Every afternoon now, she set up her little red tent next to his, and every afternoon he resisted the urge to kick it down. The one time he’d tried to wrap his arms around her in the light of day, she’d gone rigid and pushed him away. She took long walks around the campgrounds, lingered in conversation with strangers, sat on a bench by the side of a lake and stared off into the distance. She wouldn’t talk to him. She hardly even looked at him.
He’d always counted on her eyes to tell him what she was feeling. They’d told him she loved him before she’d ever said the words. He’d refused to see it, but it had been there behind the amber glass of her irises, welcoming him every time he slid inside her body, every time he made her come, every time he teased her over dinner or playfully pinched her ass by the side of the road. He’d have sworn Lexie couldn’t hide a thing from him, even if she wanted to. But now she’d retreated deep inside herself, and her eyes had emptied out. He’d done that to her. It made him physically sick to think about it.
Without her beside him at night, he hardly slept. He thought back to when Haylie had left, just before the trial had taken over everything. He’d been furious at her betrayal, and his pride had taken a serious blow. At the time, he’d thought his heart was bruised, if not broken, but he’d learned otherwise. Losing his family had hurt a lot more than losing Haylie. That first year after the trial was over, he’d lain awake a lot of nights. It had taken him months to figure out how to box up the memories and stow them away, how to keep his hands busy and his mind blank, to watch and listen to other people’s lives instead of getting on with his own. He’d done it because he had to in order to live with himself. In time, it had become second nature.
None of these strategies turned out to be the least bit helpful when it came to losing Lexie. Losing Lexie was already the worst thing he’d ever had to live through, and she wasn’t even gone yet.
In fact, she was right there, popping into sight as he pedaled over the top of the hill. Crouched over her handlebars, probably topping thirty miles an hour on a rare straight downhill stretch, she took up half the lane of the narrow road. He hated to see her out in the middle like that. Sometimes he thought she did it on purpose to provoke him. This wasn’t a main artery by any means, but it had enough traffic to keep them on their toes.
As if cued up by his thoughts, an RV that had been tailing him for five minutes finally found the break it had been anticipating and rolled slowly past, leaving less than two feet between its side and his handlebars. Christ. He watched it inch up on Lexie. She waited for the oncoming traffic to clear and waved it by. Totally capable of handling herself.
He got it. She didn’t need him. She’d been right to accuse him of trying to turn her into a project. He was an idiot. Every protective, possessive thought he’d ever had about her had been a sign he was falling in love, not a manifestation of his hero complex. The voice in his head that sounded like Taryn said, Duh. This wasn’t rocket science.
But he wanted her to need him, because then he’d have some claim on her, something other than his love to make him worthy of her. She loved him, but he wasn’t good enough. Hell, she’d said so herself. Who in her right mind would pick you? He was a melancholy hermit, deliberately cut off from the world, and she was the most vibrant, exciting, engaging woman he’d ever known. What kind of future could he offer her?
You could make her happy.
Taryn again. Maybe he could, for a little while. Maybe not. He’d dumped the weight of his past on her, and they were both pretty far from happy now. He knew he had his good points—he hadn’t been a bad husband to Haylie, not by a long shot—but Lexie deserved someone whole. He’d be a shoddy substitute.
She was doing the right thing by distancing herself from him now. By the time they got to the coast, they’d both be so miserable, they’d welcome the end.
The road narrowed even further as he passed through a section that had been dynamited out of the hillside. The shoulder was practically nonexistent, a few inches of pavement squeezed between the white lane boundary and the jagged stone. A semi with a full load of logs rattled by going way too fast, so close to knocking him against the rocks he had to slam on his brakes and put both feet on the ground to restore his balance. His back tire lifted high into the air at the abrupt stop, then slammed back down. Tom looked up automatically to make sure Lexie was okay, but she was already out of sight around a sharp corner. Then he heard the screech of air brakes and the mournful cry of the truck’s horn, and he split in two.
One part of him got his feet back on the pedals and started riding as hard as he could uphill, his legs screaming and his chest tight with the effort of fighting physics and gravity. The other part showed him, in Technicolor detail, exactly what that truck had done to Lexie when it hit her. Her broken body. Dark blood staining her hair. Gruesome, horrible images. His legs worked furiously, his stomach churned, and he lost her over and over again.
When he came around the corner, he saw her bike first. The rear reflector caught the sunlight and flashed scarlet, and then the rest of it hit him in one ugly rush—Lexie’s bike and trailer in a chaotic pile next to the rock, and the woman he loved facedown in a heap on the asphalt.
Dead, he thought, and the pavement rushed up at him. Dizzy and clumsy, he lost his footing on one pedal and gouged his shin deeply on the jagged metal edge before he managed to bring his body and his bike back under control.
He hardly felt it. Didn’t care. He was pushing back with all his might against that word—dead—trying to banish the thought and the possibility as he drew on adrenaline and previously unknown reserves of strength to pump harder and faster up the steep incline. Every scrap of him that was good—every piece of faith he had left, every ghostly remnant of hope—was fixed on Lexie, willing her to be fine. Willing her to be as invincible, as permanent, as he needed her to be.
Twenty feet away, he came to such an abrupt stop that the metal rims of his tires screeched in protest, and then he flung the bike down and ran.
She was already moving when he got to her, her hands finding the asphalt and levering her torso off the ground.
Not dead.
The relief made his knees weak, and he sank down beside her.
“Jesus, Lexie, are you hurt?” He looked for blood or breaks, thinking of abdominal bleeding, of head and spinal injuries. His fingers twitched as though he could heal her himself if he only knew what part to treat—which was absurd, because he knew nothing. He had nothing to offer her but fear and rage. “That truck—that fucking reckless asshole—don’t move too fast, okay?”
She ignored him, unbuckling her helmet as she rose to her feet. “I’m fine,” she said dully.
“You’re not fine! Christ, Lex, he hit you! He must have winged you, or you’d be—” He couldn’t complete this thought. “What was it, did he get you with the side mirror or something? Did you—”
She stuck her hand up, a stop sign presented directly to his face in order to halt the questions. “He just crowded me. I grazed the rocks and lost my balance.” She did a quick inventory of her limbs, touched a bleeding scrape on one elbow with her index finger, picked up her bike, and started rummaging through her handlebar bag for so
mething.
“Your knee’s bleeding, too.” Tom came up behind her and settled both hands at her waist, wanting to reassure himself that she was solid and alive. If he could have, he’d have stripped off her shirt and laid his head against the center of her back to listen to her heartbeat. “You need to sit down. Drink some water. We’ve got to find you some shade.”
She pulled a bandana out of the bag, twisted herself free of his grip, and began the awkward job of tying the cloth around her elbow one-handed. “I’m fine. It’s just a few scrapes. Back off.”
There was a warning in her tone, but he ignored it. “At least let me do that,” he said, reaching for her arm.
“Back off, Geiger,” she said, smacking his hand away. “I can do this myself. Every single fucking thing you want to help me with, I can do myself.”
In the end, she held the bandana in place with her chin, glaring at him as she defiantly tended to her own wounds. He saw no trace of love in her eyes—only anger. He wanted to pull her into his arms and clean her scrapes, and then he wanted to find a campsite and get her inside his tent and make love to her until she lost all will to leave him.