The Bodyguard's Christmas Proposal
Autor
Charlotte Hawkes
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The top of her Christmas list? A family! Nurse Kat Steel always wanted a big family, but a childhood accident and her ex's departure ended that dream — she's not about to lay her heart on the line again. Until Logan Connors — ex-bodyguard and new trauma surgeon — and his adorable son arrive! Logan's complicated past means he's not looking for happily-ever-after, either. Could a little mistletoe magic change that for them all?
CHAPTER ONE
IF TWELVE YEARS as an ER nurse had taught Kat Steel anything, it was that there were two things that travelled ridiculously fast around a hospital. One was a winter flu bug. The other was gossip. Right now, the latter was rife.
Even as Kat silently navigated her way around the small cluster of colleagues at the nurses’ station, all typing up notes or getting their next shout, the air was positively buzzing. The downtime was one of the pitfalls of cases coming into the ER in fits and starts on some days.
‘I mean, seriously, did you see the guy?’
‘Of course I saw him. How could anyone miss him?’
‘I missed it. I was with the woman in bay two. What happened?’
‘He was like some kind of superhero.’
‘Yeah, I’m calling him Comic Book God.’
‘For pity’s sake, Gemma, you’re such a nerd.’
But there was no malice in the last comment, and Kat couldn’t help but smile.
She might have only been at Seattle General for the past eight months, but she’d quickly discovered that Gemma was funny and kind, and a self-proclaimed comic nerd. She was also the closest thing Kat would describe as a real friend.
As if reading her thoughts, Gemma looked up and caught her eye.
‘Did you see him, Kat?’
There was no question who they were talking about. After all, it wasn’t every day that a gurney raced through the ER with one patient astride it, their knee rammed into the femoral artery of an older man who’d lain, unconscious, beneath him. Evidently the man—or indeed, superhero—had been doing all he could to plug the bleed and save the older man’s life.
At least until Dom di Rossi, their Head of ER, and the rest of his team could stabilise him enough to get him into Theatre.
‘Yeah, I saw him. But I was dealing with the female passenger who came in with them.’
‘Oh,’ Gemma moved slightly away from the group so that no one else could hear. ‘I saw her, she looked very...autocratic.’
‘Yeah, nice, though. Clearly more concerned about her fellow passengers than herself. She refused an X-ray. Insisted on seeing Lucas.’
‘Lucas Beaufort?’ Gemma named another ER doctor.
‘The same.’ Kat shrugged. ‘But don’t tell the hyenas. They’ll only read something into it.’
‘You know I won’t.’
Picking her way around the group to collect the notes for her next patient, Kat ignored the rumourmongers and pretended that she wasn’t interested. That the whole incident hadn’t looked like some incredible Hollywood action film.
It was irritating that she couldn’t seem to shake the man out of her head. Like he’d somehow locked himself in there. The intense focus on his face. And...something else. Something she couldn’t quite identify.
‘Admit it, Kat, even you can’t have failed to be impressed.’ Another nurse dragged her back to reality, and back to the conversation about the superhero patient.
‘It was certainly...unusual,’ she conceded, after a moment.
Because, after Kirk, if anyone should be immune to men—even those who looked like comic book gods—then surely it should be her?
‘Kat?’ The low voice of one of the hospital managers snagged her attention and Kat turned gratefully as a tablet was pressed quietly into her hands. Anything that could spare her from thoughts of her perfidious ex was to be welcomed.
‘Your next patient. I trust you’ll be discreet.’
‘Of course,’ Kat confirmed, glancing down at the electronic notes before the hospital managers summoned her along.
Logan Connors.
She was about to locate the patient in the main ER when the manager shook her head.
‘Not in there. This way...’
Making their way out of the general ER to the VIP patient area, they hurried along the wide corridors to the private rooms, right to the most restricted section.
Who were these people?
But there was no time to consider the question. The door to one of the rooms opened as someone went inside and, for the briefest moment, Kat glimpsed Emilia Featherstone, Seattle General’s Head of Orthopaedics, who had collected the elderly man from the gurney earlier. Then, as Kat hurried along, the door closed again and her attention was snagged by another figure standing on the other side of the corridor with his back to her, almost as if on guard. As he turned his head to talk to her approaching manager, Kat startled, and then something rolled low in her belly.
The guy from the gurney—Comic Book God. Surely he couldn’t possibly be her next patient?
She stood, rooted to the spot, as her manager bustled back down the corridor to her, the man clearly reluctant to follow.
As they neared, she realised that the name Comic Book God wasn’t nearly a lofty enough term to describe this hulk of a man, who was mouthwateringly tall, big and fit.
