Chapter 30 Roxanne’s Inferno
roxanne’s inferno
DUKE
She’s quiet now, but those three words, he left me, keep circling in my head like ash in a wildfire. I’m trying to stay calm for her, but my hands are clenched so tight I can feel my nails pressing half-moons into my palms. My jaw aches from how hard I’m biting down the things I want to say.
How could a man walk away from her? And she was injured!
She was fucking injured! How do you leave someone like Roxanne in the dirt and not come back?
You don’t. Not if you’re a man worth your salt.
She’s tucked against me again, smaller than I’ve ever seen her.
There’s a full-blown storm raging outside my tent, but I inhale and exhale trying to get Roxanne to focus on my breathing.
Pulling away just enough so I can see her face, I let the pad of my thumb skim her tear-stained cheek.
“I know that wasn’t easy for you to tell me, and I’m not going to pretend I understand exactly what that night did to you.
I do know this—you didn’t break out there.
You survived. You survived your own ninth circle of hell. ”
I let the silence sit before continuing, my voice even softer now.
“You’re brave, Roxanne. You’re brilliant. You’re beautiful as all hell, and if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have let go of your hand. Not for a second.”
She sniffs and looks up at me with these dewy blue eyes that look like crystals now. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Make me feel so good.”
“Guess you bring out the best in me,” I say.
“What about you, though?” she asks.
“What about me?”
“You didn’t share in the Fire Circle either. What did you face when you came home?”
I grow quiet for a beat and then decide that everyone has been baring their souls tonight. I might as well bare mine.
“I was engaged,” I start.
She raises her brows and she sits up on her elbow.
“A girl I went to college with,” I continue. “We had a good year together, then I signed up for the Army. When my first round of service ended, I came home and asked her to marry me, but I wasn’t prepared for how challenging returning to civilian life was.”
I feel Roxanne’s hand still resting lightly on mine, and it keeps me talking when I might’ve clammed up otherwise.
“I had been on a battlefield, in an op that went bad, screaming, helping to pull the injured out of the blood and dust, and then … I’m home. I couldn’t function at the neighborhood barbecue. I couldn’t field the question, ‘What do you do for a living, Duke?’”
“I imagine that must have been the strangest feeling. You’re in a life-and-death situation one day, and someone’s asking you how you like your burger cooked the next. How do you reconcile that?”
“Exactly. I thought I was doing okay. Hell, I thought I was hiding the worst of it. But the nightmares … they didn’t stay hidden.
I jumped when a car backfired. Sometimes I had to step outside a crowded restaurant just to catch my breath.
” I shake my head. “It wore on her. She loved the man I was in uniform. The one who had a mission, a title, a purpose. She didn’t know what to do with the broken man who came back. ”
“I’m sorry.”
“One night, after a bad tremor, she said …” I have to swallow hard before I can get it out. “She said she didn’t sign up to be my nurse.”
Roxanne’s face softens. “That’s awful.”
“She wasn’t wrong,” I add. “I wasn’t easy to love back then. I still might not be, but after she left me I realized healing isn’t something you can rush for somebody else’s comfort. It was for the best, but it still hurt like hell.”
The storm rumbles again outside the tent, but in here, it feels like we’re suspended—breathing in the aftermath of truths neither of us had really talked about before.
I turn my hand under hers so we can lace our fingers together.
“That’s why I built Firebird,” I say, squeezing gently. “Because everyone deserves a place to come home to, even if they’re still learning how to live there.”
Roxanne shifts closer, her forehead bumping lightly against my shoulder.
“Most people wouldn’t have turned their own hurt into something that saves other people.
You could’ve stayed bitter. Angry. Closed yourself off like me, but you didn’t.
” Her voice drops a little. “You built something better. You are something better.”
I swear to God I almost lose it. My heart feels like a cup that is trying to catch a waterfall.
I shift, barely breathing, still propped up on my elbow.
Roxanne’s lying beside me, hair splayed against the sleeping bag, her hand still curled inside mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I can’t stop looking at her.
