The General's Replacement Doctor Wife

Chapter Twenty-nine

If there was anyone who better understood the word scared, it was Olivia.

She had watched him risk his life a hundred times before, and every single time, her heart forgot how to beat.

But she couldn’t tell him that every mission he went on felt like watching him walk away from her with no promise of return, that every goodbye carried the weight of what if this is the last one.

However, as much as she hated how often he threw himself into danger, she could never truly resent it.

It was a part of him.

It was stitched into his bones, carved into his choices, written in the very way he lived. He didn’t run from danger. He walked straight into it as if it were simply another path meant for him.

He chose the military, and with that choice came missions that didn’t promise safety. And she understood that kind of choice more than most.

Because she had made one too.

Hospitals were not battlefields, but they came close. Blood still stained her hands. Lives slipped through her fingers no matter how tightly she held on to them.

She had chosen that life, just like he had chosen his. Maybe that was why she never asked him to stop. Because asking him to walk away from danger would mean asking him to stop being himself.

And she knew, painfully well, that she couldn’t do that to him, even if it meant living with this kind of fear every day.

Loving him meant she would always be scared. And still, she would never choose differently.

Olivia stopped avoiding his gaze and finally let herself drown in the depths of his dark eyes.

There was so much she wanted to say to him, enough to fill all the spaces in the world, yet none of it could escape the tightness in her throat.

Some feelings were simply too fragile to survive being spoken aloud. But if he could only read her eyes, then maybe he would understand.

“Olivia?”

Clayton’s hand rose to her cheek. She felt every hardened line beneath his fingertips. His hands were not gentle by nature, but when they touched her, they were always impossibly tender.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not,” she whispered instinctively, lifting her own hand to her cheek. Her fingers came away damp.

She was crying.

Hell.

She almost laughed. Her own body had betrayed her.

Maybe it was hormones.

“Why are you crying?” he asked more gently this time.

A small, shaky laugh escaped her lips. “I don’t even know.” It was the truth. She had no idea why she was crying.

Before she could stop herself, more tears spilled.

His arms pulled her into his chest, shielding her from every pain she had endured.

“You’ve been through a lot today,” he murmured into her hair, his hand moving up and down her back in a consoling manner. “It’s not easy to perform a four hour surgery and then watch someone try to kill the patient you fought so hard to save. You must be drained and exhausted.”

That must be it. Mental exhaustion, Olivia told herself. That had to be the reason she had become such a crybaby lately.

“I’m sorry, Olivia.”