Chapter 6 #2
Everything about him was so heartbreakingly familiar, while simultaneously frighteningly different. She’d hoped that time and distance would soften the granite resolve she’d seen in him during their last conversation. Instead, that antipathy appeared to have solidified into loathing.
She’d heard it in his voice during their earlier phone conversation. But to actually see it…
The dull ache in her chest intensified into the sharp, vicious thrust of a sharp blade into her vulnerable flesh.
It took everything in her not to curl up in agony right there.
Keep it together, McKenna! She kept repeating the mantra over and over in her head, sometimes even whispering the words into the cool silence of the cabin.
It wasn’t helping. Her breathing became more ragged with each passing moment as she strove to maintain some semblance of composure.
She knotted her fingers together in her lap and kept her eyes trained on them, absently noting that her nails were a wreck, chewed to the quick and—thanks to the fact that she’d been unable to stop herself scratching at her bug bites—filthy from the grime that had collected on her skin.
Her hands were always immaculate. Nails neatly trimmed, usually only sporting a clear varnish, and kept scrupulously clean.
As a surgeon she was almost fanatical about it.
These hands, white knuckled and filthy, looked like they belonged to a total stranger.
Everything about her felt unfamiliar. Alien.
Too many swirling, painful emotions. The impulsivity of her decision to come here.
The absolute devastation she felt in now knowing that her marriage was truly over and that Smith hated her. Smith, the only man she’d ever…
Her thoughts screeched to a halt.
Ever what?
She moaned. Not willing to finish the thought. Not now, when it was too late.
“Kenna!”
She jumped, head jerking up at the sound of his curt voice right beside her.
He was at the passenger side of the vehicle where he’d opened the door without her even noticing. She’d been so busy staring down into her lap, thoughts turned inward, that she hadn’t been paying attention.
“What? Sorry.”
“Did you fall asleep?” he asked, looking irritated and confused and concerned all at the same time.
“No. I was just thinking.”
His brow furrowed, as he stared at her skeptically.
“About wh—” He stopped then shook his head abruptly. “You know what? I don’t care. We’re done here and ready to leave.” They were? Already? How long had she been sitting here navel gazing and slowly unraveling? “Harris will follow us in your piece-of-shit rental.”
“Oh, no…” Her protest was automatic although somewhat foolish. “I can drive.”
His sighed, nostrils flaring slightly on the irritated, closed-mouth exhalation. “You’re not driving anywhere with that injury.”
“Oh. Of course. I wasn’t thinking.” He stared at her again for a long moment.
“You’re being surprisingly agreeable.”
It took a great deal of effort not to be offended by that statement.
“I’m tired and in pain. And you’re right, I can’t drive until after my toe has been assessed and treated. So there’s really no point in arguing.” Each word dropped from her lips like lead weights. She sounded as exhausted as she felt and the furrow in Smith’s brow deepened.
He didn’t speak, merely shut the door again, said something to Harris on his way around the front of the Land Rover toward the driver’s side.
Then they were on their way.
His four-wheel drive made the road seem easy.
“Where would this road eventually have taken me?” she asked, sluggishly dragging her seatbelt across her chest and clipping it in with more difficulty than the task warranted.
“Nowhere good. It’s abandoned, and only occasionally used by the odd quad biker.”
“I could have been there for days,” she said, her voice taking on a luridly morbid tone as she considered the ramifications, had she continued even farther. “Weeks. Nobody would’ve known where to find me until someone stumbled across my desiccated corpse months from now.”
The look he slanted at her was incredulous and contained a hint of horrified amusement.
“I’m sure the car is fitted with a tracker.” He choked out the words in a bemused tone before coughing. “The rental company would have found your corpse long before it reached desiccation. And surely you told your family where you were going?”
“I told them you were vacationing at your sister’s place and I intended to join you. The GPS suggested this route as a shortcut. It was supposed to cut an hour off my journey.”
“Nuts when you consider that Riversend is only half an hour away from the turn you took.”
“Seriously?” Kenny didn’t know why, but that pissed her off even more than the damned GPS guiding her to certain death. “It’s supposed to make life convenient. How is adding an hour to a half-hour trip convenient?”
“Since this road would’ve taken you nowhere near Riversend, and you would’ve been stuck out here for God knows how long if you hadn’t found a signal, I think you’re directing your outrage at the wrong thing.”