Very fit. In more than one sense of the word.
‘This is Logan Connors,’ the manager introduced Kat, the very nature of how this was happening warning her that he was also to be treated as a VIP.
Even his real name had a tinge of superhero about it. Or perhaps that was just her...projecting. There was no doubt about it, the man was attractive.
More than attractive. Even frowning at her, as he was.
‘I don’t need to be looked at.’
There ought to have been a law against any man having such a rich, seductive voice, especially when they looked like this one did. And especially when they were practically growling.
‘I’ll leave him in your capable hands, Kat,’ her manager declared, turning to walk back down the corridor as she mouthed at Kat to convince him.
She had to be kidding.
‘Thanks,’ Kat muttered, instead. ‘Mr Connors...’
‘Logan.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m not being looked at. But if you’re going to call me anything, just call me Logan.’
She swallowed.
‘Okay,’ she began, ‘Logan... You’re going to have to let me check you over.’
Heat zipped thought her. If that didn’t sound like the most cringeworthy come-on, she didn’t know what would.
But how could it not?
He was possibly the most beautiful, most masculine man she’d ever seen in her life, with a strong, square jaw that made her palms itch just to reach out and trace it, and teeth so white that it was impossible not to imagine them against her skin.
It had been impressive enough watching him sail in on that gurney but now, almost face to face, Kat felt a ripple of something else—something she didn’t care to identify—cascade through her.
Fighting to regulate her suddenly erratic breathing, Kat wrested her gaze from him and glanced over his shoulder to the private room where Dr Featherstone and her colleagues were still with the other MVA victim. The man whose life this Logan Connors—Logan—had saved by compressing the older man’s proximal right iliac artery.
Given the extent of the damage, he would have needed to apply upwards of one hundred and twenty pounds of pressure to stop exsanguination within seconds—something a first responder might have needed his entire upper body to manage—yet Logan had managed it simply by ramming his knee onto the critical point.
Ten minutes ago she hadn’t thought it possible. Now, looking at the man standing in front of her, looking for all the world as though he was hewn from granite, she thought maybe she could believe anything of him.
He truly looked as though he could move mountains. Shape worlds.
Ridiculous, fanciful notion, she snorted inwardly.
He was probably just an ex-military guy. He certainly looked like one. And that compression technique was one she thought she remembered hearing military physicians were taught—to plug a main artery like that.
Not that it made any difference who he was, or what he’d done.
‘Your...father...is in good hands,’ she hazarded.
Instinct told her they weren’t father and son, but Logan’s protectiveness of the older man was unmistakable. Even for a hospital accustomed to protecting VIP identities, the secrecy around these patients was unusually high.
And Comic Book God was looking particularly fierce.
She told herself it was the fact that he was standing there, so strong and upright, as though he had just arrived at some posh gala, the most well turned-out man there. As though he wasn’t clearly injured or bloodied, or his clearly expensively tailored suit ripped and sullied with bloodstains.
And, somehow, that only made him look all the more...sexy.
You’re being ridiculous again.
Shaking her head, Kat battled to focus. This wasn’t like her. It wasn’t what she did.
She prided herself on her reputation as an efficient, kind, approachable ER nurse, liked by patients and colleagues alike, just like all the nurses who had made her own childhood, spent in and out of hospitals, so much more bearable.
And above all—just like those nurses who had cared for her—Kat strived to be very, very good at her job.
She did not strive to feel unsettled.
Ever.
Which only made it all the more incomprehensible that, standing face to face with Comic Book God, she found herself...rattled.
Unexpectedly, that gaze slammed into hers, and this time she realised his eyes had to be the most incredible, piercing blue she’d ever seen. Pinning her to the spot. Making her feel as though he could peel back every layer of who she was, and leave her exposed and vulnerable, for the world to see.
And then they scanned her up and down. Checking her out. And everything...compressed inside her.
You’re being ridiculous.
She pasted her best smile on her face and held her hand out to indicate a vacant consultation room.
‘If you’d like to go into there, Mr... Logan.’
Not a single muscle twitched. He remained standing, feet shoulders width apart and arms folded over his chest—only making it seem all the broader, and stronger.
‘I already told you,’ he growled at last, ‘I don’t need to be checked over.’
The steely blue gaze swirled with emotion. For a moment she felt swept up in the maelstrom, her breath catching in her throat until, just as suddenly, they masked over and she tumbled to the ground—shut out. Relieved and bereft all at once.
He was acting like it was his duty to put the man in that room in front of his own health. But surely he could see that it benefited no one to stay outside a door when they had an entire team in that room?
