Forever Scarred (4 page)

“B
ut I’m not used to any of that sort of thing. I’m a personal assistant, a secretary, I can even do some filing and accounts, but I’m not an out-door person at all. None of the team are. We’re all a bunch of office staff and half of us are unfit and over forty too. Carter told us we would all be about resolving things through strategies and planning.”

Patrick looked over at her worried face.

“Well, he’s right up to a point, but don’t worry about it. You will all be fine Lucy. And age has nothing to do with it. You can’t possibly be a day over twenty five. I’m thirty seven myself. It is all about doing strategic working but there are other ways to use your brain that can be very helpful when in a team. We had to use these types of exercise all the time in the army. It’s the only way you can survive all the rubbish that gets shoved at you.” His voice was calm and she knew that he was trying to be reassuring.

“Huh!” She gave a small, unhappy grunt. “Maybe I need to hear that from the man that is going to be putting us all through this torture. I
really wish he had been able to stay for dinner.” She hadn’t caught Patrick’s small smile at something over her shoulder.  She dug her fork back into the pie, and then jumped as there was a quiet whisper in her ear.

“Your wish is my command, my Lady.
It’s all about the strategies.” Joe suddenly appeared at her side.

Lucy let out a small shriek of surprise and dropped her fork again as she pressed a delicate hand to her thumping chest, while Robbie let out a howl of laughter and shimmied his chair away from Lucy.

“Hey Joe, pull up a chair. Did you finish your thingy already?” He ran to fetch cutlery and placed it neatly on the table before sitting in his seat again.

Joe put his hand on the boy’s head and ruffled his hair,
then he took a chair from the side of the room and dragged it into the gap at the table.

“Yes, didn’t take as long as I thought it would.”

Ellen smiled as she dished out another huge piece of pie onto a plate and Patrick passed Joe a bowl of vegetables.

“Glad you could join us after all Joe. I take it everything is okay now?”

Joe gave his friend a swift nod.

“Yes,
sorry I wasn’t here earlier. It was just me being over-cautious as usual. You know how I can be when trying something new. I swear all the worrying is bad for the heart but I’m hoping the equipment will be up to the strain it’s going to go through.” He gave Lucy a sideways glance and Patrick’s smile widened.

“Yes, sometimes you just have to let things
just run their course.”

Ellen looked up at her husband, knowing that he wasn’t talking about any equipment they had on the estate. That was all of the very top quality and it wasn’t just Joe that knew how to maintain and use
it.

She rested her ha
nd over her stomach and rubbed where the baby had begun pressing again as she flicked her eyes around the table.

Lucy’s dimpled cheeks were flushed a becoming shade of pink and Joe was tucking
contentedly into his pie. His scarred, swollen face was as unreadable as usual, but his eyes were bright and sparkling and Ellen smiled to herself and crossed her fingers secretly.

Lucy’s appetite had suddenly come flooding back as Joe pulled his chair up beside her. He didn’t look in her direction, but she knew that he was observing her from the corner of his eye.

She picked up the dropped fork and lifted a tender piece of the succulent meat from under the mouthwatering pastry and slipped it into her mouth.

She was so glad that Joe had reappeared she hadn’t taken any notice of how silent he had been until now. It was the second time he had surprised her with his stealth and she wondered if his job had involved more than just mechanics while in the army.

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and looked over at Joe’s hand as he topped up her glass of wine before filling one of his own.

The knuckles and back of his hand was covered in a map of scar tissue but his fingertips looked perfect and his nails were short, clean and neatly filed. She chanced a glance up at his face again and took in all the bruising. It was just turning to the greenish purple stage. And then she looked lower, across the battered skin of his cheek to his full lips and jaw. It was almost odd how they were still almost perfect. She could see the slight cleft in the centre of his chin and his smoothly shaven jaw was hard and square. His lips moved gently as he ate and his tongue suddenly flicked out to reach a flake of pastry that had stuck to the generous arch of his top lip.

He was wearing a fresh linen shirt and
dark denim jeans. The waders had been removed but she couldn’t see below the top of the table to discover what replaced them. He had obviously had a quick freshen up while he was out of the Chateau and she wondered where he had gone to do it. The scent of his now familiar aftershave wafted over her and she took in a deep breath, filing her senses with the beautifully spicy scent.

Her heart
beat picked up yet again and she willed it to calm but it just wouldn’t. She said a shy thank you to him as he suddenly picked up her wine and passed it to her and then she looked directly into his sparkling blue eyes.

Joe stared right back at her, gauging her reaction to him, to his scarring, his misshapen nose, his replacement eyelids that never quite closed and his wax like forehead that showed no expression. He knew his face looked like a badly sewn patchwork quilt but she didn’t appear afraid of him, just slightly curious and he wondered if she would ask what had happened.

It wouldn’t be easy to explain. He had hard
ly known himself and as he was the only survivor of the catastrophe and he had never found out the full story. All he knew was that one minute he was looking inside the engine of their broken down AV, desperately trying to figure out what had gone wrong and how to fix it before they were caught up in some gun battle, and the next he was flat on his back in what he assumed was a bed with the most excruciating, burning pain racking his entire body.

The place had smelt of d
isinfectant and body fluid. He could hear soft beeping noises going on around him and had surmised that he was in a hospital somewhere, but he couldn’t be sure as he had been unable to see a thing.

