Shielded by the Ruthless Military Boss novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrist
Leah walks out on a date who bruised her wrist, answers a lockdown page, and watches a doctor she has never seen walk into the ICU under a colonel's eye.
Keaton Pollard closed his hand around my wrist in the middle of the country club dining room and did not let go.
Everyone at the long table watched him do it.
I had only stood up to leave.
"Sit down, Leah," he said, smiling at the table. "You're being dramatic."
Earlier he had told his father's partners that I would quit nursing after the wedding.
We had met two hours before that.
My mother had set the whole evening up.
She had picked the dress, the restaurant and the man.
"I haven't agreed to a wedding," I said.
"You don't have to agree to it tonight."
His thumb pressed into the bone, and he turned it a little.
My phone buzzed on the tablecloth beside my water glass.
It was my mother.
Don't worry about the house. Keaton's father and I have it all handled. Smile.
I read it with my wrist in his fist.
Dad had been dead three years and had left us a second mortgage.
My mother had been charming people at this club ever since, so nobody would notice.
"Let go of me," I said.
"Your mother and I have an understanding," Keaton said, quietly now, only for me. "Sit."
A woman across the table looked at her plate.
The man beside her looked at his watch.
Nobody said anything.
My phone buzzed again, and this time the screen was red.
CODE ATLAS. Base lockdown. All clinical staff report to your unit immediately.
I had been a nurse for eleven months and had never seen that message.
"That's work," I said. "I'm leaving."
"You're not going anywhere," Keaton said. "Your mother will be humiliated."
I turned my wrist against his thumb, the way the hospital's self-defense class teaches new staff, and I pulled.
It came free.
The skin was already going purple in a band.
So I stepped out.
I walked the length of the dining room in the green dress my mother had chosen, and nobody stopped me.
Keaton called after me. "Leah. Leah! I'll call your mother."
"Call her," I said, and I kept walking.
The gate at Fort Marlow was closed when I got there, with two soldiers and rifles behind it.
I held up my badge and my wrist together, because I couldn't tell which would work.
The badge did.
Clover was waiting inside the hospital doors with a set of scrubs over her arm.
She is my best friend, and she knows every rumor in the building before it happens.
"You look like a prom date," she said. "Change. Quick."
I pulled the scrubs on in the supply closet.
When I came out, she saw my wrist and stopped.
"Who did that?"
"A man my mother likes."
"Leah."
"Later."
The charge nurse gave out assignments in the hall.
Nobody told us what Atlas meant.
We were told the doors were locked, the floors were sealed, and nobody entered or left the unit without a name on the list.
"Marsden, ICU, bed four," she said. "A lieutenant from the legal office. Car crash, stable. You stay with him."
"Why does a lieutenant need a list?"
"Because the base commander said so."
The ICU was quiet except for the monitors.
A paper cup was waiting on the station, and I picked it up without thinking.
It held black coffee with two sugars.
It was marked in block capitals: INTERN.
Every night shift I worked, there was one waiting for me.
Clover said it came from the Army liaison, and I had never asked what that meant.
I drank it standing up.
Then I went into bed four.
The lieutenant lay still with a ventilator tube and a bandaged head.
At the foot of his bed stood a man in uniform, and he did not turn around when I came in.
He was tall, with gray at his temples.
A scar ran along the back of his left forearm, and he stood with his hands behind his back.
The name tape on his chest said Kerrigan.
He was a colonel.
"Nurse," he said.
"Leah Marsden, sir. I'm assigned to this bed."
He turned then, and I forgot what I had come in to do.
His gray eyes went to my face and then straight down to my wrist.
"Ice it," he said.
"I will."
"Who did that?"
"A date, sir."
He nodded once and looked back at the bed.
I checked the lines and the numbers, and my hands were not quite steady.
The door opened behind me.
A man came in wearing a white coat that was a little too long in the sleeves.
His badge read Dr. R. Ames.
He gave me a nod and a smile that showed a chipped front tooth, and he walked straight to the head of the bed.
I had worked this unit for eleven months, and I knew every doctor on it.
I had never seen him.
The colonel didn't look up.
"Nurse," he said, very calmly. "Is that man on your list?"
I looked at the clipboard.
He wasn't.
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