Wanted: Devil Dogs MC (12 page)

“It was a burn.” Isabel says the words quietly, nodding.

“A piece of burning shrapnel had lodged in my thigh. The doc told me it was less than an inch away from severing my femoral artery, that I would have bled out in seconds if it had even nicked it.” He rests his hand, almost absently on his thigh where the scar bears testament to the horror of that day. “That was just before he told me told they hadn’t been able to get all the shrapnel out.” Isabel’s head whips up at this. “He said there were tiny fragments, so small it would have been impossible to get them all out, that my body would expel them.” He shakes his had at the memory.

Isabel bites her bottom lip as she considers the pain he must have been in. An injury like that would have been agonizing, not to mention the after-effects. “It never really heals, does it?”

Wesley shakes his head slowly. “There are bits of metal still trying to find their way out, they rip me open from the inside. I couldn’t go back to active duty like that. I was a liability; that injury could have come back at any time and that would have put my entire team at risk. They offered me some bullshit desk job, but there was no way I was going to sit in an office while and push pens around while men that I’d trained with were fighting and dying. So I was out. I guess it’s no more than I deserve.” He leans his head back against the wooden railing, looking up at the clear blue sky.

Isabel looks at him without bothering to conceal her indignation at his words. “Why do you deserve to have the thing you cared about most in the world just taken away from you?” She stares into his eyes and the haunted look about them tells her everything she needed to know. “You blame yourself for what happened to your team, don’t you?”

“It was my fault. I was their leader; I was the one who should have seen what was about to happen. I let my guard down and they all paid for it.” He slams his fist down on the wooden floor, making Isabel jump.

“How could you have seen something like that? How could you have prepared for a little kid wiping out a whole platoon?” Isabel feels the volume of her voice rise with her frustration over Wesley’s feelings of guilt.

“I should have known. That’s what we’re trained for: to see a threat before it even becomes one, to always be alert. I failed them. Do you have any idea how hard it is to know you’re responsible for the death of men you see as family?” He shakes his head, looking down at the spot on his thigh where Isabel is pretty sure his injury must still throb. “They deserved better than that. They deserved better than me.”

On impulse, Isabel takes hold of the hand that’s settled over his thigh and squeezes it, hard, making him look at her and not at whatever horrors he’s going over and over again in his mind. “You listen to me, Wesley Raeburn.” She locks eyes with him, not letting him look away. “You did the best you could. You said yourself that you were all tired, exhausted from trekking halfway across the desert. None of you could have foreseen what was about to happen. You didn’t kill them, Wes. The bomb and whoever built it and whoever set it off, they’re the ones responsible, not you. And no matter how much you want to convince yourself otherwise, their deaths are not on you.” She squeezes his hand hard and feels an answering tug from him. “You didn’t deserve what happened to you; you have to believe that.”

He smiles at her sadly. “It’s not as easy as that, beautiful.” His voice is low and growly and full of emotion. “You should know that.” He looks at her meaningfully before he drops his head back to look up at the sky, but he keeps hold of her hand, even when she tries to slip it out of his grasp.

“What do you mean?” She looks down at the stair where she’s rested her drink, tracing patterns into the condensation from the cool glass.

“You must think I’m blind, deaf, stupid or maybe all three to not see what’s plainly written all over you.” He shifts slightly, getting more comfortable now that he’s not the one that’s under the microscope.

“And what’s that, Wes?” She raises an eyebrow at him, but he either doesn’t see or pretends not to.

Instead of answering her, he throws her for a loop, something he seems to enjoy doing. “So are you ever planning on opening up those textbooks that are just siting up there, collecting dust?”

Isabel’s mouth falls open. “You went into my room? You snooped through my stuff?”

He still doesn’t open his eyes, looking like he’s having the most relaxing time of his life. “Yeah. It sucks, doesn’t it, when people invade your private space to find out more about you?”

Isabel bites back the speech she is about to let fly over invasion of privacy. After Wes had caught her red-handed looking through his stuff and smelling his leather jacket, she really doesn’t have a leg to stand on where private property is concerned.

“So? Are you ever going to go back to med school?” There’s no judgment in his voice; it’s just pure curiosity, as if the answer doesn’t matter one way or the other, as if he is just making conversation. But Isabel isn’t naïve enough to believe that. She knows he’s just trying to make her feel safe and secure so she opens up to him and tells him all her deepest darkest thoughts and feelings. It’s Armchair Psychology 101. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, though.

She lets out a deep sigh, letting go of something she’d been nursing alone. “The truth is, Wes, I don’t know.” She shakes her head, wishing she had a more definite answer than that. Her mind has always had a scientific bent; her mother had been the artistic one. Isabel is comfortable with definite answers, with things she can quantify and prove. Since college ‘I don’t know’ has been a phrase she had jettisoned from her vocabulary, but since her mother had died, it had come sneaking back in like an unwelcome visitor who just refuses to get the message.

Wes remains silent, sensing that she’ll clam up if he says anything to interrupt the flow of words from her heart to her mouth.

“She’d been riddled with the cancer. It started in her lungs, even though she’d never smoked a day in her life.” Isabel shakes her head at the irony of that particular fact. “And then it just spread all through her body. There were no major organs that weren’t affected.”

“How do you know that?” The quiet urgency in Wes’s voice tells her he’s already hazarded a guess.

