Phoenix

by Crouch, Janie

  For safety’s sake, the bridge still offered a means of buckling in via safety line and harness, but most people just chose to walk it. It was wide enough and the boards sturdy enough not to be a real threat.

  Unless, of course, just walking was a threat, and you might fall over in a minute.

  Riley would have to hook herself into the safety line—there was no way she could take the chance of crossing with her legs spasming the way they’d been. She was just about to do so when the walkie-talkie clicked again.

  “Riley, you doing okay?” Zac’s voice came through.

  “Yeah, no problems.”

  “Good. Hope you’re going to arrive soon. Anne’s not back yet, and we’ve got a bunch of little injuries I need you to take a look at. We halted the race for twenty-four hours, but everyone needs to be cleared before tomorrow morning.”

  A bout of dizziness hit her, and she had to lean against the tree. Shit.

  “I’m still about an hour out.” She didn’t like to lie, especially not when she could almost see the camp from here, but the way she was feeling right now, it might take her every bit of an hour to make it that last quarter of a mile.

  “Oh. Okay. I thought you would’ve been much closer,” Zac said. “You sure everything’s okay?”

  “Yep.” Her voice was tight. She was glad he couldn’t see her face. “Just a little slow.”

  “Okay. We’ll see you when we see you. Be looking for you in about an hour.”

  “An hour. Roger that.”

  She pushed herself up from the tree she was leaning against. She needed to keep making forward progress—an hour would pass quickly, and she wouldn’t be able to hold Zac off a second time.

  But when she took a step forward and leaned to grab the safety harness lying on the ground next to the bridge, her muscle spasmed—the worst it had done all day. She jerked forward, lost her balance, and fell to her knees.

  Shit. This was bad. The annoying, nagging pain that had plagued her since she’d started walking had been bad enough. But it had been manageable.

  But her muscles clenching and unclenching like this? That was bad. Very bad.

  “You’re hurt. Something is wrong, and you didn’t tell me.” She sucked in her breath at Boy Riley’s voice behind her.

  This was much worse.

  She turned. He stepped out of the tree line just a few feet behind her.

  She had to get it together, quick. She forced herself to sit up straighter, like she’d meant to sit down for a little break. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Just clumsy.”

  “That’s bullshit, Wildfire, and we both know it. I was so pissed when I woke up and found you gone.”

  She didn’t want to fight with him. Couldn’t afford to fight with him. “In my defense, I thought I was going to get the RV and drive it to camp two. I thought you had to walk since you still wanted to be in the race, so I might as well let you rest. Then the rope bridge was out so I had to turn around.”

  “I’ve been watching you for three miles.” Those whiskey-brown eyes narrowed at her. “At first I was trying to figure out why you’d left. I thought maybe you just needed some time or something. What happened in the cabin was pretty intense.”

  She nodded. It was all she could do.

  “Jesus, Wildfire, you’ve never been one to run away. I’ve always trusted you.”

  “I’ve never betrayed your trust. No matter how far apart we’ve been, there’s never been anyone else.”

  He shook his head. “I know that. For me either. I’ve never been interested in any other woman but you.”

  He took a step toward her, and she wished she could scoot away, but unless she wanted to drag herself in the dirt, that wasn’t happening. “But I trusted you to tell me when you needed something. To communicate with me. Not run away.”

  “I always did.”

  “I would’ve believed that until today.” Another step closer. “I’ve been watching the pain and stiffness get worse. Dizziness too, right?”

  Damn it, he’d always been way too observant. It was what made him such an exceptional athlete.

  She had to think of a way to talk herself out of this.

  She stretched her leg out in front of her as casually as possible, hoping if it seized or jerked again, it wouldn’t be noticeable. “I think we can both agree it’s been a crazy day. I might’ve pushed it a little too far. My body decided that an extra five-mile hike on top of everything I asked it to do today was unreasonable and let me know it.”

  He tilted his head to the side, studying her. “You know, that’s exactly what I told myself. That you had every right to take it as slowly and stiffly as you wanted. That you saved my life today and that I should be carrying you if you wanted me to.”

  She didn’t like that he was being so reasonable. Didn’t like that he was standing over her, towering over her way down here on the ground. “Why aren’t you angry? I left you sleeping without a word.”

  “Oh, like I said, I was plenty angry. I was going to have it out with you.”

  “Okay, so let’s have it out.” She’d been wrong. Fighting was better. She could easily make him mad and get him off topic.

  “I’m not going to fight with you, Wildfire.”

  “And why is that?” She said with a smirk, the furthest actual thing from what she was feeling.

