Chapter 26
Rowan Rafferty’s origin story
The sun shining through the windows in Kendra’s stateroom made her hair glow.
That glow seemed to extend down her neck and shoulders, the only part of her exposed to me.
The rest was under the sheet and comforter.
When the rain stopped last night, it got cold, and we were cuddling in a cocoon of warmth between the covers.
She sprawled over me like I was her personal body pillow, and I didn’t hate it.
I did hate thinking of how this was all going to end when True and Jesse broke up. And I predicted the breakup was imminent. I wanted to hate the wanker, but he made it hard.
Speaking of hard.
My cock had been complaining since Kendra fell asleep after her multiple orgasms, but I couldn’t get mad at her for that. I did that to her. I licked her into unconsciousness.
That made me chuckle.
“I must look funny,” Kendra mumbled into my chest.
“Nope. Thinking about how much of a badass I am, licking you into unconsciousness.”
“You did do that.”
“I know. I think you called it - fuck-tastic.”
She lifted her head to look at me. Her hair was going in every different direction, and a smudge of mascara was under her eyes, but she looked relaxed and rested. “But I didn’t do anything for you!” She reached for my waistband. “Let’s fix that right now.”
I swatted her hand away. “You’ll do no such thing, Goldilocks. That’s not how this works. I wanted to bring you pleasure. I did. The end.”
Kendra sighed. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
“To you?”
“Oh, I definitely got the better end of that deal,” Kendra admitted. “I hate leaving you with blue balls.”
“Love, the balls aren’t blue. They’re frustrated, but not blue.”
Kendra lazily scratched her fingernails up and down my chest. I could hear the wheels turning in her mind, but I waited for her to say it.
“Will you tell me how it happened?”
“How I lost my leg?”
“Yes.”
“I spent decades in the Royal Australian Navy,” I began.
“Because you’re Australian.”
“Half. Dual citizenship. My dad is American. My mom was Australian.”
“Was?”
“She died several years ago. Cancer.”
Kendra nodded but didn’t say anything.
“I went to MIT and got my degree to build ships. Part of that is designing the ships. Part of that is testing the designs in the real world. One day, we were running a test on one of my propulsion systems when there was a failure. The boat came right at me, but it’s so big, it’s hard to stop on a dime.
I tried to clear the area, but my lower left leg got caught between the ship and the pier. ”
Kendra gasped. “That’s horrible.”
“My leg was crushed beyond anything the doctors had ever seen. They talked about reconstruction and other types of surgeries. But before the surgeries, they needed a 3D scan to tell them how extensive the damage was.”
“How long did this take? Weren’t you in pain?” Kendra asked.
“A few days. Yes. A lot of pain. But there was a lot of pain medicine,” I said.
“So much pain medicine, it didn’t register when the surgeon came in with a cancer doc.
During the scans, they found what looked like a tumor.
Turns out it was Chondrosarcoma. Cancer inside your bones.
It had spread throughout my femur and was headed to my knee. ”
“Holy shit.”
“Yep. Thing was, I didn’t know. I hadn’t felt it. If it weren’t for the accident, they would have caught it too late, and I would have died.”
Kendra propped her chin on my chest. “How can you remain so positive about this?”
I shrugged. “Lots of therapy. Physical therapy and mental health therapy.”
“Sounds healthy.”
“More like - necessary. I was so angry for the longest time. Why me? What did I do to deserve this? I spent a lot of time with my therapist learning that nothing I did or didn’t do led to the cancer,” I sighed. “We also worked on gratitude for what I did have.”
“Tell me the bad part that you’re leaving out,” Kendra said.
I tapped her nose with my finger. “You’re too perceptive.
I was married at the time of the accident and surgery.
At first, my wife promised to be by my side no matter what happened.
She pledged to be in the hospital every day until I could get out of there and go home.
But that kind of surgery and recovery takes months.
And it turns out my wife didn’t want to wait months. ”
Kendra’s face turned red. “That bitch.”
“I was mad, especially when I learned she was sleeping with my best friend. I had known him since my first year in the Navy. He introduced me to my ex-wife. And when I look back on it now, I know there were signs that I missed. I kept thinking they were the same people as when I met them and not who they became. So, what could I do about the infidelity? What can you do if someone wants to be with someone else? I didn’t want to fight him for her.
No one wins in that situation. Plus, I was pretty sure they’d been having an affair long before my accident, so maybe this was another blessing,” I said.
“Cut out three types of cancer in my life.”
Kendra rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “I can’t imagine what that was like, what you went through. Was your dad helpful?”
I sighed and reached for Kendra’s hand, resting it on my chest. “He probably believes he was being helpful.”
“How so?”
“He offered me a desk job at his company.”
Kendra smiled. “That monster!”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Hey, lady. When you’re used to being out on a boat or working on boats, the thought of a desk job inside a stuffy office was the last thing I wanted to do in the world.”
“I get that.”
“Thought you might.”
“So, you divorced, moved to Florida, and bought Pegleg Pete’s?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, shit. Now I get—”
I smiled at her. “It goes back to addressing that one-legged elephant in the room. Although, I’m not a fan of the fictional arsehole.”
“When you said I could ask you anything, did you mean it?”
I nodded.
“How do you have sex without the prosthetic?”
I huffed a laugh. “Well, I know what guys in the online support groups suggest, but I haven’t tried it out myself.”
Kendra sat straight up in bed, the covers falling from her generous breasts. “Then we have to remedy that right fucking now.”