Reclaiming His Heart (Polar Love Stories #3)

Chapter 1

Daniel

Waypoint Research Station

Antarctica

‘Austral Summer’

Dec 7th.

Ghosts were not real, yet I was seeing one.

I was a NASA researcher and physician living on a remote station in Antarctica, studying how humans coped with extended isolation. Turned out, I was coping the worst. Because what else could explain the apparition that had just walked in through the doors of my clinic?

A tall man dressed in an aviation suit stood looking at me.

“I’d have done the same for Dr. Park,” he said.

That was my name. Yes. He was talking about me. Specifically, he was talking about how he would risk life and limb to rescue me, should the need ever arise.

Apparitions didn’t talk this clearly. Obviously, the only explanation was that my mind had finally broken.

There was a precedent for this sort of thing. Under extreme circumstances, the human mind could create powerful mirages. Years of collecting data on everyone who passed through Waypoint Research Station had shown me the tremendous power of human longing.

I took a deep breath. No need to panic. I could fix this. I just needed to—

He started walking toward me, and I stopped breathing.

A warm, calloused hand landed on my cheek, jolting me to my core. There were voices all around. People were talking, but I couldn’t hear anything over the sudden roar of blood in my ears. This was not a hallucination. It was real.

Reed was here.

How was he here?

“Hello, my prince.”

My blood ran cold at the voice and then turned hot when the meaning landed.

My husband’s stupidly handsome face swam into view. The crooked nose, the broad grin, the piercing blue eyes that held me captive. The sheer bulk of the man was impossible to ignore.

Okay, time to panic. All systems were failing.

“Hey. Back up. The doctor is married.” Someone tried to pull him back.

“Yes,” Reed replied. His voice was low and unhurried. “The doctor is married.”

I watched him look at my friends, then glance back at me. Straight into my eyes and through my fucking soul.

“To me.”

I was going to pass out.

Or spontaneously combust.

Or just die.

“Daniel?” Viktor, my roommate, called from somewhere, but I couldn’t find the words.

I was having trouble even forming thoughts.

My prefrontal cortex had gone offline. Cortisol was probably shooting through the roof.

I should be capturing this data right now, but apparently, I was not functional enough to do that.

For years, I had managed to survive without him just fine, and now, in less than five minutes, Reed had reduced me to a mess. How dare he show up in my carefully planned life?

I had a system in place, dammit. I woke up at the same time, showered at the same time—much to my roommate’s chagrin—ate the same breakfast daily, and followed my routine to a ‘T’.

Reed’s hand fell away from my face as he turned to answer one of the four men witnessing this great disaster unfolding on my own turf—my own clinic. The loss of his touch was immediate. I felt as though I had been plunged into the cold Antarctic waters.

I stole a glance at my friends. Yeah. It was bad, all right. They were all staring at me.

“What the fuck,” Viktor mouthed at me.

Sure, I wore a wedding band, but no one knew I was married to a man. In the deepest recesses of my heart, the one I had locked and thrown away the key to years ago, lived my unrequited and terribly inappropriate longing for a man I had no business thinking about.

“You are married to a man? You have a husband? A man husband?” Viktor was still asking me inane questions. He was losing his mind. “Looking like that?”

Reed laughed at Viktor’s babbling. Uh, God. The way he laughed—the sound of it seemed to reverberate through the very spaces inside my ribcage. His annoying habit of whispering in my ear, warm breath against my face, always gave me goosebumps. So stupid of me.

Worst of all were his hands—those large hands on me had been my undoing. Everything about him was raw and magnetic. And I hated it so much.

I’d always been a calm and level-headed man. The surgeon people depended on. The station doctor everyone confided in. The friendly colleague everyone liked, yet no one truly knew.

Reed, though? He had zero respect for systems. He seemed to think life was a runway and, if he just ran fast enough, he would take off just like the planes he flew.

The problem was that, a long, long time ago, I had been swept away by this ludicrous man and his indomitable spirit.

He had shown me highs that I would never reach again.

I had once felt loved—no, no, no, it was no use going there. It was all a different life. A different era. That had been four years and four months ago. Since then, we had not talked. And now he was here. Surely, a man was allowed to freak out under these circumstances?

“Doc?” Viktor’s newly affirmed boyfriend, Sam, walked up to me.

