Laura's Wolf (Werewolf Marines) (19 page)

That truth cut through her like a knife in the heart. He liked her, she knew. He was attracted to her, that was obvious. But love?

I’m leaving you,
he’d said, and
I don’t want to lead you on.

Laura didn’t even know when she’d fallen in love with him, but she couldn’t deny it, any more than she could deny the truth of his feelings for her. She loved him, but he didn’t love her. He’d helped her, but she couldn’t help him. And that was all there was to it.

Roy was genuine and trustworthy and honorable. He was a man whose friends would do anything for him—a man who was worthy of their loyalty. She was the opposite of that. Of course he couldn’t love her. She’d been a fool to ever imagine otherwise.

Laura blinked back the tears that threatened to spill over. No one could
make
another person love them, and she wouldn’t humiliate herself by pleading her hopeless case. She’d do what she could for him, because he deserved that, and then she’d walk away with her dignity intact.

Roy emerged from behind the boulder and walked back to the car, unsteady, shoulders hunched. Laura offered him the water bottle, trying not to look into his eyes. She was afraid she’d start crying if she did.

“Thanks.” He rinsed out his mouth several times, leaning on the open door and spitting on the road, then slumped down in the passenger seat with his head tipped back and his feet resting on the muddy ground.

While he was recuperating, Laura did her best to stomp on her emotions. Dumping them on him would only embarrass her and put him in the awkward, painful position of having to turn her down
again
.

When she was certain that she had herself under control, she asked, “Do you still want to do this?”

“If you’re still willing to drive.” With a shaky smile, he added wryly, “I won’t mess up your car. I don’t think it’s physically possible for me to throw up any more.”

“That is
not
what I was thinking,” Laura retorted. But she couldn’t say any of what she
was
thinking.

I don’t want to make this harder than it already is,
he’d said. The least she could do was return the favor.

“I’m worried, that’s all,” she said. “What does it feel like for you? Is it really bad motion sickness, or something else?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can take it.”

“Oh, come on, Roy!” Laura said, with flash of anger. “This isn’t any fun for me either. How would you feel if you were in my place, and I was too sick to talk when the car was moving and refused to tell you anything when it was stopped?”

He turned to face her. “If I tell you, will you promise to keep driving?”

Laura’s stomach knotted again. “Yes.”

“The movement is disorienting. I can’t feel where I am in space, like I’m falling or deep underwater. I thought it would help if I closed my eyes, but that’s what made me sick. I won’t do that again.” He scrubbed his hand over his face, wiping off the sweat and leaving pink streaks across his pale cheeks. “Apart from that… My head hurt. My chest hurt. My heart was racing. I felt dizzy. It was hard to breathe.”

“Roy…”

“You promised,” he reminded her.

“I’m just wondering what this is actually doing to you,” Laura said.

“Nothing. I’ve felt some of that before. Not as intense, but…”

Laura felt her eyebrows rise about as far it was possible for them to go without flying off her forehead. “What happened in the kitchen looked pretty intense.”

“No, no. I meant from before the helo went down, when I’ve woken up from nightmares. I looked it up. It’s a panic attack. I mean, that’s what it’s called. It doesn’t mean you’re literally panicking,” he added hastily.

Because obviously the worst possibility here is that I might think he’s capable of panic,
Laura thought, exasperated. “I know that. I—”

“A panic attack is a ‘spontaneous adrenaline rush,’” Roy said, as if he was reading from whatever article he’d looked up. “The chest pain is from breathing too fast. It feels like you’re going to pass out, but you can’t: your blood pressure goes up, not down. It’s not dangerous.”

“
I know that
.” Laura was trying not to snap at him, but he was making it very difficult. “But is that what’s going on now? Just because it feels similar doesn’t mean it’s the same thing.”

Roy tugged at one of her curls in an attempt at playfulness. It didn’t fool her any. “Are you going to make me walk four hundred miles to San Diego?”

“No,” Laura said resignedly. “Just let me know if you need me to stop.”

“I will.” Roy picked up the bottle of water and held it to his lips, then apparently thought better of it and put it down without drinking. Taking a deep breath, he pulled his feet in and closed the door. “Let’s go.”