I lean in a little closer, close enough to catch the scent of her shampoo and the rain still clinging to her skin. Close enough to ruin everything if I make the wrong move.
Mercy, I want to kiss her. I want to nibble on her neck and find pleasure centers on her body even she didn’t know existed. But when she flinches every time a streak of lightning flashes outside, I know romance is not what she needs right now.
Damn.
I’m falling.
Hard.
There’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to stop it. I press my forehead lightly to hers before I pull back and lie down beside her again. “Thank you for that.”
“I appreciate you letting me in, Duke.”
“Hey, now that you said the magic word, I will always let you in … to my tent, I mean.”
She giggles and inches closer.
“How do you feel?” I ask. “Better?”
“A little better. It does feel good to talk about what happened.”
“When you do, it doesn’t have to have power over you anymore.”
“Are you saying this to yourself or me?” she asks, gazing up at me.
I smile. She got me. “Yeah, saying it to both of us.”
She gives a small nod.
“Does this mean that you’re ready to make peace with Colorado, now?” I ask.
She looks past me for a minute and pulls her hand back from mine. She sits up and tucks her hair behind her ears. “You know, I always have a special place in my heart for Colorado, but every time I look outside, it feels attached to him … to what happened.”
“So you don’t think you could ever live here again?”
She doesn’t hesitate and shakes her head. “No.”
“You really like living in New York that much?”
“New York has its downsides, but yes, yes I do. I like the bodega down the block from my office. I love the espresso from my neighborhood coffee shop.”
“But the lights, the noise, the smell of the subway,” I say, remembering why I didn’t enjoy visiting my sister.
“There are downsides to living anywhere, and yes, you never know what you could step in walking down the sidewalk, but it’s… it’s the feeling that you’re stitched into a million lives at once. That you’re walking through history and heartache and hope all in the same block.”
My heart is aching as I listen to all of Roxanne’s favorite places in New York. I love seeing her face light up when she talks about the place she considers home, but it only solidifies how temporary her time here really is.
“You can sit in a coffee shop and overhear four different languages,” she continues. “You can stumble into a hole-in-the-wall bookstore that smells like dust and dreams. You can watch a man propose on the subway and a woman cry into her phone at the same time, and somehow both moments make sense.”
“Yes, but where can you get cuddled by a rescue turkey?” I ask.
She tips her head. “That’s tougher to find.”
Roxanne reaches over and touches my arm, sending a little spark through me.
“Do you think you could live anywhere else?” she asks. “Are you going to be tied to this ranch forever?”
The question lands heavier than she probably means it to.
No one’s ever asked me that before—not like that.
Part of me wants to tell her yes, that I’d follow her anywhere if she asked.
But the other part—the one that’s still learning how to breathe here—knows I’m not built to leave. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Uh … I don’t know.”
The corner of her mouth quirks up. “I guess that’s an answer.”
“That’s best I can do in a tent, in the woods, in a rainstorm.”
“Fair. We’ll save the big existential questions for a more suitable setting.” She sits up. “We better get some rest.”
“Right, let me grab your sleeping bag, unless you want to head back to your tent, and don’t you dare think for one minute you’re bothering me.”
“I’d like to stay. I’ve never been good at sleeping in the woods.”
“You got it.”
After grabbing some of her things, I set everything up, and she yawns as she crawls into her bag. Outside, the rain has slowed to a lazy drip, and I’m thankful the storm is finally passing.
She murmurs, “Goodnight, Duke,” her voice feather-light, but it sends a rush of something warm through my chest anyway. I love that she says my name. I only hope this continues.
“Goodnight, Roxanne,” I say back, just as soft.
For a few minutes, neither of us moves. The only sounds are the rain, the occasional shuffle of sleeping bags, the steady beat of breathing that slowly syncs between us.
Eventually, her breaths grow deeper, slower.
I close my eyes, and for the first time in a long, long while, I fall asleep to the sound of someone else’s heartbeat.