Chapter 42
Zane
It sucked that I had to do this, but it was all about her safety.
I never hesitated when called upon to jump out of a perfectly good airplane at thirty thousand feet at night in the freezing cold and free-fall over enemy territory, but this scared the shit out of me.
After asking the desk nurse where she was and getting told her exam space number, I spent a good five minutes in the waiting area, getting my nerve up to face Peyton, the woman I couldn’t live with or without.
I had to get this done before Duke and Serena arrived.
Serena would probably tell Duke to kick my ass for what I was about to do, and it was already going to be hard enough without that hassle.
As soon as I pulled open the curtain, my Peyton gifted me one of her wonderful smiles. “Zane.”
The doctor blocked my path and appraised me with an ice-cold stare. “You can’t be in here.” She shoved my shoulder. “Out now.”
“No. It wasn’t him. I want him to stay.”
The doctor stopped pushing me and turned back to Peyton. “You said boyfriend.”
“The Boyfriend Strangler,” Peyton said. “Zane saved me from the criminal.”
That drew a smile and a nod from the doctor.
“How is she?” I asked as I moved around to the other side of the bed.
“Good enough to get out of here, right?” Peyton answered. “I can’t stand it in here.”
The doctor shook her head. “Not until we get the results of her CT.”
“But I passed the concussion protocol, didn’t I? That means he can take me home.”
“I don’t like the light sensitivity,” the doctor said. “So we’ll just see what the CT shows. Remember, a bleed can happen without a concussion, and we want to be certain.”
“You stay,” I insisted, with a firm hand on her shoulder. “The doc’s right. We have to be careful about head injuries. Remember what I told you about Tommy Willmont.”
She nodded.
“It doesn’t matter how trivial you think it is. We can’t take any chances with your noggin. If you hit your head, you come in, you get the scan, and you talk with the doc about the results. Now promise me.”
Her sigh was loud enough that the nurse down the hall probably heard it. “Okay, but it better not take long.”
“The lacerations are not deep, but they are long, and they’ll have to be watched for any signs of infection.”
I nodded along. “Should she stay the night then?”
“It’s not that serious,” the doctor said. It had been worth a try. “I’ll be back when we have your results.” She patted Peyton’s thigh and left, closing the curtain behind her.
I felt my pulse quicken with dread as I composed myself. “You’re going to spend tonight with Duke and Serena.”
Her face screwed up in confusion. “What?”
“It’s the safe thing to do.”
She blinked several times. “What do you mean, safe? He got shot. He’s probably dead by now.”
“No, he’s alive.” I’d checked and the strangler, John Doe, we still didn’t have a name on him, was unconscious and in critical condition.
She reached for me.
I made the mistake of taking her hand. The feeling of her touch was just as magnetic as it had always been, and that made this doubly hard. “I promised I’d be out of your hair when you were safe, and you are now.”
She squeezed my hand and sobbed. “But—”
“I’ll have your things brought over, and you can move back into your place whenever you want.”
Tears began to leak down her cheeks. “You’re leaving me? I don’t understand,” she sobbed.
I could feel a sniffle coming on if I didn’t get out of here now. “You can’t be safe with me. This is for the best.” It was the truth I was ashamed to admit. I pulled my hand away.
She started to cry. “Why?”
That’s when I felt my eyes begin to water. “I have to go before I put you in danger.”
I turned and left through the curtain.
“I don’t understand,” she sobbed out again.
Her words tied my gut in knots as I walked down the hall and away from the one good thing in my life.
As much as I wanted to go back and hold her, I knew I couldn’t. This was the right thing to do, the honorable thing to do. The thing that would keep her safe.
Nothing was more important than that.
Peyton
I wiped at my tears with the corner of the hospital bedsheet and lay in the bed stunned. How could it be that Zane was no longer my man? How could I have misread the signs so badly?
Closing my eyes, I replayed what he’d said. Just before the cops had arrived, he’d asked me if I planned to go back to Boston. I hadn’t had a chance to answer.
I should have told him all I wanted was to stay with him. Had I somehow blown it by not blurting that out when I had the chance? I should have yelled it across the room, goddammit.
For five minutes, maybe longer, I went in mental circles wondering what I could have done differently, or how I’d misunderstood his feelings for me, then my grief morphed into anger— anger at him for just leaving, and anger at myself for falling for the brute.
Thinking back, the seeds of this had been there all along. He wasn’t a liar, that much I knew, and he’d said he’d be out of my hair when I was safe.
I’d misread his devotion to my safety as caring for me when all I’d been was a job, a responsibility. A responsibility that was now over.
The curtain pushed open, but instead of Doctor Holland, it was Lucas Hawk. “How are you doing?”
I sniffled and wiped under my eyes. “Shitty,” I admitted.
“Where’s Zane?”
“He left,” I sobbed out.
Lucas moved to stand by my bed and took my hand. “Talk to me. What happened?”
His hand was warmer than I’d imagined it would be. This man, whom everyone feared, had suddenly shifted into comforting mode just when I needed somebody to talk to.
“He broke it off.”
“Idiot,” Lucas scoffed.
I almost laughed at Lucas’s one-word answer.
“Did he say why?”
My facade of strength crumbled into sobbing speech. “He said he wanted me to be safe, and now that I was, he would be out of my hair.”
“That’s bull.”
I took a corner of the blanket and wiped my eyes. “I thought he cared. I mean, when we were alone together, it was like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”
“He does care. It’s obvious as hell every time he looks at you.”
“But he said—”
“Forget that,” Lucas insisted. “He’s scared. Sure, he’s a SEAL, and he’ll say he’s not afraid of anything. Hell, he’ll run straight into a deadly firefight, or wrestle an alligator for you, but he’s scared of how the nightmares will affect him.”
“Nightmares?”
Lucas grabbed a tissue from the table, sat on the edge of the bed, and dabbed at my cheek. “It hasn’t been long. He’s been in hellish places and lost comrades in arms. He’s afraid of hurting you if you wake him when he’s in that state. I had the same problem when I first got out.”
“You did?”
“It’ll take time, but he can beat it.”
“I had no idea.” I blinked back my tears with the realization that I had a chance.
“It’ll be tough. He’ll want to fight you on this. You’ll have to be strong.”
“The only easy day was yesterday,” I said, echoing Zane’s own motto.
Eventually, my doctor came back. “The scan is normal.”
I sat up. “So I can go?”
“As soon as the paperwork is done. And, young lady, I want you to have your boyfriend keep checking you just like last time.”
My boyfriend. The words stung and I had to fix that.