Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Obsessing over what Declan might be doing wasn’t going to help anything, and I needed to give him space to be with his team and have the discussions and appointments he’d gone for. But working another long shift was a curse when I finally had a break to check my phone, only to find Declan had finally messaged, and now it was too late to call and risk waking him up.
Hours earlier, he’d sent a pic of a desert sunset over craggy rocks and scrubby plants. Wish you were here. Doctor went okay. I’ll be home the day after tomorrow. Will tell you everything then.
Texts sucked. Declan’s expressions were cryptic enough in person. Reading his mood via text was darn near impossible. The picture was gorgeous, even in the shitty late-night cafeteria lighting on my phone. I could easily see why Declan enjoyed training in Arizona in the winter. The rugged desert with vivid colors reminded me of growing up in Utah near the various national parks. While I had no desire to return to the scraggly compound where I’d spent my first fifteen years, I could see sitting in the desert with Declan, watching the sunset, holding him, talking.
Hell, I’d hold him anywhere, and that was the entirety of our problem. Not wanting to alarm the bored cashier in the otherwise empty cafeteria, I suppressed a groan. Instead, I took another bite of a bitterly disappointing chicken croissant.
I’d be happy to openly claim Declan as mine, to have a real relationship. I’d risk losing his father as a friend, but I’d gain Declan, who was everything I’d spent my life searching for. Someone to take care of. Someone to take care of me. Someone who let me spoil them in and out of bed. Someone who valued time in bed for more than simply sex.
The last few nights I couldn’t look at my bookshelf or my e-reader app. I’d never been happier than when I was cuddled up, reading with Declan. But as much as I cared about him and wanted a future, I wasn’t prepared to spend years miserable and stuck in a closet of his own making.
That risk was made crystal clear as I scrolled through my messages to discover a series of texts from Rowan.
Rowan
OMG. Declan’s riding?!?!? They wouldn’t let him do that without the doctor clearing him, right? Cyrus posted this video on social.
Helpfully, he’d provided a link where Cyrus indeed had a video of him and Declan riding together.
Training with one of the GOATs. Bucket list moment and so f’ing happy to see Number Eleven riding again.
Fuck. Guess that answered that. Racing had won. I couldn’t see Declan’s face while he rode, not with the helmet and goggles and distance of the camera, but his body language was loose and fluid. I couldn’t say I knew a ton about riding motorcycles, but Declan certainly looked the part of the natural everyone said he was, one with his machine, zooming down straightaways and taking curves smoothly. He’d said numerous times that he was born to ride.
Now, I believed him. No way could I take that from him.
He could come out, be a trailblazer for his sport. But would he? Likely not, no matter how much “time” he was granted. I’d always known he’d return to racing, much as I’d hoped otherwise. I couldn’t hold him here and should have known better to dream of trying.
Stomach decidedly sour, I scrolled on. My other messages were a laundry emergency from Rowan, a request from Eric asking if I could handle getting the teens ready for school in the morning because he had an early shift, a message from Wren that Oz missed me, and oh, by the way, we were out of bacon and cereal again. Tony had forwarded word of another football fundraiser, and Maren had sent a line of cryptic emoji.
I was trying to decipher those when my hospital phone blared, summoning me back to the ER.
“We’ve got a multi-vehicle I-84 crash,” the triage nurse reported. “Two cars tangoed with a motorcycle in the rain. One fatality on the scene and three critical patients inbound. Life flight is grounded by the weather. All hands on deck.”
I didn’t have to ask which was the fatality, and my esophagus twisted into a tense knot right behind my sternum. Was I ever going to be able to hear motorcycle and not immediately think of Declan? And lord, I hoped Sean wasn’t on duty. He was a pro, a longtime firefighter, but he’d take this one hard.
I made it back to the nursing station at the ER, where the teams had assembled as we awaited the ambulances. One victim had burns, so the burn team would need to handle that case, bringing in the burn cam and other equipment to stabilize until they could airlift the burn patient into Portland.