Page 28 of Loving You Always

“Of course.” She sniffed, giving up on any dignity in these most intimate moments. “It was awful.”

“How would you have felt if I had died in Haiti?”

It would have gutted her. She would not have been able to hide her devastation from Cam or Jo or Kristeene or anyone who might have been around when she received that news. She would have collapsed and wept like a widow. She shook her head from side to side, her eyes locked on his.

“Yeah, that’s what I would have felt if you hadn’t made it. Worse.”

“Walsh—”

“No, you listen to me.” He planted a beam of steel in his words. “It was me in that chapel last week begging God to spare you. And it would’ve been me who would have died inside if you hadn’t made it. So don’t tell me you wish you weren’t here.”

“It’s so hard.” She didn’t mean to moan, but the hurt had to escape somehow. “I don’t think I can do it.”

“You have a long road ahead of you. Some rehab and some hard days. Maybe some counseling? If you don’t want to do this, it’ll be that much harder.”

“I know, I just…” Her voice trailed off on a hiccup, tears clogging her throat.

“Kerris, at my mom’s funeral, I let you go. I did the right thing. You were pregnant. You were Cam’s.”

Kerris gulped, hoping he wasn’t about to go there. She didn’t have the strength.

“I don’t have that resolve anymore. Not like I did.” She felt his lips in her hair. “I came too close to losing you for good, and I can’t promise to always let you go.”

He let his head fall back beside hers against the pillow, giving her a sideways glance full of things that frightened her.

“Hearing you say these things, I can’t leave you like this.”

She tried to ease away a little, as much as the limited motion her two casts and the bindings around her ribs would allow.

“Walsh, you have to.”

“You have to promise to try. If I even hear from Mama Jess that you’re not trying, I’ll be back. Don’t test me. I’ll come back and take care of you myself.”

“Walsh, you don’t have to do that. You can’t do that.”

“And am I supposed to trust Cam to do it?” The molten anger she realized he’d been carefully hiding from her slid under the shield guarding his composure.

“Walsh, hewilltake care of me.”

“He needs to do a damn better job of it.” The brambles in his voice scraped across her nerve endings. The anger he didn’t bother to hide made his big body hard and unforgiving. She was cuddling a stone wall.

“And maybe I need to do a better job taking care of him.” Kerris ran a finger along her hospital ID bracelet. “Maybe I need to be a better wife.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He nudged her when she didn’t respond.

“Nothing.”

She refused to reveal what she knew Cam would see as the ultimate humiliation: the fact that she had called Walsh’s name in her sleep. The guilt of that ate away at her.

“You’d better go,” she said after they’d lain there huddled together for a few more moments, words unnecessary.

“I don’t want to go.” His lips brushed her ear with the words.

And I want you to stay forever, she thought, wondering if the pain in her torso was a broken rib or a broken heart.

“Please go.” She denied herself the stolen pleasure of leaning up to kiss the hard line of his jaw.

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