  He crouched down so he was more at her level. “Because that’s exactly what you want. To distract me with a fight.”

  Goddammit. “Get over yourself, Harrison. Hell, I’ll admit we had some good sex today. But nothing has changed. I still don’t want you in my life. We’re not right for each other. Never have been, if you think about it.”

  He tilted his head to the side again. “Do you want to marry me?”

  Oh God, her heart was going to break inside her chest. “You’re really not good with the concept of a breakup, are you? That’s the opposite of getting married.”

  He shifted his weight so he was sitting on the ground near her rather than crouching. “I know we never seriously talked about marriage. Except for when we saw that house. Do you remember that?”

  If she could have run away, she would have. “Yes,” she choked out. “I remember the house.”

  She’d lived in Oak Creek all of her life and somehow had never known about the huge old cabin about five miles south of the main section of town. She and Riley had found it almost by accident when they’d seen a realtor’s open-house sign as they were driving by the main road last fall.

  One look at the place, and she’d fallen in love with it. The wraparound porch. The three fireplaces. The use of native stone for the outer finishes. The creek that ran through the back of the property.

  It was like she’d seen her whole future there. Her. Riley. Three kids.

  She’d said something of the sort to him, then felt like an idiot. She’d always been the one to belittle the concept of a traditional marriage and family.

  She’d seen how ugly marriage could turn out, had been used as a bartering tool between her mother and father for most of her childhood.

  She’d wanted to stay as far away from that as possible. He’d known it from the beginning, and it hadn’t bothered him.

  “I know what I said when we saw the house. It was just hormones or something.”

  It sure as hell hadn’t felt like hormones. It had felt like fate was slapping her in the face, telling her that maybe everything she’d thought she didn’t want she actually did.

  Of course, fate had slapped her again with the MS diagnosis—telling her maybe it didn’t matter what she did or didn’t want. She was getting MS instead.

  “It was the only time you ever talked about the possibility of marriage and a family. I was wondering if maybe you were considering that again now.”

  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.”

  Riley struggled to hold on to his temper. Wildfire’s spirit and stubbornness were two of the things he most loved about her, but it also meant they sometimes butted heads. “No. You don’t get to make yourself relationship judge, jury, and executioner.”

  “I’m not trying to be that, but the hard fact about MS is that it’s just going to get worse, and our lives are not compatible.”

  He slammed his fist against a tree, causing water that had collected on the leaves during the storm to rain down on them. “That is complete and utter bullshit. You’re scared, I get it. But there’s no way—”

  The sound of a twig breaking cut Riley off. He turned to find Zac and Wyatt coming in a few yards to the south. They’d obviously made the noise on purpose.

  “I’m sorry,” Zac said. “I’m truly sorry to be interrupting you, but I thought you’d prefer to know we were nearby.”

  The other man looked deeply regretful. So did Wyatt.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Long enough,” Wyatt said.

  Wildfire gritted her teeth and gave them a nod. “So now you know. Multiple sclerosis. My
body is attacking itself. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Annie got back early, and when she found out you were alone and that it was taking you so long to get to camp two, she freaked out. Especially when she found out everything you’d been through today. She was about to come after you, but I talked her into letting Wyatt and me come.”

  “Annie wouldn’t tell us anything, just that you might not be able to make it to camp,” Wyatt said.

  “I knew she wouldn’t tell anyone,” Wildfire whispered. “Even if she wasn’t a medical professional, I made her promise.”

  Riley’s heart broke a little at the look of defeat that fell over her features. In all the years he’d known her, he’d never seen that look.

  Her fearlessness was gone.

  “Wildfire…” He stepped closer.

  She shook her head. “Don’t touch me. I have to go. I can’t talk about anything else right now.”

  She walked toward the bridge, and something akin to panic clutched at his chest. What if she fell? Even with the safety ropes, would she be able to get herself back up?

  “I’ll help you get across.”

  She didn’t look at him. “I can do it myself.”

  “No, let me help.” He walked around in front of her, taking the safety rope to attach it to the harness. But she snatched it out of his hand.

  “I said I can fucking do it myself!”

  “Don’t be stupid.” He took it back from her. “There’s no need to—”

  She slapped him. The sound of it rang out all around them.

  Neither of them had been expecting it. There was probably more shock on her face than there was on his.

  “Oh my God.” A huge tear rolled down her cheek.

  He moved his jaw around a little, not surprised to find the blow had cut the inside of his cheek enough for him to taste blood. “Are you done with your fit now? Are you going to let me help you?”

  He almost expected her to slap him again. Wouldn’t blame her.