Page 219 of The Perfect Wrong

Hands and instruments poke me, disconnected voices flying around, and then the steady whirr of jet engines fades to the muted silence of a hospital.

More nurses. More doctors. More bleeting machines.

More hours—days?—flat on my back as they fuss over fixing fractured bones and rehydrating my desiccated husk of a body.

When I can sit up long enough to choke down food without passing out again instantly, some wiry guy who sounds like a military shrink comes in.

I tell him to give the commander more attention. Sexton is a fuck of a lot more screwed up than I am and missing a couple fingers. Not that the hard old goat is likely to care about anything besides the fact that he kept his granddaughter safe.

For the first time since I slept with Delia, I pass out without any nightmares gnawing at my brain. Sleep comes in sporadic fits but it returns like an ebbing wave.

I need to rest. I need to get ready for her.

And I only have one dream.

Every time, it’s the same, the one that sustained me for all the weeks I was rotting away in that dank fucking tomb.

Delia.

Sweet, naked, strawberry-mouthed Delia.

The only cure I’ll ever need for body, mind, and spirit.

As soon as I get my lips back on hers, I will fucking drink her up like a man who’s been wandering the desert for twenty years.

I just don’t want her to see me like this.

Not fucking yet.

Not when I’m welded back together with screws and surgeries, bandages on every limb. I’ve probably had at least thirty or forty pounds melt off under the stress, and sad to say some of that is muscle.

That sick son of a bitch left me a shell, and I have to reach deep to find the man who’s still worthy of an angel like her.

Even if I don’t lay it on the shrink, I worry they’ve left me with a few traumas I’ll only realize some long dark night, when I wake up roaring with sweat dripping down my neck, ready to strangle the motherfuckers who tortured me like an animal.

Whatever.

I’m still alive.

Still breathing.

Still whole, once my bones have a little time to set.

Still able to claim what’s mine and fuck her as hard as I missed her face.

If there was ever a time to stop dicking around with a new lease on life, it’snow.

I’m going to marry her.

We’ll start working on our family the second she graduates and jumpstarts her career—hell, maybe before, if I can’t contain the boiling need in my veins to breed.

A couple days later, I wake up feeling better than death warmed over. I finally have a raging hard-on again, and I’ve got half a mind to ask the nurse to run me a cold shower.

But she tells me I have a visitor.

I straighten up and try to look like more than a guy who took a brickbat to his face as Landon Strauss comes strolling in. Sex is at his side, a few yellowed bruises on his face and one hand bandaged.

Fuck.

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