She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t some elaborate ploy to get you to propose.”
He made a choked sound. “Hell, I know that. You don’t have an elaborate ploy in your body.”
Yeah, she’d started thinking about marriage and family that day. And maybe would’ve gone down that path eventually.
But when she’d driven by that house a couple weeks later, it had sold. Another family had moved in. It had become the house of their dreams.
Probably better in the long run anyway.
“We never talked much about marriage even after that house,” he continued, picking at a piece of grass in the ground. “But we always talked about forever. Talked about what we’d be doing when we were seventy. Talked about the places we wanted to travel to, and the types of food we wanted to try, and the things we wanted to do.”
She kept her face turned away from him, hiding her mouth in the crook of her elbow so she could hold back her little sob.
“You were always it for me, Wildfire. Marriage license or not. You are still it for me.”
“Riley…”
“When you broke up with me, I was angry, sad, confused, then angry again. And that was before we even hung up the phone. Then it just got worse.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was never trying to hurt you.”
“Once I could breathe again—and believe me, that took a while—there was an emotion that pushed all the others to the background. Resolve.”
She wasn’t surprised to hear that at all.
“Resolve isn’t something I’m a stranger to. It’s part of my career, refusing to turn away even though something is hard or dangerous. I came here resolved to get you back, Wildfire. Or at the very least to get answers and maybe challenge some young, handsome surgeon to a duel if he had tried to steal your heart. I think I could be pretty good with swords if I needed to.”
“Riley…” Her voice caught on a sob. She wasn’t going to survive this.
“I was resolved. I was willing to work out whatever compromise you needed in order to stay in my life. I was willing to fight whoever I needed to—and, you know a surgeon would probably be good with swords, because they’re good with scalpels, but I was still willing.”
Her laugh was choked. She loved this man so much.
He let out a sigh. “Believe it or not, what I was ready to do in my resolution isn’t even my point. My whole emotional gamut—”
Now she turned to him, cutting him off. “Riley, I’m so sorry.”
He put a finger over her lips. “I’ve been sad. I’ve been angry. I’ve been resolved. But I haven’t been scared. Not until a few minutes ago when I heard Zac say that he needed you in camp to help hurt people, and you told him you were still an hour away.”
“I…”
“That’s not you. You would never make a hurt person wait. That’s when I finally understood there’s something so much more going on than just a breakup. The time for hiding is over, Wildfire. Tell me what’s really going on.”
Chapter 21
Riley had once spent twenty-two minutes trapped under a layer of snow from an avalanche where he and his team had been filming a stunt. He’d only survived because in the first few seconds, when he still had the ability to move, he’d known to create an air pocket around his head.
He’d had a tracker on and known help was coming, but those had still been the longest twenty-two fucking minutes of his life. A frozen tomb. Unable to move. Unable to do anything at all but hope someone would get him out.
And on two separate occasions when he was working with the Linear Tactical guys on a mission, Riley had had a gun held to his head by bad guys who were pretty pissed off that Riley had been working against them. Both of those instances he’d been pretty sure he was about to die. It had only been the Linear Tactical team’s decisive actions—a long-distance bullet from Finn, a surprise attack from the ceiling by Wyatt—that had allowed Riley to be alive today.
He did a lot of scary shit on a daily basis.
But nothing, absolutely, completely, and utterly nothing had ever scared him the way hearing Wildfire lie to Zac on that walkie-talkie had.
There was something wrong with his Wildfire.
He’d spent the past few minutes talking to her, trying to get her to a place where she could say it to him. He’d done all he could. Now she had to take the next step. She had to tell him.
“I have multiple sclerosis,” she whispered. “I was diagnosed ten days ago.”
He only had a vague idea what that was. “Are you dying?” That was the most important thing, right? Everything else was secondary to survival.
“There can be complications that can lead to fatality, but generally speaking, no. MS isn’t fatal.”
He closed his eyes and let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding.
She wasn’t dying.
It wasn’t leukemia or a brain tumor or one of the other hundreds of things that would mean he’d be burying her in the next few months. That had honestly been what he’d been thinking.
“Okay. I don’t really know what multiple sclerosis is, but it’s not fatal. That’s what’s important. We’ll work through it together. You know I have money. We can find doctors, get whatever medicines you need.”
She got up. Slowly. More unsteadily than he’d ever seen her.
He hopped up beside her, arms out to assist. She ignored him.
“MS doesn’t work that way. There’s no medicine that’s going to make all my symptoms go away.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t know anything, but we’ll figure it out.”
She turned and walked a few stiff feet to a nearby tree, not looking at him. “You don’t understand. It’s going to affect my muscles. My coordination. I won’t be able to get around like I am now.”
“Right away?”
“I don’t know. It’s different for every single person. I may be in a wheelchair six months from now.”
She was selling him on the worst. He already knew it. “Is that for sure?”
She shook her head. “Nothing is for sure. But—”
He stopped her. “Then we’ll figure it out. Together.” That was the one thing he was sure of.
“No, we won’t.” She still wasn’t looking at him. “Don’t you get it? Our lives were already different enough. And now this? A wheelchair, Riley. Not exactly conducive to adventure travel or jumping out of an airplane.”
He walked over to her, not sure if he should touch her or not. “We’ll work it out.”
She laughed, but the sound held no humor at all. She turned around and looked at him. “I knew that’s what you would say. I knew you’d be all gung ho about being by my side for whatever happened. But that’s just not going to work. We’re still broken up. We’re still done.”
“That’s it? You get to just make all the decisions? You keep this from me and then just drop it on me, then refuse to talk about it at all?”
“Honestly, there’s not a whole lot to talk about.”