‘I understand that you’re concerned for your friend—’ Kat tried her usual tack of empathy, but right now it was all she could do not to melt under his laser glare ‘—but he is with our best team right now. And we are obliged to check you over. You could have internal injuries and not even be aware of them.’
‘I don’t have internal injuries. I’m fine.’
‘You’re covered in blood,’ Kat pointed out as evenly as she could.
Right up until that startling gaze walloped back into hers, leaving her feeling oddly winded.
He glanced down in evident surprise.
‘It isn’t my blood,’ he declared after a moment.
‘If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to ascertain that for myself.’ Her voice sounded strange. Haughtier than she was used to.
Logan Connors was getting under her skin, and she wasn’t sure she understood why, much less cared for it.
His eyes gleamed, as though he could read her thoughts. Slowly, he unfurled his arms and lifted them out to the sides in invitation.
Or in challenge.
‘Fine. Be my guest.’
Either way, a tiny thrill threaded its way along her spine. Wholly inappropriate—not that she seemed to be listening, no matter how sternly she tried reprimanding herself.
‘Not here, in the middle of the corridor,’ she managed to bite out. ‘Perhaps in the consultation room?’
He crossed his arms back over his chest, his stance seeming all the more rooted. If that were even possible.
‘Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.’ It was a voice that rumbled straight through her. Again.
Doing things to her. Again.
Something ached in Kat’s chest. And lower, if she was going to be absolutely honest. My God, she had never, never responded to a patient this way.
She had never responded to anyone this way. Not even Kirk.
She cleared her throat, consulting the notes on her tablet and ignoring the odd tumbling, swooping sensation in her chest.
‘And, like I said, I can’t assess you in the middle of a corridor.’
He didn’t answer. He barely even shifted. Yet this man—this stranger—somehow made the corridor seem brighter, and bigger and yet simultaneously he seemed to...fill it.
She pressed on.
‘It’s hospital policy.’
He didn’t even blink. His eyes merely roamed her body, leaving her feeling as exposed as if she’d been naked.
And a helluva lot hotter.
She swallowed—hard—and struggled to refocus.
‘I really ought to ensure there’s no delayed injury that only becomes obvious once its already severe. Your own health is just as important as that of the man in that room.’
She didn’t know what made her eyes slide over that chest and those folded arms to see a wedding band.
The feeling of disappointment that plummeted through her was illogical. Yet undeniable.
She thrust it aside.
‘There must be people who care for you.’ She glanced down at his hand, told herself that it was only professional interest that made her notice the lack of a wedding band. ‘Someone to whom your welfare is more important than anything?’
It was like a switch flicked on again for a fraction of a second. Kat watched, mesmerised as a fierce kind of expression swam over his features, changing them for a moment. A love so intense—an emotion she suspected he usually kept well buried—swirled tumultuously in his eyes, buffeting her, and then it was gone.
A tight fist punched inside Kat’s chest.
For a moment she wondered what it must feel like to be the woman who could elicit that kind of all-consuming reaction from a man like this one. Or indeed from any man. And then she shot down that line of thought because, for her, only grief lay down that particular road.
‘Good,’ she managed curtly. ‘So now that’s established, this way, please.’
He dipped his head curtly and, with a final check of the door of the private room, he followed her down the corridor to another treatment room as Kat heaved a relieved sigh—at least it would keep her on the right side of Ayanna Franklin, the hospital’s head of PR. But then, as the door closed behind them and Kat swung back only to find Logan watching her, she realised her relief was short-lived. Because she felt his gaze everywhere, heating her in places she had forgotten even existed.
Enough.
Hadn’t she just established that he had someone in his life who he cared for? And who cared for him? So what was she playing at, imagining he was looking at her?
Furious with herself, Kat straightened up, as though the action could somehow shake off the alien sensations.
No matter what happened, she wasn’t going to go off lusting after some unavailable male. It was time to stop talking, get her head down, and concentrate on the task she was supposed to be doing—tending to her patient.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she asked.
The information in her notes was quite good medically, if a little scant in parts which might have revealed unnecessary information pertaining to the identity of his group. But that was no surprise given that Seattle General was renowned for maintaining the privacy of its highest-profile celebrity clients. Even a B-lister with a sprained wrist from a minor vehicular incident could have the media splashing the story over the front pages on a slow news day.
‘I’m not after any information relating to your...companions,’ she said carefully. ‘I just want to hear your recollection of events.’
Knowing how much Logan recalled would give her some idea of whether he might have sustained any unreported head injuries. Although there were no evident signs of anything on his skull. No bleeding from his ears. No indication of disorientation.
Except in herself.
