Chapter 40 Liam
Liam
“I need you in the office by eight today, Liam.” Bonnie’s tone was clipped.
I muted the phone’s mic and spat toothpaste into the basin, then clicked it back on.
“I’ll be there.”
“Good. Because this nine thirty thing isn’t a good look.”
Christ. It was just once. I’d finally managed to talk Andrea into staying in bed with me a bit longer than usual on a workday. One workday.
Worth it.
Then we’d gone for coffee on the way.
She’d had a courgette muffin, and I’d wiped a bit of milk foam off her nose. She’d—
“Are you even listening to me, Liam?”
Right.
“We’ve got less than a week until the redundancies are confirmed and people find out who’s going,” she said. “After that, there’s no hiding. It doesn’t help if you’re swanning about like a lovesick schoolboy.”
“Bonnie, I—”
“Liam. I’m flat out. I’ve got to go through every single HR file in person to make sure we haven’t missed anything before we make the final announcement. I could really use you at the office.”
“Sorry. Look, I get it. I’ll be in soon.”
“Thanks.”
The line clicked off.
Andrea’s toothbrush—bright pink, ridiculous—was in a glass, completely out of place against the gray vanity. It made me smile.
It was a weird situation—dating someone who was technically your employee.
She didn’t feel anything like an employee.
And I still couldn’t get her out of my head.
She’d insisted we keep everything invisible at the office as much as possible, so we made the most of our time outside work. Coffees and dinners. Movies. A couple of shows. Lying on her couch together while Eliza clattered around the kitchen and Mr. Darcy tried repeatedly to sit on my balls.
Why the cat liked me so much, I had no idea. Drooling bastard was growing on me, though.
Andrea had even stayed over at mine a few times, although Mr. Darcy had stayed behind with Eliza.
Fuck. My place felt empty without her. Maybe I could get her to move in?
The cat would be an issue with the covenants, but perhaps her sister could help out?
She’d worked out how to do his injections now, at least.
If it came to it, we could look at getting somewhere else, maybe a place out of town—
The phone rang again. Bonnie.
“Forgot to say. I’ve got you a meeting with the MHRA. Well, Hugo has. At ten.”
Game on.
“That’s great news, Bonnie.”
“Yeah. I’ll brief you when you get in. Or can you talk now?”
I moved the phone from my face and rinsed my mouth.
“Sure.”
“They’re considering a temporary humanitarian exemption,” she said. “A bespoke emergency authorization.”
I leaned against the sink. “So … this lets us work around the usual restrictions? For field use?”
“Well … yes, but it’s not a slam dunk. They’re nervous about a controlled substance being handled outside hospitals.”
“Of course. Diversion, chain of custody,” I said. “It’s opioid based.”
“And powerful.”
“Which is the point for severe trauma.” Amputations. Burns. I closed my eyes briefly as an image slipped into my mind again. The dust, the heat, a small hand gripping my arm. “This is where it’s needed. Without proper analgesia, shock kills them before anything else does.”
You didn’t forget that once you’d watched it happen in real time.
“I know, Liam. But they’ll worry about delivery, too,” she said. “Anything designed for non-hospital settings. Field hospitals and medics … that’s where they’ll push back first.”
Because that was where good ideas usually died—anything too fragile or too expensive, too complicated to store.
I’d sat in enough rooms with clinicians and NGO logistics teams after discharge to know the pattern.
If something couldn’t survive heat, bad roads, and thin training, it didn’t survive at all.
But at least now we had an opening.
“Send me the brief, Bonnie,” I said.
I clicked off the call.
Off-label use was the easy part. Export controls, civilian handling, and political cover were the real barriers. Without MHRA sign-off, no NGO would touch it, and no insurer would underwrite it. It would never get through procurement.
But Novexia’s pathway was almost clear.
If we could supply Traumex at cost for humanitarian use—strip it back to a generic—the exemption was the last piece on the board, and that would mean a model that could survive procurement scrutiny and still reach the places profit normally ignored. And then, we’d be able to scale.
I hadn’t learned that in uniform or from my father.
I’d picked it up in the meetings I sat through after discharge, with clinicians, NGOs, procurement teams. Where helping more people usually meant earning less.
Novexia’s sales team was bloated—that much was obvious. I’d seen the same thing at the tech start-ups I’d invested in after uni.
The company had been built on gouging hospitals. The margins were obscene.
Losing that profit was going to hurt.
Something had to give.
