He wasn’t.

Chapter Seven

Ronan

Six years earlier

“Dr. Grisham?”

“Don’t call me that,” I automatically said as I turned away from the man standing at the motel room door and continued to struggle with the cap on the prescription bottle. “Here,” I said as I tossed my wallet at him. “Take whatever I owe you.”

I didn’t care when the man followed me into the room, although as I glanced at him again, I realized there could have been two men since my vision was fucked up. “How many of you do I see?” I asked stupidly as I searched for the bottle of vodka I’d put down somewhere when I’d gone to answer the door.

The man didn’t respond and truthfully, I didn’t give a shit because I’d finally gotten the cap off the pill bottle. But when I tried to dump the pain pills into my hand, none of them hit my skin and I stared in confusion at the array of white dots scattered around my feet.

“Here,” the man said and he placed one of the pills in my hand. Somewhere in my muddled mind it occurred to me that the pill was round instead of oval and it looked blue instead of white but I didn’t care.

“Need more than one,” I muttered even as I shoved the pill into my mouth and swallowed since I hadn’t managed to find the vodka.

“It will take me a few minutes to clean these up,” he said. “Why don’t you relax and I’ll give you a couple more in a second?”

A voice in the back of my head said the motel manager was being a little too nice considering what an asshole he’d been all the previous times he’d pounded on my door demanding payment, but I realized I didn’t give a fuck. Pretty oval white pills will do that for you. Hopefully round blue ones would too.

My eyes felt heavy as I watched the man kneel on the floor to collect the scattered pills and I put out my hand so he could give them to me. But as a calmness finally began to settle over my tired body, I dropped my head to the pillow and closed my eyes so I could enjoy it.

The next time I awoke, the uncomfortable bed beneath me was gone. My mouth felt like it was stuffed full of cotton and my head was hurting like a son of a bitch. It took me several long seconds to realize I wasn’t in my motel room anymore and the lovely burn of the OxyContin I’d been swallowing like candy for the last few days since I’d been discharged from the hospital was gone. I had a vague recollection of the blue pill I’d swallowed without so much as a second thought and realized now it had likely been a sedative or sleeping pill.

I forced my eyes open and let them adjust. I was sitting in the front passenger seat of a car, but there was no one else in it and it was parked in the middle of a grassy field with nothing around as far as the eye could see. Well, not nothing. There was a small lake with a picnic bench about a hundred yards away and sitting on top of the table was a man, his back to me. I glanced at the ignition but saw no keys. I searched the car for a weapon but couldn’t even find a scrap of paper to indicate who the car belonged to. My phone was gone, as was my wallet.

I was surprised to actually feel a tremor of fear go through me which was ridiculous since I hadn’t given a shit whether I lived or died once I’d locked myself in the motel room and started chugging the pills that made me forget everything. My limbs felt sluggish as I opened the car door and got out. I kept my eyes on the man’s back as I scanned my surroundings once again, but I didn’t see any other cars, roads or any signs of life. There was a slight breeze that made the tall grass sway back and forth but otherwise it was obscenely quiet. I made my way towards the man, accepting whatever fate he decided to throw my way because I didn’t care anymore. Trace was gone and the man I’d been had died with him. I’d watched our blood pool together between us in the dry, hot sand that had cradled our broken bodies and I’d felt my life end the second Trace’s had. The stranger who’d brought me out here for whatever reason couldn’t take anything else from me.

I hated that it took me so long to get to him, but while my body had healed enough for the doctors to discharge me from the military hospital in Bethesda, I wasn’t fully healed enough to move much faster than a snail’s crawl and without a very pronounced limp. As I got closer, I realized that while most of the land around us was flat, the picnic table the man was sitting on was on top of a small rise that led down to the water. So it wasn’t until I was about fifteen feet away from the man that I realized we weren’t alone and I came to a stop when I took in the sight before me.

Tags: Sloane Kennedy The Protectors M-M Romance
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