‘We were traveling at approximately seventy kilometres per hour on a relatively straight section of road when we entered a dip with unseen black ice, and the vehicle slid, hit the curb, left the ground and rolled twice before coming to a halt on its side.’
‘All right.’ Kat nodded.
‘I exited the vehicle through the side window and, having assessed the likelihood of the gas tank leaking and the vehicle bursting into flames, I took my...companion with me. I assessed him for injuries, saw the laceration to the femoral artery. The driver, Giorgio, made sure our female companion got out safely, too.’
‘Good...’
‘I tended to the femoral laceration for approximately twenty minutes during which time the medics arrived and transported us to the hospital.’
‘By using your knee over the proximal right iliac artery to slow flow velocity to the CFA.’
‘Is that a question or a statement?’
She blinked at him.
‘Both, I suppose. Okay, I need to check your pupils and then I’d ask you remove the top half of your clothing.’
For now there was no need to ask him to remove the trousers. Unlike the ripped, blood-soaked shirt, the only mark on the trousers was where his knee had been rammed into the older man’s injury.
Worse, and more shamefully, she wasn’t sure she had quite psyched herself up for the sight of him and his thunderbolt thighs. Still, as her eyes watched him shrug smoothly out of his jacket and shirt, Kat found her mouth going drier by the second until, finally, she was faced with the most chiselled, masculine chest she’d ever seen.
Muscles on muscles. Lean, hewn and flawless, leaving her heart in a dither over whether it could pound out the most energetic beat of its life or whether it should simply stop altogether.
He was surely too impossibly perfect to be real.
Her mouth felt parched, her skin tight and hot, and even her fingers were tingling with the ridiculous urge to reach out and touch those ridges and contours. And then he turned slightly and she caught the jagged edges of a scar; an old bullet wound by the looks of it.
A tiny imperfection, which somehow made him all the more beautiful, and rare.
Her guess would be that he was some kind of a bodyguard for whoever the VIP in that room was. And she couldn’t shake the knowledge that she was going to need all her professional level-headedness to get through the next half-hour or so in one piece.
Logan didn’t like it when the nurse—Kat, her manager had called her, hadn’t she?—fell so quiet. It made him wonder what was going on behind those expressive eyes.
And then he didn’t like it that he even wondered such a thing. She was pretty enough...more than pretty, interesting, he conceded grudgingly. But there was no reason for him to notice.
Look what had happened the last time he’d really noticed a woman. A trickle of bitterness threatened to weave through Logan, but moments before it did, it was instead washed out by a crashing wave of love. Love in the form of one four-year-old little boy.
Whatever hassle and grief Sophia had brought into his life, he wouldn’t change a single moment of it if that meant losing the best thing he’d ever known—his son, Jamie.
‘So...’ The nurse cleared her throat. ‘Let’s get you sorted so you can get back to standing outside your...companion’s door. I understand from the notes that you aren’t from Seattle.’
‘Actually, I am. Born and raised,’ Logan surprised himself by saying.
‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘You’re back, visiting?’
‘Something like that.’
It was a stock response, so why was he having to clamp his mouth shut from saying anything more? What was it about this woman that almost had him opening up in a way that he never did? That had him about to tell her that he was home for good? Finally.
He was bringing Jamie from Isola Verde to the USA, to the very place where Logan himself had grown up, to try to give his son—or, if he was honest, both of them—a fresh start.
Ironic that today was supposed to have been his last day ever as royal bodyguard to Roberto Baresi—the King of Isola Verde. More than that, though, King Roberto was a good man, underneath it all. And he’d been more than just an employer to Logan. Over the years, the older man had been a kind friend, too. Now he was in that room along the hall. Possibly dying. The fallout was potentially catastrophic—and not merely the political ramifications.
Logan hated that he was stuck here, in another room, not doing his job as bodyguard to the King.
Not that he could tell this nurse—Kat—why he’d been so reluctant to leave his employer’s door, of course. The fact was that only a handful of people in this hospital were aware of exactly who their VIPs were, and even fewer of them were aware of the connections the Baresi family had to one of Seattle General’s own consultants.
Not that he was about to be the one to spill that secret.
As the adrenaline rush that had carried him through the car crash, and the aftermath, was beginning to wear off, the sudden realisation that he’d been inches from losing his employer—and maybe even his own life—on the very last day of his assignment hit him.
And then what would have happened to Jamie?
The ugly question was there before he could snuff it out.
When the nurse had brought up the idea of someone out there who loved him, the rush of love and fear had been overwhelming. What would Jamie have done if that car crash had gone a different way?
In that one instant, his four-year-old son would have lost his father. Wasn’t it enough that, for all intents and purposes, he’d never had a mother? What kind of start to life would that have been? His mother abandoning him and his father being killed because of a stupid area of black ice?
