ou,” he admitted, forcing himself to take another bite of the delicious chicken. He made himself taste it. Savor it. Because she’d made it for him. That felt a lot like caring. He knew, because that was the way Nonny’s food tasted. He knew, absolutely, that Shylah had taken special care to make this meal for him. Maybe she had because she thought it might really be his last, but she’d poured herself into it.
“Where would you want to live if we could live anywhere?”
He had never given that much thought. He sat back, chewing on the chicken and studying her face. It was slightly flushed. She was feeling the emotion underlying the intimate, revealing conversation they were having. Exchanging fantasies, but yet, they were real to him now because they all had her face. Her scent. He even had the taste of her in his mouth.
“I’ve gone all over the world and I know this sounds a little ridiculous, but I’ve fallen in love with the Louisiana swamp. It can be as hot as hell and humid like the tropics, but the beauty there is indescribable. I like the remoteness of it. The way a man can see what’s coming at him and yet disappear if he wants. You can get by if you need to, living off the land. It isn’t an easy life, but it’s a good one.”
“That surprises me. I don’t know why, but it does.”
“I went out there with few expectations. I honestly didn’t care where I was. My unit was there, my fellow GhostWalkers, and we protect one another. Wyatt’s grandmother was there, and she was becoming known to our enemies. Then Wyatt found Pepper and his three little girls. That gave us all another purpose to stay there. The girls are still young enough to bite when they get upset, and their bites are lethal. The swamp is a good place for them right now. It allows them freedom and keeps others safe.”
“Your voice changes when you talk about the place. I can tell you really love it.”
“I do. I didn’t think I could love anything or even anyone, but Nonny has this way about her. She made me realize that there were good people in the world. She made me see that we were a family of sorts—the GhostWalkers in my unit—and that we had an extended family in the other GhostWalker units. I liked that. I liked belonging to something important like that. I also found I liked knowing I had the ability to protect Nonny, the three little ones and Pepper.”
“What made you think there weren’t good people in the world, Draden?”
He almost missed that carefully worded question because she spoke so softly and used the same tone she’d been using before. He felt his gut clench. “That’s for another time, sweetheart.” He rebuffed her gently, not wanting her to think he wasn’t willing to share with her. After all, who was she going to tell? Even if she judged him harshly, he’d be dead in a few days anyway. “When we’re lying in bed in the dark.”
She didn’t look hurt. She gave him a faint smile. “My mysterious man is always so intriguing. I think I might like your swamp.”
“We’re all sticking close. We all have money. Whitney’s daughter has shared a fortune with us, but Wyatt is loaded, and Trap is ridiculously loaded. Apparently, Gino is as well. Who knew?” He shrugged and sent her a small grin. “I’m sitting pretty as well.”
“I take it that means all of you have enough money to purchase the land and make it defensible.”
He laughed. Actually laughed. His woman was practical in some way others weren’t. She didn’t say build a house. Or furnish it with the best. It was all about defense.
“I found this really nice acreage just to the south of Trap and Cayenne. I liked it because it gave me privacy but allowed me to get to the fortress we’re all setting up at his place in a very short period of time.” He could run it in minutes and the trees, dripping with moss, provided him with good cover.
“Did you ever consider you might have a partner to share your home?”
“Not until I met you. Well, technically, I hadn’t actually met you. I leapt over you when I was running for the water. You were lying on that little raised knoll, but in the depression. You looked up at me and I remember thinking I wasn’t going to make it to the river because I was going to have a heart attack instead.”
She shifted in her chair, pushed the empty dinner plate aside and leaned into her hand as she put her elbow on the table. Her large, dark eyes never left his face. “I knew you saw me.”
“I didn’t know you were there until I jumped over you to keep from stepping on you. You had a pair of binoculars in your hands, but you didn’t move. You didn’t flinch, not even to protect yourself. You kept your hands down. You just watched me with those eyes of yours and for a second, I felt like I was drowning. I knew then it was you.”
“That’s the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever said to me. I like that you knew.”
He stood up to gather the dishes and take them to the basin-type sink. He liked that she didn’t argue with him about his knowing. She just accepted it. He wasn’t even going to bring up Whitney and his inevitable pairing. Or the fact that he’d considered killing her right then.
“When I woke up and realized that you had given me mouth-to-mouth, I wanted to shake you. And yell at the top of my lungs how unfair life was. You know, a child’s reaction.”