Laura could still see the cabin in the rear view mirror. The odometer hadn’t even registered one mile. Her entire body tensed as she started up the car. When she had first driven to the cabin, it had taken her about five minutes to drive up the dirt road, going slowly because the road was rough. With the road even worse now, she guessed it would take ten or so.

“It’ll be better once we get on the main road,” she promised Roy. “It’s much smoother.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, sounding unconvinced. He was sweating again, his face the color of dirty snow.

She avoided a giant pothole, then glanced back at Roy. He had his fist pressed to his chest. Damp patches were forming on his shirt. He caught her gaze and gestured for her to keep driving.

Laura was gritting her teeth so hard that it was giving her a headache. Her hands were clenched around the steering wheel in a death grip. She forced herself to relax, or at least to relax her muscles. Seven hours to go.

Finally, she made it to the main road. It was narrow but paved and well-maintained. To her relief, there were no other cars. She put on some speed, driving with a light and easy touch.

The ride felt smooth to her, but one look at Roy told her that the jolting earlier hadn’t been the problem. He looked like death, his eyes glassy, his skin ashen. His breath came in shallow, desperate gasps.

“Breathe, Roy.” She put her hand on his shoulder.

“I—I can’t—”

Laura slowed, trying to divide her attention between Roy and the road. It wound along a mountain, and the last thing either of them needed was for her to drive them over a cliff.

“Pull over,” he gasped.

But there was nowhere she could park the car, just a wall of granite on one side of the road and a thousand-foot drop on the other. If she stopped where she was, she’d risk getting rear-ended at high speed by the next car that whipped around a curve behind her—maybe even knocked over the edge.

Her heart pounding, Laura gripped the steering wheel with one hand and picked up Roy’s left hand with her other. It was lax and clammy in her grip. She laid his hand over her belly.

“Breathe with me. In…” She inhaled deeply. “Out…”

He slumped forward. The seatbelt caught him before he could crash into the dashboard. His hair hung down, hiding his face, and she couldn’t hear his breathing over the hum of the engine.

Terror jolted through her. She sped around the next curve. There was still no real shoulder, but she spotted a level area off the road, covered in thorny bushes. She turned into it, crashing through the bushes, braking as fast as she dared.

The car came to a shuddering stop. Laura yanked the key out of the ignition, jumped out, ran around to the side, and flung the passenger door open.

Roy was still unconscious. She held him up as she unfastened his seatbelt, then awkwardly lowered him to the ground beside the car. He was so heavy that he almost knocked her down.

Dead weight
, she thought, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

His lips had darkened, turning almost blue. She put her hand on his chest. For a long, horrible moment, she felt nothing. Then it moved under her fingers. He was breathing, but only barely.

Laura miserably wished she’d taken a first aid course, and wished more that she’d had the sense to refuse to take him any farther once she’d seen how sick it was making him. He could die in front of her, and there would be absolutely nothing she could do to save him.

With nothing better to do, she held his hands. They were heavy, and very cold.

Moving hastily, she opened the trunk, took out her emergency blanket, and draped it over him. Maybe it helped. After a time that seemed endless but was probably only a minute or so, his breathing deepened and some color returned to his face.

A little less frightened now, Laura registered that his feet were still in the well of the passenger seat and he was sprawled on top of a crushed shrub. She started to get up, to try to wrestle him into a more comfortable position, when his eyes opened.

“You’re hurt,” he muttered, reaching out to her.

Laura caught his hand. “No, Roy.
You’re
hurt. Just lie still.”

“No, you really are.” His voice was stronger now. “You’re bleeding.”

“I am?”

“Your face.” He touched her cheek with his other hand, and his fingers came away bloody. “And your arms.”

She glanced at the ragged scrapes that crisscrossed her bare arms. “I shoved through some bushes.”

Wincing, Roy rolled over, pulled his feet out of the car, then sat up, leaning back against a tire. His arms and neck had also been torn by thorns and splintered twigs. “I blacked out, didn’t I?”