*
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Definitely not.”
“Andrea … I spent a lot of money on this …”
She rolled over, then straddled me on the bed, pinning my arms to my sides and laughing as her hair fell into her face. Her breasts swung under the thin tank top, the shape of her bare nipples obvious through the white cotton.
Fuck. I was no match for Andrea without a bra on.
I faked a struggle for a while, then pushed her off easily and flipped her under me, holding her wrists against the duvet with one hand.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Jones, but I’m afraid you made a promise.”
I dragged the other hand down her neck and pulled the opening of the tank top down until my fingertip was just against her nipple.
“If you don’t agree, you will have to be punished …”
She shrieked with laughter and tried to push me off, but I pulled the top down farther until her breast slipped out.
“Fuck, Liam, okay, okay, I’ll do it.” Her eyes were wet with laughter, her cheeks pink.
“Good. We’ll continue this later.” I released her wrists with exaggerated formality and sat back. Fuck, she looks spectacular like this, lying with her hair spread across my pillows, shorts riding up her legs.
“Actually, we don’t have to wait till later,” I added, my gaze snagging on her breasts again. They were so full that even on her back, the shape of them was hypnotic.
“No, Liam, you’re right. I did promise.” She leapt up. “We can’t stay in bed all evening.”
Ah, yeah, we can.
If we didn’t have to go to work, I’d have stayed in bed all day and all evening.
But Andrea was about the only thing in my life I had absolutely no hope of controlling. If she was getting out of bed, so was I.
We’d already fucked twice today. I just couldn’t get enough of her—her soft skin, how she laughed when I made some stupid gag, the way her limbs folded around me, her warm, wet—
“Well, what do you think?”
I turned. She was wearing it—a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Snuggie, just for her.
“Jesus, woman, can you make anything look sexy?”
She gave me a twirl. “Now I can look as bad as you while we lie around together watching Netflix.”
“You look like a goddess.”
She laughed.
“So what first?” I asked. “Furniture, or When Harry Met Sally?”
“Hmm. I say furniture.”
She couldn’t receive deliveries at her place, and she didn’t have much space to put it together, so she’d had the chest of drawers sent to mine instead.
I’d told her I’d buy her whatever solid piece she needed, but she’d just looked at me with that pretend long-suffering look of hers and insisted she wanted the IKEA one.
Fair enough. If we could survive assembling something called a MALM together, we could probably survive most things.
I walked into the living room, noting the box on the floor.
I slit the tape cleanly and folded the cardboard back along its creases so it stayed open without tearing.
The panels came out first and went against the wall in descending order of size, edges aligned.
After that, the fittings—screws, dowels, cam locks—tipped into the upturned lid and separated into groups.
I set the Allen key beside my right knee, exactly where my hand would reach for it without looking.
“Bloody hell, Liam, are you assembling drawers or planning an invasion?”
“Mock if you like,” I said. “You’ll still get functional furniture.”
She kissed my head and watched as I unfolded the instructions and laid the page flat against the carpet. The diagrams suggested a simplicity that the parts did not immediately support.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“You can open the wine if you like,” I said. “Shouldn’t be long.”
I tried the first configuration, then adjusted it once, quietly. The cam lock resisted.
“Sure I can’t hold something or put something together?” she called from the kitchen. “I’ve done this a few times before.”
“Got it, thanks, babe,” I called back.
“I knew your engineering degree would pay off eventually.”
I aligned the panel again, inserted the dowel, and tightened the cam carefully, just as the printed instructions described. I found systems worked when you respected their order.
She walked back into the sitting room in bare feet and stood next to me, watching.
“I think that piece actually belongs with this thing,” she said, picking up one of the panels.
“Babe … could you just—” I had them in order for a reason.
The joint shifted half a centimeter and stopped, held in a position that was neither assembled nor loose, simply … incorrect.
“Did they not cover this at Oxford?” she asked, with an innocent smile.
“Right after the class on elevator safety mechanisms,” I muttered.
She took the panel from my hands, turned it once, and pushed the joint together until it seated cleanly.
“There,” she said.
I stared at it.
“Right. Of course. That was … my next move.”
“Obviously,” she said. “I just saved you time.”
She handed the panel to me and floated back toward the kitchen with her wine.
“Give me a shout if you get stuck again,” she called over her shoulder with a smirk.
We managed another drawer before abandoning the effort entirely, which felt like a reasonable level of adult responsibility for a Friday evening.