Chapter 3
Reed
I followed Daniel back through the corridors of the main station building. He pointed things out as we made our way down to the supply store.
After he had made me sign paperwork to transfer my medical care to him, because apparently I was doing an “abominable” job of taking care of my health, he had declared that I needed a minimum of six hours of sleep.
In the middle of the day.
We were on our way to gather some supplies so I could shower in the clinic’s en suite bathroom and then complete my mandatory beauty sleep, as ordered by my husband.
Daniel paused in a doorway beside a large room. I looked past him into the space.
“And this?” I asked.
“Secondary lounge.” He leaned against the doorframe. “You grab something from the store and come here when you need a minute. Main cafeteria is further down. You’ve already seen it, I am sure.”
“Yep. The chef gave me a cupcake. Best one I’ve ever had.”
Daniel smiled. “He’s kind of famous for that.
” He pushed off the doorframe and continued down the corridor, talking as he walked.
“When I first got posted here, I assumed the food would be terrible. Months without fresh vegetables. I figured it was inevitable. Then I met Theo and understood that he was more than just a chef.”
“Food must become a big deal when you’re isolated like this for months on end,” I said. “It stops being about nutrition.”
“Exactly.”
“Remember our army cook during deployment?”
“How can I forget?” Daniel smiled. “John was very good, but that was temporary. A few days, a few weeks, a month at most. Here, you are guaranteed to be stuck. Months at a stretch, nothing else to do except research. Every celebration, every marker of time passing—it all runs through food.”
“So the chef is more like a family cook-therapist-grandma all rolled into one?” I asked.
He breathed a chuckle. “Not sure about grandma.” He nodded at a doorway as we passed. “That’s the station store. We will go in via the back door.”
“It’s closed?” I looked back. No one was at the counter. “I don’t see anybody.”
“Runs on the honor system.” Daniel kept walking. “We’re too small a station. Technically, I’m the storekeeper.”
I glanced back at the store as we passed it.
Calling it a store was generous. It was a closet-sized space—shelves stacked with snack boxes and a handful of other items, a small cash box sitting open on the counter.
Even as I watched, two women in bright red parkas came laughing down the corridor, grabbed a few boxes of snack bars, dropped money into the cash box, and walked out like this was the most normal thing in the world.
He led me inside the space. As he picked items off the shelf, he kept pointing things out to me. “Don’t worry about expiration dates. Those don’t work here. By the time most things arrive by ship, it is already months later.”
I picked up a granola bar and looked at its wrapper. “I’m beginning to realize just how radically different life is here.”
“When did you get posted here?” he asked.
He gestured for me to follow him back to the clinic.
“It’s my seventh day today,” I replied, smiling at a station staff member as we passed each other in the corridor.
The man looked at us with open curiosity.
Daniel abruptly stopped walking, and I almost knocked him off his feet, bumping into him. He stared up at me.
“Just seven days?”
The smell of his citrus hair gel wafted into my nose. At our heights, his head came just below my chin. The perfect height to tuck him into my embrace.
If he would only let me.
He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, the sleeves precisely rolled up to his forearms, buttoned up to his throat, wearing thin-wire glasses just like I remembered. He had always looked out of place among our unit of soldiers. A doctor was rare enough in a clandestine special ops mission.
But it was more than that. It was his personality.
His neatly combed thick dark hair, always parted to the side, his delicate bone structure due to his part-Asian heritage, his gold-rimmed, thin-framed glasses that somehow managed to survive bullets, dust, and death, and just the way he carried himself.
Like a prince despite being covered in dust and blood in a tiny war-torn country.
“Reed?”
I blinked. “Ah, yes. Your call was my first rescue gig here.”
“Did you know…?” His voice dropped to a whisper, though there was no one around except us in the corridor.
I nodded. “I did. Been trying to track you down for the last four years. I looked for you everywhere. Across all of the U.S.”
Daniel’s beautiful brown eyes went wide. Peace-time Daniel looked even more royal.
