He nodded slowly and passed a hand over his jaw, working it as if he’d been clenching it the entire time. Leaning up in the bed, she could see that he wasn’t wearing a T-shirt. She looked at where his hand was still on her arm, along the tanned skin of his forearm, up to the powerful outline of well-honed muscles on his biceps, across his collar bone to the dusting of dark hair across a chest that made her mouth water and her guilt rise. She shouldn’t be checking him out. Not right now. Here he was in pain, and she was … on fire. Then his gaze returned to hers, intent and devastating.

She suddenly felt self-conscious. She’d gone to sleep in just the T-shirt and hadn’t thought to put anything else on, she’d been so worried about him. Now she pulled at the length of the T-shirt that reached her mid-thigh, completely unaware that the neckline then pulled low exposing the delicate v between her breasts.

‘Nightmare?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. I get them when it rains like this. It reminds me …’

‘Of the accident? I had them for a few years after too,’ she confessed.

‘Really?’

‘Mm hm,’ she said, rubbing her arms, and for the first time Henry could see the faint silvery traces of scars. Frowning, he took hold of her arms and ran his fingers over them, only belatedly questioning whether his touch would be welcome. Seeing the marks on her arms hurt. He’d managed to escape the accident almost untouched. Physically at least. He turned her hands in his, exposing the soft undersides of her forearms and noticing a red burn slashed just above her wrist.

‘That was from the kitchen,’ she said, twisting her hands back over. ‘And that one,’ she nodded to the other arm, ‘was from the oven. I don’t know a chef who doesn’t have the same marks.’ She smiled sadly and shrugged, her arms still within his hands. ‘I … I don’t usually wear short sleeves, but …’ She leaned her head towards her upper arms where the silvery traces spoke of a different hurt, ‘I got off easy,’ she said quietly. And he realized that she was comparing herself to Victoria, who had lost the possibility of having children, and Zoe in her wheelchair.

He shook his head. So much damage from that night. So much devastation and loss.

‘Tell me about the nightmares?’ she asked.

Such a simple question, such a hard one to answer. He wanted to say no. He wanted to turn away, but the sincerity in her eyes, the compassion … Flashes of the nightmare crashed through his mind. Shattered glass, Claudia, smiling, then screaming, his hand slammed against the car’s console, the sound of the revving engine and screeching tyres. He swallowed and blanked his mind against the images.