Like me, he was a quiet man. He seldom expressed his feelings. And also like me, he had been caught up in the hurricane that was his longtime friend, now boyfriend—Viktor. Perhaps I should conduct a new study on this pattern.

“Doc?” he repeated.

“Yeah?” I replied. It came out as a croak. How embarrassing.

Sam glanced at me, then at Reed, and back at me. “I have only one question for you. Do you feel safe with this guy?”

“Oh. Umm. Yes, I do.”

I didn’t need safety from anything or anyone. I wasn’t a man easily scared, but did I feel safe with Reed Harmon? Yes. The safest I had ever felt, which was ironic given how many times we had both been in life-and-death situations together.

Sam turned around and gestured to the other three men. “Let’s give Dr. Park privacy.” He ushered a protesting Viktor out of my clinic, who was still yelling, “What do you mean you have a husband?”

I watched Grant and Adrien leave with a smile and a nod, and then the clinic door closed with a thud, leaving me alone in the sudden silence.

With my husband.

Whoever said time stands still knew what they were talking about. Technically, time was, of course, not something that could stop. But the human brain did register time differently—I could attest to that now. So many new data points.

Time had sometimes slowed down for me—during dangerous missions, while serving in war, when I had come close to death numerous times—but never had time come to a standstill until now.

“What are you mumbling about?” Reed looked at me with that rakish smile that always turned me into a bumbling fool.

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I looked down at my tightly clutched iPad, at the screen, seeing nothing, and praying for the universe to swallow me. “Einstein’s general theory of relativity,” I muttered. “Time is a constant.”

A low laugh rumbled out of him. “Oh, Daniel, you haven’t changed a bit.”

I shook my head. No, I hadn’t. I was still a fool for him.

“What about time being constant?” He stepped right into my personal space.

I took a step back and bumped into the counter behind me. “Only black holes have been known to make time stop.” Not husbands.

He caged me and whispered in my ear. “Why does a black hole sound so dirty?”

I groaned, and despite my brainwaves going haywire, I snorted at his attempt at a joke. “You haven’t changed either,” I huffed.

When I’d met Reed during the special ops mission, I had immediately known that I needed to stay far away from him.

But my idiotic heart hadn’t gotten the memo that I wasn’t supposed to fall for him.

My rational side knew that he would tear through me like a tornado.

I couldn’t afford to have feelings for a man whose very existence was a mockery of my carefully planned-out life.

But no matter how much I tried, he had gotten under my skin. In that nightmare of a war-torn country where innocence was stripped away from all of us, Reed had been the only thing that had kept me feeling sane.

But that was then, and this was now. And I needed to remember professional boundaries. I took a deep breath. “So, how can I help you?”

I felt him stiffen—the first sign of his confident facade cracking.

“You know I’m the one who responded to your medevac call?”

I blinked. Of course, that was it. Here I thought he had somehow come back for me. Of course he hadn’t. Why did that realization hurt so badly, though?

“Oh. Of course.” I adjusted my glasses clumsily because there was no space. He was all around me. Looming over me. “Sorry. I have been busy with paperwork for that call and tending to Viktor and Sam. The two men you rescued.”

I looked up at him. “Thanks. Waypoint appreciates what you did.”

“And you, Dr. Park?”

I cleared my throat, fighting for my professionalism. “Of course, I do as well, Pilot Harmon. You must be here for your flight-clearance physical. It won’t take long.”

He didn’t answer immediately. He just kept looking at me. His eyes roamed all over my face as if greedily drinking in the view. His gaze lowered—down my throat, over my chest, hovering at my crotch.

Unbelievably, my long-dormant dick suddenly woke up.

This was mortifying.

He kept undressing me with his eyes until they snagged on my hand and froze.

I followed his gaze.

My ring.

Our wedding band.

Well, not really, because could you call a piece of scrap bent into a circle a wedding band? A wedding with no ceremony, a handful of bleeding soldiers as witnesses, and bombs and bullets as background music was, after all, not a real marriage.

Our rings hadn’t matched. We’d never gone to a store together. No one had proposed or had dinner by candlelight. Our story wasn’t something my friends here would understand. That’s why I had never shared it.

I couldn’t help but look at his hand. When my gaze landed on his finger, my insides twisted so painfully that I gasped without meaning to.

There was no ring on Reed’s finger.