Page 194 of The Girlfriend Clause
She didn’t feel anything like an employee.
And I still couldn’t get her out of myhead.
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 oftown—
The phone rang again.Bonnie.
“Forgot to say. I’ve got you a meeting with the MHRA. Well, Hugo has. At ten.”
Gameon.
“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 realtime.
“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.