I bent down and spoke low enough for only his ears.
“I have missed you, my prince.”
His call sign was Prince because we teased him about his immaculate hygiene in the middle of a war. The joke was on us, though. It turned out that the man had nerves of steel underneath that smooth exterior. Something my Australian unit realized soon enough.
You come to know a man’s character pretty quickly when he is holding your lieutenant’s heart in his bare hands through an open chest cavity while simultaneously instructing you in a calm voice on how to stop carotid artery bleeding.
Every man in my unit, all special-ops-toughened warriors, had ended up owing our lives to Prince and respecting the hell out of our “cute” American physician.
His breath hitched deliciously.
“Reed.”
I was no fucking poet, but my name on his tongue right then felt like a benediction.
I wanted to kiss him so badly it was a physical ache. But we had unresolved tension, and I needed to chill. I knew my husband. He was methodical and deliberate. He didn’t rush into anything.
I wanted us back.
The way we used to be.
I was doing everything in my power to get him there, and the way he had been responding to me had me wanting to fucking cry with joy.
However, Daniel was a man of legendary restraint. I had to follow his lead. One thing was clear to me.
He still cared.
Now that I had found him, I was locked on like a missile to a target. I was never letting him go again.
Back inside his clinic, he shoved me unceremoniously into the bathroom with stern instructions to take the sleeping pills afterward. The shower felt cool against my heated skin. I wrapped a hand around my cock. I had been semi-hard the entire time I had been with Daniel.
Closing my eyes, all I had to do was bring his image to mind.
Daniel had long, slim fingers and a surgeon’s steady hands.
During our deployment, he had applied the same methodical attention to my body as he did to everything else.
But it wasn’t his touch alone—it was the way he lost all composure when we fucked.
My dick thickened in my hand, and my head hung between my shoulders as I rubbed one out frantically. It wasn’t enough, and it left me just as starved for his touch, but it would have to do for now.
Afterward, dressed in fresh clothes, I took the pills he had left on the bedside table and collapsed into the clinic bed. Most beds were too small for my frame. This was no exception, but thankfully, it wasn’t so small that my feet dangled.
He had been keen as a hawk and caught right off the bat that I had been having trouble sleeping. I was highly functional, or else they wouldn’t have cleared me for Antarctica. Only Daniel knew my baseline readings.
And yes, I had been sleep-deprived, but that was just a side effect. My “diagnosis” was that I was heartsick.
For my husband.
For the man who married me four years ago and then disappeared off the face of the earth.
***
Thirty meters out, a cluster of red parkas moved across the dock by Waypoint Station. Two of them crouched over some equipment while a third pointed to something on the horizon. A team was getting ready for an evening launch.
I sipped my coffee as I watched the Zodiac leave the dock, the outboard engine cutting a low mechanical buzz across the flat water, trailing a thin white wake that closed behind it in seconds.
It reached the first cluster of ice, slowed down, navigated between two chunks, then kept going.
It grew smaller. The engine sound faded until there was only the cold.
In the distance, the Antarctic sun hung low over the horizon, its golden glow reflected off gigantic icebergs.
I lifted the coffee to my lips and let my gaze drift left along the shoreline, past the corner of the building, to the stretch of flat, compacted ice behind the station.
My chopper sat on the ice. It was navy blue—a deep metallic finish that caught the sun and held it.
The body was compact, a single round bubble at the front where the cockpit glass curved down to meet the nose, the tail extending back in a long, tapered line.
Two short landing skids sat level on the ice.
She was absolutely stunning.
“Sorry.” Daniel exited the building behind me and walked up to me. “I was waiting for your blood work to be transmitted from your station. The internet is being particularly slow today.”
A smile slowly pulled at one corner of my mouth.
I couldn’t help it. He was so earnest and yet so easily flustered by my presence.
While I had taken a long six-hour nap, Daniel seemed to have regained some of his footing.
He had even agreed to accompany me on my maintenance trip, which I was taking as a good sign.