She cleared the rest of the table while he washed the dishes. “I had the same childish reaction when you told me you were infected. At last I’d found someone I was truly interested in, and you were telling me you were going to die. That sucked.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” Draden didn’t want to think about her leaving, but he was desperate for her to have a chance to live. He had to get her to agree to leave. He knew the others would get her to a hospital and do everything they could to make certain she lived. “If you were at a hospital, there’s a chance they could use your blood to develop a vaccine or a therapy to treat the virus. Joe could pick you up tomorrow and take you to a hospital.” He risked a look at her.
Shylah stood absolutely still, her face a mask of shock. Rejection. Anger. Hurt even. It was all there. She didn’t say a word. Instead she left him standing there at the kitchen sink and went straight out the door. She didn’t exactly slam it, but she closed it very, very firmly, just loud enough to make him wince.
Outside, light spilled through the canopy and lit up the entire morning. He stood at the window and watched her sink down onto the porch stairs. She seemed to be rocking herself back and forth for comfort. It was the first real sign he’d seen from her that she was close to a breaking point. One couldn’t see the results of a filovirus and the way they caused severe hemorrhagic fevers in humans and not be terrified. He wasn’t being stoic. He was as terrified as a man could get, but he had trained himself to stay ahead of fear. He ran. He was running now, killing as many of the MSS as possible to give himself purpose while the virus took effect.
Shylah had to be just as scared, maybe even more so. She didn’t want to be alone, not in a hospital surrounded by strangers, any more than he did. He didn’t want to go out feeling like a helpless, terrified lab experiment. He wanted to choose that moment when he lifted his hand and ended his suffering. Before he did that, he was determined to record every step of the disease’s progression, so Trap and the others could hopefully find a way to stop the virus from spreading across the world.
He dried his hands while he thought it all through. He didn’t want her to die. That was his hold-out hope, the one he needed to make it through this without breaking. Maybe she needed him. He hadn’t considered that she might need him. Another thing he hadn’t considered was that maybe being there for her was more important to him than what he needed. He had told her he would stop pushing her away and then he’d just done the same thing again.
He tossed the towel on the counter and went out to her. He didn’t say anything, he just sank down onto the stairs beside her, thighs touching. Reaching over, he took her hand and slowly, one by one, opened the fingers she had curled into a fist. He was grateful she didn’t pull away from him. He lifted her hand to his mouth and brushed a kiss there before pressing her palm to his
heart.
They sat together for a few minutes in silence. He listened to the birds and insects. They were great sentries, the birds in the air and the insects on the ground. Loud, the insects nearly drowned out every other noise, but the birds rivaled them with their cacophony of sounds. Some were melodious, but all too often, one sounded off on a particularly jarring note. Still, he liked to hear them.
“I’m sorry, Shylah. It won’t happen again.” He brought her hand to his mouth again, pressing kisses to the center of her palm. “It’s important to me that they find a way to save you. I think I became a little obsessive about it and I didn’t stop to think how it could look to you. I’m not rejecting you. Just the opposite. You mean something huge to me. Huge. I can’t think about much of anything else but keeping you alive.”
She was silent, staring out into the trees, her long lashes drawing his attention. Her profile was as beautiful as when he was staring straight at her. Up close he could see the dusting of gold across her nose. He loved those little freckles and he’d stared at them so much he knew the exact position of every single one of them.
“I’ve been preparing to die for a long time, Draden. I was always going to choose a time and let go on my own terms. There was no escaping from Whitney, not without dying a nasty death. He let us all know that. It was get killed in combat, and I’m not capable of aiding that along, or die of a virus. I knew he was having those individual strains created to target us. We always knew we weren’t worth anything to him or anyone else there.”
Everything male in him reacted to that. His entire body rebelled at the idea. He wanted to get physical, punch something, break necks. Kick the shit out of someone. She was worth so much—the world—and yet she hadn’t been given that. “Baby.” He tried. How did one tell her? Emotion rose to choke him, and he had to turn his head away. Whitney was the most fucked-up being he’d ever encountered, and he’d met his share of vile individuals.
“I wouldn’t have chosen a virus like this one. I’m scared to death. I am. But I would much rather be here with you. Have this time with you. Die with you, rather than live a life of what amounted to slavery to Whitney. We talked about it, the three of us: Bellisia, Zara and me. We couldn’t stay there forever. We agreed to escape if the opportunity presented itself, even if that meant death. We were going to live free for a few days, a week or two, for whatever time we had. This is my choice. You are my choice. Don’t take that away from me.”