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he would most likely make things worse. They were duefor two days off now. By the time they had to see each other again, she might have forgotten his moodiness or at least forgiven his silence. They could just go back and pick up where they’d left off.
    Being colleagues who respected and cared about each other. Julia had called the soldier ‘mate’ and it was what she often called him as well. That’s what they were. Mates. Comrades. Not quite friends because that implied something a lot more personal than they had. Dangerous territory.
    The decision to leave things was a relief. The shower and change into warm, dry civvies was a comfort. Mac signed himself out and noted Julia’s signature already in the logbook. She’d left before him and that was good.
    Or was it?
    And why was her car still in the parking lot at the back of the station?
    Maybe she’d gone into the messroom to talk to the crew on night shift. Mac battled, briefly, with the desire to retrace his footsteps and find her but solved the problem by turning towards his own vehicle—a hefty, black four-wheel drive that filled his allocated space. Overflowed from it, in fact, despite him nosing it in until the front bumper virtually touched the moss of the old stone wall surrounding this area. There were trees on the other side of the wall. Big, dark shapes that created such intense shadows he didn’t see Julia until he was about to pull his driver’s door open.
    She was sitting on the wall. Wrapped up in a padded anorak and mittens. Waiting for him.
    â€˜ What the—?’
    Julia jumped down. Her hood fell away and she wrapped her arms around her body as she took a step forward. And then another. Until she was close enough for him to see that her hair was still damp despite the protection the hood had given her from the drizzle. Close enough for him to smell the shampoo she’d just been using.
    â€˜I couldn’t go home,’ she said quietly. ‘Not without knowing what rattled your cage so much tonight.’ Her gaze caught his and held it. ‘Was it something I did?’
    â€˜Good grief, no!’ Mac was transfixed. By the smell of…what was it? A mixture of soap and…almonds, that’s what it was. Even more by the warmth he could feel radiating off this small, determined woman. Most of all, by the way her eyes seemed to catch the glow from the lights behind him in the parking lot. He knew her eyes were blue but right now they were just huge and dark and full of concern.
    â€˜It…it was the job,’ he told her. ‘It…got to me.’
    â€˜Of course it did.’ A tiny nod advertised that Julia had already come to that conclusion. ‘There’d be something wrong if it didn’t.’ She frowned now, glancing down and lowering her voice. ‘But why couldn’t you talk about it? Like we always do?’
    Mac opened his mouth to offer the same excuse of exhaustion. Or to say he’d been asleep but it was obvious she knew he would be lying. She was looking up at him again and he could see plainly that she knew he hadn’t been asleep. She’d seen through him in the truck and she was seeing through him now. Right intohis head. Into his heart. There was no escape and, suddenly, Mac didn’t want to find one.
    â€˜That woman,’ he heard himself saying. ‘She…reminded me of someone.’
    â€˜Ahh.’ The sound was long. It contained complete understanding that there was—or had been—a woman of great importance in his life. Far more important than herself.
    Mac could actually see the thought process going on in the way she was standing so still she wasn’t even blinking. The almost imperceptible backing away he could sense. The way her lips were parted a fraction as her mind worked.
    And that slight parting of her lips was Mac’s complete undoing.
    She was so wrong to put herself down in any way but that was