“Don’t gatekeep my outrage, Smith. I can damned well be outraged at whatever the hell I want.” She whipped her head around to glare at his profile and caught the whisper of a smile at the corner of his mouth before he schooled his features into neutrality again.
He shot a quick, inscrutable look at her, before directing his gaze back to the awful road again.
“You’re not usually so easily riled.”
Why did he have to make her sound like a fractious child?
She shrugged and threw caution to the wind to tell him, “As you pointed out the night before you left, you never really knew me.”
The only indication she had at all that her words affected him was the bunching of muscles along his jawline.
“And why is that, Kenna?”
“Fear, I suppose.” His head turned sharply and his eyes narrowed on her face, as if he was trying to gauge her honesty.
“Watch the road, Smith.” He glowered before his head swiveled back toward the road.
“Fear? What the fuck are you afraid of? I’m not some kind of monster. I’m damned sure I never gave you any reason to fear me, Kenna!”
“Of course, you’re not a monster, Smith.
I didn’t fear you. I was just so…” She rubbed her eyes tiredly.
They were gritty and sore from the dust. “I was insecure. About you. Us. We went into this marriage for a reason that no longer exists. Before my miscarriage, I felt like something you had to endure to get what you really wanted. After…I expected you to leave. Not because I think you’re a bad guy, but because I always knew I wasn’t good enough for you. ”
“This is…I don’t…” He kept his eyes fixed on the road, but the frustration she sensed in him mirrored her own.
Admitting things out loud that she hadn’t even admitted to herself wasn’t easy for her.
It was all coming as something of a surprise to her as well.
“You’re not an insecure woman, Kenna. You’re confident.
Accomplished. I’m having a hard time believing this. ”
“I know this isn’t the time or place to talk about this.
But I don’t think we’ll have another opportunity, so I just wanted to tell you that I know…
” She paused and tried to gather her thoughts, so exhausted she could barely think straight.
But right now, in this car was the last time she’d ever have the chance to talk to him like this.
And she wanted to make it count. “I know I excluded you. I know I isolated myself from you at a time when we should have been able to lean on each other for support. And I-I’m sorry. ”
His mouth thinned and his hands clenched around the steering wheel, knuckles white.
“And what are you hoping to accomplish with this apology?”
“Nothing. I just…”
“What?” The word was delivered in such an abrasive tone that it scraped against her nerve endings. “You wanted to make yourself feel better? Is it working? Do you feel better?”
“Not really.”
“And why is that?”
“You still hate me.”
“Hate is such a strong word. I don’t hate you, Kenna. You have to give a fuck to hate someone. It’s as emotionally exhausting as love. And that’s just way too much bandwidth to waste on you.”
The flat, emotionless delivery of those devastating words slammed into her with the force of a semi-truck. And there was simply no coming back from that.
“Okay,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and inaudible above the sound of the Land Rover’s engine. She cleared her throat and raised her voice to repeat the word.
“Okay. I—” She stopped talking. It didn’t matter that she had more to say. It didn’t matter how she felt. He didn’t care to hear it or know it. She lapsed into silence. , hands so tightly clasped in her lap, they were going numb.
They reached the turn back onto the asphalt road, and the sudden smoothness of the ride was jarring after the bone-rattling discomfort of the last twenty minutes.
“You really could have gotten into serious trouble back there.” Smith finally broke the silence after a few minutes on the asphalt.
“I could’ve died,” she intoned bleakly. “I only had one bottle of water.”
“Stop saying that,” he told her sharply. “You would have been a little uncomfortable for a day or so, but we would’ve found you.”
“No. I’d have wandered off looking for help and gotten myself eaten by a leopard. Or bitten by a snake.”
“Since when are you this fatalistic?” Now he sounded almost amused.
“Since always. My dad used to call me his little cloud of doom and gloom. I always wanted to be his—or anyone’s, really—ray of sunshine.” Her voice was starting to slur and she sounded distant even to herself. “But that’s not in me, I guess.”
Kenny yawned. She was so tired her eyelids felt weighted down and she was having a hard time focusing. She yawned again. She just needed to rest her eyes for a little bit and she’d feel much better, she was sure. More capable of dealing with Smith’s indifference.