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As Duncan climbed in behind the wheel of his truck to finally get off this damn shoulder, Phoebe reached over and clutched his arm. “Hey. Thank you for this. Really, thank you. After an hour of watching people drive right by me, trying not to panic about how I’d ever get out of here with Smoky, you stopped and gave me so much more help than I hoped for. You are officially a knight in shining armor.”
Feeling that praise like it had actual warmth, Duncan smiled and attempted a dumb courtly flourish. “At your service, milady.”
Phoebe laughed and sat back. “Okay, don’t let it go to your head there, buddy.”
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~oOo~
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For the first few minutes of the trip, they rode in relative silence. A few sentences about where, precisely, Duncan was headed, and some discussion about what temperature to put the heater on. But no kind of real conversation. Duncan tried to pick up her vibe and understand whether she’d even like to talk.
He liked this girl, and he wanted to know more. Eventually he was too curious to keep quiet, so he found something she’d offered about herself and used it to maybe start a conversation.
“How’d you decide to start a rescue ranch?” He almost added that his sister was a vet and had just won an award for her work with rescues—hey, maybe they even knew each other—but decided against it. He wanted to know about her. Details about him, or his family, could wait.
Oddly, Phoebe didn’t answer right away, and when he glanced over, she was watching him, her expression almost blank, just a touch of that evaluative look around her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to get nosy,” Duncan said. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just ... it’s a big, long, heavy story, and I don’t want to trap you in something a lot more involved than you were expecting.”
“Hey, we got an hour to kill, right? I’m listening if you want to tell me a story, heavy or otherwise.”
She nodded but didn’t start her story. For a few more minutes, she was quiet, and every time Duncan looked over, she was watching the road ahead of them.
“I was in the Army,” she finally began. “Deployed to Afghanistan.”
“Oh, shit,” Duncan said. He thought about Dex, but again, set details about his life and the people in it aside for later.
“Yeah. I enlisted after high school. I wanted to go to college, but there was no money for it, and I didn’t want to drown in loans. So I went the military route. I was deployed pretty much right out of training.”
“I know people who fought over there,” Duncan said, because she’d paused like she expected some input. “I’ve heard how rough it was.”
“I was there for less than a year. Then the truck I was in rolled over an IED.”
That statement surprised Duncan so much his foot slipped off the gas. “What? Shit!”
She did not look like someone who’d been blown up by a bomb. Duncan had done a couple of Christmases with Dex at the VFW, and he’d seen what IEDs did. He wondered what her big coat and jeans were covering.
His face must have shown that thought somehow, because she said, “I’ve got all my parts. I don’t even have many scars. The guy sitting next to me was torn apart, but I barely bled.” She looked out the side window. “On the outside, anyway. On the inside, I got kind of pureed. The shockwave from the bomb.”
If they hadn’t been towing a horse, Duncan would have pulled off the road and found somewhere to stop so he could really look at her. Unable to do that, he said, “I’m sorry.”
He caught the shake of her head in his peripheral vision.
“Anyway. I was in a coma for about eight months, and when I came out of it, I had to learn to do everything again—walk, talk, write, read, feed myself, everything. I even had to relearn how to think and remember who I was. I was in rehab for almost two years, the last part of it in a kind of halfway house, where you transition back to living on your own.”
“Jesus, Phoebe. Can I ask—tell me I’m an asshole if I shouldn’t ask—but how old are you?” She looked young and fresh, innocent, even. Not like a wounded warrior.
“Maybe it’s rude, but I don’t think you’re an asshole. I’m twenty-five.”
The same age as him. Suddenly his badass biker life felt like make-believe.
It very much was not; the Bulls practically had a wing of the cemetery as evidence of the extreme realness of their life. But he himself hadn’t faced danger like that. He’d been left behind for most of the hardcore shit. Even now, Dex was trying to leave him behind.
Suddenly, Duncan thought he truly understood Dex’s motivation. Still didn’t agree with it, but understood.
