teach me to do CPR properly.’
‘Oh…’ Charlotte hadn’t expected that. Hawk wanted something that she could give him? He certainly deserved it. ‘But there are courses you could go on,’ she found herself saying. ‘You could get a qualification if you wanted to.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Hawk said simply. ‘I want you to teach me.’
‘No problem, then,’ Charlotte said. ‘I’d be happy to teach you, Hawk. I should be able to rustle up a dummy through Laura.’
‘We’d have to find our own time to do it. Evenings, probably.’
Charlotte had to wet suddenly dry lips. ‘No problem.’ She had to clear her throat again. ‘It’s a great idea, Hawk. And there’s heaps you can learn. Like paediatric resuscitation. A cardiac arrest in a child is often caused by a respiratory arrest happening first, which is different to adults. Potentially, you could have a child with an obstructed airway leading to an arrest at an accident scene that could be saved by good CPR.’ She was babbling. It was time she left.
A riot of conflicting emotions were trying to gain precedence over each other. Had she really thought she hated Hawk only two days ago? A tiny task that presented itself as a distraction was welcome. Charlotte leaned over her desk and stood Jamie’s photograph upright again. By the time she looked up, Hawk had moved. He was returning to his desk despite it being long after his official knocking off time.
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he said politely. ‘But right now I’ve got a report I want to get finished.’
‘I’ll get out of your way, then,’ Charlotte told him. She paused at the door. ‘Thanks again, Hawk.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Hawk still sounded oddly polite.
‘I hope we get a chance to play with it soon. Kind of,’ she added. What would Hawk think if he knew she was looking forward to another situation like Mr Jones had caused? ‘Not that it’s likely,’ she continued. ‘I haven’t had a chance for much fluffing lately, have I?’
‘No.’ Hawk smiled but his gaze remained on his computer screen. ‘Still, you never know what’s around the corner, do you?’ He wasn’t expecting a response. His fingers were busily tapping keys already.
Charlotte took the hint and fled.
Her dreams that night were a jigsaw of medical emergencies. Hawk was present in more than one of them, carrying a life-saving defibrillator that filled Charlotte with an overwhelming sense of relief. There were snatches of other overwhelming emotions concerning Owen Hawkins as well, yet Charlotte felt that she had slept well for the first time in many days. She awoke to find the tension had gone. She felt rested, calm and ready for anything. She was looking forward to getting back to work today.
It was just as well she had recharged her batteries. She needed every ounce of energy and alertness she could summon when she and Hawk were despatched that afternoon to another major incident.
‘What is it with us and trucks lately?’ Charlotte had to raise her voice over the sound of the siren as they sped towards the outskirts of the city.
‘They’re big and heavy. They tend to squash things they hit.’
‘And they use up too much of the road. Like that sheep truck—it was halfway into the car’s lane.’ Charlotte slowed the car a little as they approached a bend. ‘How many vehicles has this one collected?’
‘It’s squashed one under the front and a couple of others have piled into the back of it.’
A fine, misty rain had made road conditions slippery. Failing to heed the speed the advisory sign recommended for taking a bend in such conditions, a car had skidded, turned clockwise 180 degrees and ended up in the lane of opposing traffic. A truck driver had done his best to brake but had been unable to prevent the collision. His front wheels had gone over the back of the car, crushing the left-hand side beneath the heavy vehicle, and had then shunted it some distance along the road. Another car had crashed into the rear of a bus as it had braked and they in turn had been rear-ended by a delivery van.
The scene was chaotic. Injured car passengers included a couple of hysterical teenage girls. The driver of the car under the front of the furniture truck was still alive but badly injured, and it had taken some time for the fire service to cut access to the victim. Her passenger would have to remain where he was, buried in the crushed side of the car still under the wheels of the truck. The ambulance service was stretched to deal with the multi-casualty incident and Hawk took one look at the scene as they arrived and turned to Charlotte.
‘See where you’re needed most,’ he told her. ‘I’ll start the scene investigation.’
Charlotte was needed most at the car. She found Laura trying to stabilise the critically injured driver and she was clearly having difficulty. The suction gear beside her was full of blood. A discarded endotracheal tube was also covered in blood and Laura was holding a smaller size of tube as she peered past the light her laryngoscope provided.
‘I can’t see a thing,’ she was saying in dismay. ‘And there’s no way I can get even this tube in. Her trachea’s crushed.’