Jamie’s grandparents would have looked after him, of course, as they had so often during the whole of his little life. But it was hardly the same.
Logan slammed his mind shut. But not fast enough to stop something dark, and ugly, from reaching out with its long, twisted fingers and scraping through him. He hadn’t been the best father he could have been, away so much with work. But now he’d quit as a royal bodyguard. Now he was coming back to Seattle for a new life.
Not just back to where he’d been born and raised. But back to his medical career. Back to being a doctor.
As much as he’d known that being a bodyguard instead of a doctor had been the right call—his head hadn’t been in the right space after that last, hellish tour of duty—a part of him had also missed the rush of the medical environment.
He just hadn’t anticipated that his first tour of Seattle General’s ER would be as a patient and not as a doctor.
Which was why it was professional curiosity, he told himself, and nothing else, that kept his eyes glued to Kat as she bustled crisply around the room. Selecting kit, arranging things, making certain she had everything just so, like she was on some kind of mission.
‘Right, I’m going to run my hands over you to check for any areas of discomfort.’
‘Be my guest,’ he commented.
It was completely out of character, but the words had come out before he could bite his tongue. Then Kat wrinkled her nose and he couldn’t have said how, but he knew that was her trying to conceal her embarrassment.
He found that oddly appealing.
And then she began to check him over and his mind emptied until all he could think of was the feel of her hands all over his body. Without warning, something rushed him and he realised that he had yet another reason to want to get out of this room—away from Kat, the ER nurse—as soon as he possibly could.
‘Have you any pain?’ she asked.
‘None,’ he lied.
He could tell she didn’t buy it for a moment.
‘Things will go a lot faster if you’re honest.’ She eyed him critically, a flash of that feistiness again, and he didn’t know why but it made something kick deep inside him.
Focus.
‘What makes you think I am?’
‘Perhaps the fact that you have tiny shards of glass in your skin,’ she retorted, and as his eyes moved to her lips again, he wondered what she’d do if he leaned forward and caught that tart mouth with his. ‘But we can deal with those.’
What the hell was wrong with him?
Logan gritted his teeth.
‘Just clean them up and I’ll be out of here.’
He might have known she’d ignore that.
‘Now the main pain,’ she continued. ‘Is it your back? Your shoulder? Your neck?’
It was all three, if he was going to be honest. The right side of his neck and shoulder were sore, and his head was beginning to pound, as though the pain was running from his back right up to the top of his skull.
Mainly because of the car crash, though he suspected it wasn’t helped by the need to fight this sudden, wholly inappropriate attraction to a woman who was not only his nurse now but who would be his colleague in a matter of weeks.
Nonetheless, his right hand and arm were beginning to stiffen up, and even his right leg was aching. His professional assessment was that he’d torn his trapezius muscle. He imagined it was her assessment, too.
‘Like I said,’ he ground out, ‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re clearly medically trained,’ she said archly, ‘so I think we both know what’s likely happened. And that you aren’t fine.’
‘Fine, I have a bit of whiplash, but there’s little that can be done but give it time to heal. Fortunately, I’m fit and healthy, so I should be okay.’
‘There’s downplaying it, and then there’s that,’ she commented. ‘But if that’s the way you want it, that’s up to you. Either way, I’m going to be sending you to CT to ensure there are no internal injuries.’
But there was something in her tone that got under his skin. A compassion that he knew he didn’t deserve.
What had happened to him had been luck rather than good judgement. He’d risked his life because that was his job. When, really, his main job these days should be his young son.
Because he got to go home to his son. How many of his former army buddies had lost that luxury when they’d lost their lives?
And what was it about today, the accident, this woman, that was all coming together to pry open a dark box inside him that needed to be kept locked? For ever.
‘Agreed,’ he ground out, standing up in a rush and taking some perverse pleasure at the shock on her face.
Let her wonder what had suddenly made him apparently take his health so seriously.
As far as he was concerned, he’d done so because she’d reminded him of the little boy who was at his grandparents’ home, and even now was waiting for Logan to come home so that the two of them could start their new life together. Jamie had already lost enough with a mother like Sophia, but what the hell would his boy have done if anything really had happened in that car accident?
He was here to make sure that nothing happened to him for his son’s sake. He was here because it was the responsible thing to do, to let this nurse check him over to ensure there were no internal injuries that the adrenaline was concealing. He was here because the quicker he let her assess him, the quicker he could get back to King Roberto’s room, and make sure that he hadn’t lost his employer—and friend—on the last day of his job.
He was most certainly not here because any part of him was intrigued by this Kat woman.
No part of him at all.