He had tried to raise his hands to his eyes to clear the obstruction to his view but
the excruciating pain and a warning murmur as he felt a slight pressure on his forearms, told him to stop.

He had listened carefully
through the mind numbing pain that gripped him, and a cold fear had swept over him as a woman’s gentle voice told him that he had been covered in acid during a bomb attack and while they were positive that his legs would mend perfectly from where they had been broken by the force of the blast, they were still unsure that he would recover his sight. He was lucky to be alive as the rest of his team had been killed instantly so he was to keep still and stay quiet and to touch the button under his fingertip if the pain grew to be too much.

He had flicked a pain racked
fore-finger immediately and had felt the smooth surface of a plastic stud. He pressed it more firmly and had been rewarded by falling into a deep sleep a few moments later.  Much later he had woken to the sound of his mother weeping desperately at his side.

His hearing had become acute during the
weeks waiting for the leg pins and facial bandages to be removed permanently. The treatments between had been an unending round of torture, but almost miraculously his legs had mended perfectly and he had retained his sight and strangely enough his sense of smell too, which had amazed him when he had eventually been allowed stand up with the help of a pair of crutches, to look in the mirror at his ruined face.

His ravaged eyelids had been replaced with flaps of skin taken from his inner thighs
, his eyelashes and brows were transplanted black hair follicles from his forearms, but his cheeks were raw and pitted from the acid burn. His forehead hadn’t escaped either and was a now a wax like immobile sheet of skin from his inner forearm and his nose had all but disappeared but they promised that even that could be repaired in time.

He remembered feeling the
horror and the shock, even after he had been warned that it was going to be bad and for a long while he had wished that he had been blinded too so that he would never have to know how much he had changed.

The
only relief came in that his lips and chin had escaped the worst of the blast of acid. He had apparently thrown up his hands in an automatic reaction and though they had been coated with the vile burning fluid, the damage hadn’t been as noticeable. They had hurt like hell but had recovered more quickly than the rest of him.

His
treatment was ongoing. The recent operation to replace his nose had been deemed a success, and in many ways it was seeing that he now actually had one and could throw away his prosthesis that had looked false no matter what disguising tactics he had used, but the treatment had been painful in so many ways and nothing was ever going to restore his face to the way it had been before. He was glad he had finally decided that he couldn’t take any more.

He gave Lucy a quick smile which she returned easily and then dug back into his food.

While he had still been in the army things hadn’t been too bad for him but once out in the big wide world he had discovered a weird form of cruelty that he could barely describe. People didn’t even know they were doing it half of the time, offering stupid suggestions of bio oil and cosmetic surgery, while they could barely look him in the eye. Working with Patrick and David had helped his insecurities no end, but in others they were painfully evident.

His lack of female company was
one of the worst.

He was a red
blooded male and at twenty nine years old he had an almost overpowering urge to find a woman to share his life. He wanted someone who would love him for who he was and not one who was worried about what he looked like. It was a pity that his face was the first thing everyone saw. None of the women he had met previously could hold eye contact with him. They looked nervously at somewhere just over his shoulder or took endless amounts of time rummaging in their handbags while they spoke to him.

Lucy had certainly captured his attention on the looks front and while he had initially decided to cut and run, as soon as he’d reached his cabin
by the river, he realized what a fool he was being. He remembered Patrick talking about his own self-inflicted heartache. It had been a complete waste of his and Ellen’s time.

He quickly realized that hiding himself
away wasn’t giving her the chance to get to know him, to forget about the horrendously obvious scars that covered his face and the hidden ones that encased his heart. He had put the side of trout in the fridge, stripped and jumped into the shower for a quick spruce up and then raced back up to the Chateau.

Seeing Lucy sitting at the table
, her expression one of horror as Geraldine had given her a rundown of a few of the tasks they would be completing during the course, had made him smile. She was kidding herself if she thought she wasn’t the outdoorsy type. She just didn’t know it yet and he was determined that he was going to show her. Her silence in the woods had given her natural affinity with nature away. It was a rare gift to be able to hide oneself without alerting the birds or animals, and especially rare if he hadn’t been sure she was there.

He glanced over her once again as she took a
nother mouthful of the pie. Her lips moved delicately and the dimple peeped out as she chewed.

God! She was beautiful
!

She had changed out of her
formal suit and shirt and was now wearing a pair of soft linen trousers in a dark blue. Her shirt was made of the same material but in a gentle rose pink that matched the glow on her cheeks. Her hair was still swept up but even more of the tendrils had escaped the blonde mass and she kept blowing them gently as she tried to keep them out of her mouth as she ate.

He tried to be objective about it. There was really no chance that she would ever be more than a client and strictly speaking he should never try to become involved with one of their guests, but Lucy looked to be about twenty five, may
be a little older. She would know her own mind when it came to men, regardless of what he wanted to happen.

And he did want something to happen. He wanted it with an ache so deep he could scarcely breathe. Everything about her was enticing him. From the way she looked to her delicate scent
, from her clothes, to her fabulous body. She certainly wasn’t anywhere near fat but her body had curves to die for and she was tucking into her food as though she really enjoyed it.

But there was
n’t a thing he could do to make anything happen unless she made a move first. There was no way he could, what with the way he looked. She might be hiding the fact that she thought him repulsive and there was no way he could stomach the rejection if she refused him.

He put the last mouthful of delicious pie into his mouth and sat back in his chair, staring at her back and shoulders
thoughtfully, as she twisted the stem of the glass in her hand.