AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The week spent fearing for my life.
The rescue.
The plane.
And the…
I’d been strong for most of the wretched experience but suddenly I couldn’t stop the tears. It was crazy. Why cry now when I was sitting safely in a beautiful home of a man who’d sparked a passion I’d thought didn’t exist?
But I allowed myself to cry, promising that I’d never shed another tear. At least not until the horrific experience was over once and for all. Would it be? Why had I been taken? Why pick on me? I hadn’t realized I was sobbing openly until I felt Viper’s presence and tried to regroup quickly. As I wiped my eyes, I plastered on a smile.
He said nothing, sitting down beside me, folding his arms over his legs.
For some crazy reason, that opened the floodgates again. Then I did an ugly cry, the kind where I wanted to crawl under my covers holding a damn stuffed animal. Fuck. I was a grown woman. What the hell was I doing thinking about a teddy bear? While he continued to remain silent, just having him close provided the comfort I needed.
When I was finally sniffing and not blubbering like a child, he turned his head.
“I was beginning to wonder,” he said in his rich, deep tone.
“What? How stupid I could become?”
“No. If you were superhuman, incapable of feeling the level of fear you should have been.”
His words made me laugh, which broke the hold the sadness had over me. “I assure you that I’m not super anything. I’m just a girl who has no clue how she got here.”
“Well, you got here by helicopter flown by a bad guy.”
I shot him a look, wrinkling my nose. “Where did the bad guy go ‘cause all I see is a hero.” I knew instantly I’d selected the wrong word, the light vanishing from his eyes.
He stared out at the water and from what it appeared, he was barely breathing. “I’m no hero, Willow. Just a man doing a job.”
“It didn’t seem that way. You love the risk, the danger involved. That’s easy to tell.”
Snorting, he allowed me to see another smile. “Yeah, you pegged me. I was always that way as a kid. It’s normal for you to be scared or upset, furious with the situation. You should be.”
“Maybe so, but crying isn’t going to help a damn thing. I’m usually not that kind of girl.”
“Then what kind of girl are you?”
No one had ever asked me that question before. “I was always a loner as the only kid. Studious. The good kid. That didn’t make me popular. I loved animals from the time I could remember.”
“A veterinarian suits you. What I was trying to tell you is that if you weren’t upset or worried, then you wouldn’t be human at all.”
“Are we safe here?”
“Safe is a relative term. How I’ll answer it is to say we’re safer here than probably anywhere else. I can protect you here.”
I rubbed my arms, uncertain of what to say. “The day the two men took me was the happiest day I’d remembered in a long time. A Golden Retriever had been brought into the clinic. He was limping, crying constantly, yet his owners had taken him to another vet twice and they found nothing. Finally, Buddy stopped eating his food or drinking water. They brought him to the emergency clinic where I worked. The tests were inconclusive, and I ran every test I could think of. His white blood cells were almost nonexistent, and I was pumping him full of fluid and antibiotics, but he kept getting worse.” I wasn’t certain if he was even paying attention. I wiped another tear away, wishing I could have Buddy in my arms again.
“Did he die?”
I took a deep breath. “He was close. By that point I was sleeping on the floor next to the cage he was in. His parents were beside themselves, calling every other hour. When the woman broke down into tears on the final day, I almost couldn’t handle it, but I was able to pull myself together. She begged me not to let her baby die. Her son.” Several more tears slid down my cheeks. I wiped them away furiously, trying to hold my shit together. “Anyway,” I choked. “I was determined to find out what might be wrong. I contacted several other facilities, as well as my instructor and finally something made sense. Lyme disease. I checked. He had an advanced case, which usually isn’t curable. When it’s been in an animal’s system for a long time, they’re rarely able to recover, but I couldn’t let him die. I just… couldn’t.”
The memory was bittersweet. I pressed my hand over my eyes, sobbing all over again. When I felt his arm sliding around me, I stiffened, although there was no reason to. He said nothing, just held me close as I cried about Buddy and the situation, the fact my mother had never loved me, my father looking the other way. I was even crying about the only man I’d ever dared fall in love with, only to have my heart crushed into a thousand pieces.
I’d become pathetic.
“He…” I gulped for air, determined to get through the story. “Buddy was a fighter. A ninety-pound fighter. I encouraged him, fed him bites of food every few minutes and I even sang to him. That went on for eighteen hours. Finally, the vet tech found me asleep on the floor with my hand in the cage holding Buddy’s paw. When I was awakened, I was in a daze until I heard Buddy’s tail thumping against the metal.” I shifted away so I could look into his eyes. “I saved him. I. Saved. Him.” The tears continued to fall.