“I studied the autopsy report.” She knows how crazy it sounds, how macabre, how sinister, but it had been an automatic reaction to ask for it. She is wired to try to figure out what made people tick from the inside out. It had made complete sense to her to try to understand what had happened to her mother to make her body give out so thoroughly at such a young age.

“Jesus, Bel.” Wes’s hold on her hand tightens reflexively and he tries to pull her towards him but she shakes her head, almost imperceptibly, reminding him they’re out in the open, not lying in the dark in his bedroom. She watches his jaw tighten as he reins his emotions in and Isabel warms inside at the realization that he’s hurting for her, that he cares about what happened to her.

“She didn’t tell me.” Isabel keeps her gaze focused on Wes, knowing if she looks anywhere else she won’t be able to get out what she needs to say. “I didn’t know she was even sick! We spoke pretty much every day and not once did she say anything. You know, ‘Hi, Issy, so you remember how last week I told you I was fine, well turns out that I’m not. I’m dying of cancer and there’s nothing anyone can do.’” Isabel shakes her head at her own poor stab at humor. “She never said anything. The nurses said it was because she didn’t want me to worry about her. But I know it was because she didn’t want me to leave school. She was so proud that her daughter was going to be a doctor; she didn’t want anything to get in the way of that, even her. She knew if she’d told me she was sick I would have dropped everything to be with her, for as long as it took to get her better.”

Wes’s thumb sweeping her cheeks tells her the tears have started to seep out of her eyes. It’s another rule she’s breaking with him. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry in front of anyone. But just like everything else, Wes is changing her.

“You couldn’t have made her well again, Bel. The doctors told you that themselves. There are some things that just can’t be fixed, no matter how much you want to.” The reason in his voice does nothing to allay the feelings of guilt that she’s been struggling with for months.

“You don’t know that.” She sniffs hard, doing what Jamie would label ‘ugly crying.’

Wes reaches out and cups her chin in his hands, as if he can make her hear him like that. “I do know that and so do you.”

“I still miss her so much.” Isabel isn’t crying anymore, but the tears are just sitting behind her eyes, waiting for the next prompt to let rip.

Flouting the rule they’d set themselves, not to show their relationship in public, Wesley pulls her into his embrace, stroking her hair and rocking her gently, as if she is a little girl. “I know, baby. I know.” He murmurs the words against her ear, so tenderly she feels like she might start to cry again.

A sound from inside the house brings Isabel crashing down to Earth and the responsibilities that they both have to protect. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

She feels Wes’s hold tighten around her for a fraction of a second, as if he is about to disagree and then he releases her. She scoots back to her side of the porch stairs, suddenly feeling a little silly for having given so much of herself away. She can’t even say why she had done it, only that she had been powerless to stop the wave of emotions from rushing out of her and along with it the words that she had been keeping locked up tight.

“Don’t start overthinking it.” Wes’s tone is weary, as if he knows it is already a foregone conclusion. “You don’t have to regret everything you share with me as soon as the words are out of your mouth.” He pushes himself up from the floor, looking down at her.

“I’m not! I mean, I don’t.” Isabel shakes her head to emphasize her point but there’s no mistaking the note of hesitation in her voice. She curses, for the umpteenth time, the fact that he knows her so well.

“Sure.” The flatness in his tone tells her exactly what he thinks about her back-pedaling.

“What’re you doing?” She looks after him as he picks up his tool belt and adjusts it around his hips.

“Time to get back to work, don’t you think? Break’s over and my boss is a real slave-driver.” He smiles at her cheekily, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“She’s not all bad, though, is she?” Isabel plays along with his banter, trying to get back to their easy sparring that’s way more comfortable than the deep and meaningful moments they’ve shared or the grey area they seem to find themselves in more often than not when they’re walking on eggshells around each other.

“She has her moments. And she’s easy on the eyes so I let her get away with a lot.” He raises an eyebrow and that time his smile does reach his eyes and Isabel feels a kick to the gut at just how gorgeous he is to look at. All of a sudden, his smile disappears and it’s replaced by a neutral expression she knows all too well. His attention is drawn to something next to her. “What?” She frowns, following his line of sight.

“You better get that.” He nods towards her cell that’s started buzzing on the lemonade tray where she’d set it down.

Mike’s name is flashing up on the screen coupled with a goofy photo they’d taken. In the photo their arms are wrapped around each other and Isabel is laughing so hard she can almost remember how it felt. She looks happy. From the look on Wes’s face, that fact clearly hasn’t been lost on him. He turns on his heel, stomping down the stairs with heavier-footed steps than necessary, studiously avoiding looking at her.

She snatches the phone up and schools her voice to something other than the irritable tone that she knows is going to spill out as soon as she opens her mouth. “Hey, Mike.”

Isabel turns away from Wes, but not before she sees the expression of resignation cross his face and it damn near breaks her heart. They haven’t spoken about Mike, not really, and Isabel knows it’s a subject she’s going to have to broach eventually, with both of them. She knows that Wes has been waiting for her to tell Mike she’s seeing someone, to take herself off of the proverbial table. But she just hasn’t been able to do it, not because she wants to be with Mike but because she doesn’t want to hurt him. If she’s honest with herself, it’s not only that, though. She’s afraid that if she admits to Mike she’s with someone else it somehow makes her relationship with Wes more real. And then, when it all goes to hell, as it inevitably would, where does that leave her?