“What’re you smiling at?” he glared.
I shook my head. “Nothing. Ready for the tune-up?”
He nodded, and we walked together toward my bird, ice crunching under our boots.
“This is new,” he said, his breath coming out in white puffs. The temperature had fallen sharply during my six-hour slumber. “You didn’t need to tune up the military birds back… back when we were deployed.”
“Different environments, different protocols. Down here in the cold, the engine oil gets thick as paste if she sits too long. So I need to warm her up periodically. If I skip a cycle, the rotor head seals stiffen up and the pitch control linkages stop moving cleanly.”
“Oh.”
“Antarctica doesn’t forgive easily, Daniel.” I glanced down at him.
And neither do you, but I let that go unsaid.
He must have sensed it, though, because he frowned and looked up at me with questioning eyes.
I put down the gearbox I had been carrying in one hand and pulled the sliding door open on the side of the helicopter. The metal track ground against the cold.
Quickly, I ducked inside, making sure everything was safe. Satisfied, I popped back out and gestured toward the cockpit.
“Get in. And climb over to the other seat.”
Daniel grabbed the doorframe with both hands and hauled himself up off the ice, but his boots slid on the smooth skid rail. He pulled harder, fighting the cumbersome parka and the awkward angle of the door. He wasn’t a short guy, but he was shorter than me.
I chuckled at his fumbling and placed my large hands on his ass, pushing him in.
He landed in the seat with considerably less dignity than he usually displayed, accompanied by a yelp.
“Asshole,” he grumbled before crawling over the seat to the next one.
I laughed and pulled myself easily into the pilot’s seat and slid the door shut with a solid thunk.
The cockpit was small. Two seats side by side with no gap between them, close enough that his shoulder pressed against mine when I reached across to the instrument panel.
Everything in front of us was within arm’s reach—a dense cluster of gauges and dials in the center, two digital screens below them, switches running in rows above our heads.
Daniel looked right at home in the co-pilot’s seat.
I wrapped a hand around the tall black lever rising from the floor between my legs and eased it up a fraction. “Remember this?”
“Too well.” He shuddered as if reliving the memory from four years ago when he had to learn how to fly. I didn’t know if there were any other surgeons who could fly, but my Daniel was special.
“Want to touch it?”
“Never again.” He looked at it like it was a snake.
I laughed again and felt warm all over.
“How long do you need to keep her running?” he asked.
“A few minutes.”
He nodded and turned to look out the cockpit window. I followed his gaze to the dock, where another team was launching a Zodiac.
The instrument panel lit up—needles swung to their positions, numbers populated the digital screens, indicator lights blinked amber, then settled to green one by one.
“Looks good to me,” he commented.
“You still remember it!”
“Not something one forgets easily.”
“I bet you’re the only military doctor who knows how to read flight panels.”
“Didn’t learn it willingly,” he grumbled without any real heat.
I knew he secretly loved it. Daniel appeared so prim and proper that I doubted his station colleagues realized just how much of a maverick he was. He just executed his version of it quietly.
One of the parkas on the dock turned and waved at us. Daniel waved back. The man cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, but the cockpit’s closed windows and the slow whine of the engine starting up made it impossible for us to hear him.
Daniel gestured back, explaining we couldn’t hear him.
The man started giving us enthusiastic thumbs-ups, complete with hip thrusts.
“Oh my God.” Daniel groaned.
“Is that Viktor?” I asked.
“Who else? My roommate is slightly… unstable.”
I barked out a laugh. Daniel smiled and rolled his eyes.
“Is he still your roommate, though?” I asked, flipping switches.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought he and Sam were together now. Will he still be sleeping with you?”
Daniel suddenly fell silent, and his eyes widened.
I carried on as if I didn’t notice.
“I was told by the Station Chief that I was rooming with you.”
Daniel’s mouth dropped open.
I grinned and winked. “I’m looking forward to it.”
The look of horror on his face was bloody hilarious.