“You almost stopped breathing.” Laura heard her voice shaking. “I thought you were going to die.”

He seemed taken aback. “Really? I felt bad, but not
dying
bad.”

“You weren’t getting enough oxygen. Your lips turned blue.”

“Oh.” He glanced around at the wreckage they’d made of the bushes. “Did the car crash?”

“This was the only place I could pull over.”

Roy plucked a twig out of her hair, then brushed his fingers over her forehead in a light caress. “Thanks for saving my life. That’s four times now.”

His calm made some of her residual fear ebb away. “Don’t go for five.”

“I’ll try not to.” Roy sighed. “So, I guess motor vehicles get added to the long list of things to avoid.”

“Maybe only cars,” Laura said doubtfully. “You were in a helicopter in Afghanistan.”

“That was medevac. I bet the hospital corpsmen ended up using some kind of mechanical ventilation. Same with the plane back to America. I doubt I’ll ever fly again.” He looked up at the sky, his expression so bleak that a chill went through Laura’s blood.

“Roy, you’re not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?”

“Like what?” Roy sounded genuinely confused.

“Like… um… committing suicide.” She blurted it out, unable to look him in the eyes, half afraid that he’d laugh at her for thinking such an outrageous thing and half afraid that he’d confess that he was.

There was such a long silence that it became its own answer. Then Roy put his hand on her shoulder, making her meet his steady gaze.

“I thought about it,” he admitted. “Sort of. If I stayed a wolf for long enough, I think I’d forget that I was ever a man. And a wolf doesn’t need cars or lights or guns.”

“But you’re not—You didn’t—”

“I didn’t. I won’t.”

She wanted to believe him. But she had to be sure. “Even if you’ll never fly again, or ride in a car, or see a movie?”

Roy leaned back against the car. He seemed tired but serene, as if he’d successfully completed a long and exhausting but important job. “Here’s what I’ve been thinking, Laura. When that helo went down, if I’d survived some other way, I could have lost so much blood that I ended up with brain damage from lack of oxygen. Then I’d still have a career-ending injury that didn’t show on the outside. I still wouldn’t know how much I’d ever recover, or what I’d be able to do with the rest of my life. And if that’s what had happened, I’d like to think I’d find some way to deal with it and carry on.”

“That’s good,” Laura said cautiously. “So if I leave you the keys to the cabin and drive down to talk to DJ’s family myself, you’ll be okay by yourself till I come back?”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Unless you’d rather walk. I bet you could get there in a month.”

“I’ll give you the address and write you a note,” Roy said immediately. “Do you have paper?”

Laura found a pen and notepaper in her purse and offered them to Roy, along with the key to the cabin. He stuffed the key in his pocket, then stood up, a little stiffly, put the paper on the roof of the car, and began scribbling away.

He seemed lighter, as if a weight had been lifted from him; as if this latest blow had, paradoxically, forced him into an acceptance of his situation. Laura was glad that he seemed to be feeling better. But she felt exhausted and wrung out, physically and emotionally, as if
she
was the one who’d gotten yet another piece of bad news and then nearly died.

As soon as he finished writing, she’d never see him again.

He was a mess, his clothes and skin and even hair wet with sweat and smeared with dirt and blood. His T-shirt was torn and rucked up, exposing the ragged welts of his shrapnel scars. He was still very pale, and he leaned against the car as if he needed it to help him stand.

If some miracle occurred and they got together, they’d never be able to do most of the normal things couples do: drive around and go on vacation, go to movies and watch TV, talk on the phone, eat at restaurants, email each other cat videos. He’d have a hell of a time getting or keeping any sort of job.

He’d admitted that he had nightmares and panic attacks, and she bet he had other war-related problems she didn’t even know about yet. She’d always be worried about his health, or that he was planning something heroic and self-sacrificing. Not to mention that he was legally missing in action and on the run from powerful, dangerous people who wanted to lock him up and experiment on him.

And if he only loved her, she wouldn’t care about any of that.

“I could come back,” she blurted out. “If I find DJ, I could drive him to you. Or anyone from his family. I… um… I need to come back anyway, to collect the cabin key.”