The stridor Charlotte could hear as the injured woman struggled to breathe was alarming. If they couldn’t achieve some airway protection there was no way they could keep her alive long enough to reach the hospital. A rescue helicopter with further back-up was approaching to land just over the road in the vacant parking lot of a factory but it would take several minutes for them to be able to offer assistance.
Laura’s partner was someone Charlotte didn’t recognise and he was less qualified than Tim. He shook his head as he held the bag mask over the patient’s face again.
‘I’m not getting any air in,’ he said grimly. ‘Her airway’s totally obstructed.’ He reached for the suction unit again and inserted the end piece into the woman’s mouth. A fresh flow of blood entered the tubing to take the level in the reservoir up with alarming speed.
‘Try a cricothyroid puncture,’ Charlotte advised Laura.
‘I’ve never done one.’ Laura bit her lip. ‘Not for real.’
‘I’m not even qualified to try.’ Tim’s replacement for the shift sounded equally anxious.
They both looked at Charlotte. ‘I’ve done a few,’ she admitted. ‘OK. I’ll have one more go at intubation and if that fails we’ll go for a cric.’
Hawk passed close to the trio of ambulance officers a minute or so later. He could see that the situation was extremely tense and he heard Charlotte sounding very grim.
‘There’s subcutaneous emphysema all over her neck. Hand me that 12-gauge cannula, Laura. Have you attached the 10 mil syringe with 3 mil of saline in it?’
‘Yes.’ Laura sounded as though she had supreme confidence in what Charlotte was doing. ‘Here you go.’
Hawk stopped dead in his tracks as he saw what Charlotte was doing. She had already been feeling the patient’s neck carefully. Now she was pushing the large needle directly into the front of the woman’s neck.
‘I’m aspirating with the syringe as I go,’ he heard her say to her companions. ‘I’ll either aspirate air bubbles or blood or I’ll feel a break in resistance as I cross the tracheal wall.’
Hawk couldn’t move. The next few seconds were far too tense.
‘Yes!’ Charlotte sounded delighted. ‘Air bubbles. Now I’m advancing the cannula and we’ll confirm placement with an empty syringe.’
‘What size?’ Laura’s hand hovered over the kit close to Charlotte as she knelt beside the unconscious woman.
‘Another 10 will be fine. Have you got that Y-connector attached to the oxygen tubing, Pete?’
‘All set to go. Fifteen litres?’
‘Yep.’ Charlotte reached for the new gear. ‘Let’s get some air into her.’
The helicopter had landed by now and brightly suited and helmeted paramedics were advancing on the scene, rolling a stretcher between them. Hawk moved away. There was no room for extra bodies in this area and too much for him to do elsewhere. He was surprised when Charlotte joined him a minute later. A few spots of blood on her white shirt were the only indications of the dramatic procedure she had just completed.
‘It’s under control,’ she told Hawk. ‘They’re just getting her packaged for transport. There’s only minor stuff from the other vehicles and there’ll be plenty of ambulance staff to deal with them once the chopper gets away. I’m all yours.’
He wished.
‘What were you doing to that woman?’ Hawk needed to dispel that errant thought as quickly as possible. ‘It looked pretty serious.’
‘It was. She was already hypovolaemic from her injuries and she would have died from hypoxia pretty damned quickly if we hadn’t done something.’
Hawk gave Charlotte a blank look and she smiled. ‘Sorry. Serious blood loss and lack of oxygen. She’d crushed her trachea…’ Charlotte stroked the front of her own neck to indicate the area she was talking about. ‘There was no way we could get a tube in to get her breathing properly because there was too much tissue damage and bleeding. The obstruction was enough to make using a bag mask ineffective as well.’
Hawk was finding it difficult to concentrate on what she was saying. He was still staring at her neck. He wanted to stroke it himself. Shaking his head to clear the increasingly unwelcome distractions, he moved off. Charlotte kept pace with him as he marched along the road.
‘What I did was a needle cricothyroidotomy. It’s like a temporary tracheotomy. Even a needle can allow enough oxygen to get in under pressure to keep someone alive long enough to do a proper surgical airway.’
‘That’s cool.’ Hawk was focussed again now. He wasn’t even annoyed with himself any more. The distraction of his desire for Charlotte had been only momentary. A brief flash that could be put aside until a more suitable time.
‘Look at that.’ A learner’s plate card was lying on the road surface not far from the woman’s car. ‘She was driving, wasn’t she?’
‘Yep.’ Charlotte shook her head. ‘Her passenger isn’t going anywhere and he certainly didn’t have a chance to change seats.’
‘Friction marks,’ Hawk pointed out. The lines wiggled in a bizarre pattern. ‘The car’s been shunted. They’re post-impact marks.’
Charlotte nodded. She turned her head for a moment to watch the helicopter take off.
‘We’ll have to get a crane in to lift the truck off the car. We’re going to be here for a while.’
Charlotte nodded again. ‘I’ll get the paint and my sketch book.’
It was well over an hour before the truck got lifted from the car and then towed away. The total devastation of the vehicle provoked a soft curse from Hawk. The steering-wheel of the truck had been directly over the passenger seat of the car. The windscreen and roof of the vehicle were flattened to the same level as the bonnet on that side. The body of the passenger was barely visible amidst the crushed metal and it took the fire service another thirty minutes to extricate the body of the unfortunate man.
Then the wreck could be lifted by the crane and both Hawk and Charlotte peered at the underside of the car.
‘There’s severe rim damage on the front right wheel.’
Hawk nodded. ‘And look at this scraping under the petrol tank. You’re lucky we didn’t have a fire while you were trying to work beside it.’
‘I doubt that a fire would have lasted long in this weather. Freezing, isn’t it?’
‘We’ve got just about enough information for now. Let’s get back to the office and see what we’re missing. I think anything else we’re going to need will still be here in the morning.’
Reviewing all the digital photographs on the computer was the last task they did that day but it was well past the time they should have gone home, and their office was an oasis of light in an otherwise dark department. Charlotte stretched her shoulders back as she sat in front of the computer. Then she rubbed her shoulder.
‘I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t taken you up on that challenge at the rifle range yesterday.’
‘That’s just because you still owe me those beers.’ Hawk was standing behind her. He watched her rubbing her shoulder. Then, almost without thinking, he placed his own hands on Charlotte’s shoulders.
‘Now, that’s something I can cure,’ he informed her.
His fingers anchored themselves above her collarbones while his thumbs kneaded the muscles on either side of the base of her neck. He increased the pressure gradually and Charlotte groaned.
‘Oh…yes! That’s the spot. Ouch! Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Hawk?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m sure.’
But he wasn’t. He was good at giving neck and shoulder massages but what he was doing right now was probably a big mistake. He had his hands on Charlotte Laing and the messages his fingers were relaying to his brain—not to mention other parts of his anatomy—had very little to do with anything therapeutic.
Charlotte had become very still and quiet, and Hawk found the movement of his hands slowing. He dropped them to the back of her swivel chair and found himself turning her to face him. The expression on her face made him wonder whether the physical contact had had just as disturbing an effect on her as it was having on him.
She sat looking up at him with a vaguely dreamy expression clouding her eyes. Her lips were slightly parted and it was the sight of the pink tongue tip that was Hawk’s complete undoing. He had to lean down a long way to reach Charlotte’s mouth with his own but within seconds he was no longer stooping. Had he dragged Charlotte up to her feet or had she risen to follow his lips? It didn’t matter. The movement and the contact were so seamless he couldn’t tell where his own body finished and Charlotte’s started.
And he had never, ever experienced a kiss anything like this one. He was in danger of drowning in the flood of sensation it provoked. Or suffocating because his body would not obey his brain and come up for air.
Charlotte was equally breathless when she finally pulled away. Her gaze was as wild as the desire still building in Hawk.
‘This isn’t going to happen, Hawk.’ The words were punctuated with a gasp for air. ‘It can’t happen.’
Hawk caught her shoulders again but this time he didn’t pull her towards him. He knew she would resist, and trying to persuade her by physical means would spell definite failure. Instead, he spoke softly.
‘Jamie’s not here any more, Charlie, and I’m sorry about that for your sake.’ He wasn’t sorry for his own sake. No way. ‘But you can’t lock all that passion away. Something inside you is going to wither and die if you deny it for too long. You’ll end up with only half a life.’ His fingers eased their hold and then squeezed again gently.
‘I’m here,’ he whispered. ‘I want you, Charlie. More than I’ve ever wanted any woman.’ His gaze locked with Charlotte’s. ‘And if that kiss is anything to go by, I think you want me, too.’
Charlotte shook her head but Hawk wasn’t going to give up just yet. ‘You need to start living again.’ His smile felt curiously crooked. ‘And I’d like to be the person you start your new life with.’
‘It’s not going to happen, Hawk.’ Charlotte pulled away. In an instant she had grabbed her bag and in another she was gone, with the echo of her words following her. ‘It can’t.’
Hawk was left standing in the office with only the memory of that kiss.
‘Oh, it’s going to happen,’ he murmured. ‘It’s just a question of when, Charlotte Laing. Not if.’