“Everyone likes Ducatis.”

He scoffed.

“Okay, maybe I’m hoping she’ll like the Ducati.” The last time she’d seen it she’d simply shaken her head and walked away. My eyes flicked to the clock. The girls had been gone twenty minutes. “How is Paisley handling all of this?”

He didn’t look away from the screen. “She’s a little bit of everything. Strong, stubborn, relieved…heartbroken. She refuses to complain, not even about us sleeping on the fold-out down here until I can get up the stairs. She needs to take her beautiful, pregnant ass up to our room and sleep in a decent bed, but she refuses. She takes care of everything. The house, laundry, groceries, getting me to therapy and doc appointments, dealing with the stupid fucking wheelchair… Hell, I almost wish she would complain. It’s like she’s scared to let me know she’s hurting.”

“Will?” Guilt slammed into me, ripping apart what little peace I’d gained since the funeral. I shouldn’t have taken those last shots. I should have conserved more ammo during the firefight, should have had his back. But a million “shoulds” wouldn’t bring him back. How can Paisley…Ember even look at me?

Jagger sighed and dropped the remote as the race ended. “Yeah. It’s always worse after she calls to check on Morgan. She puts on a brave face, but it’s not like I can’t see it in her eyes, hear it in the words she’s not saying. What about Ember?”

I absently rubbed the skin near the healing, raw, pink line of the laceration on my thigh. “The notification wasn’t easy on her. Losing Will, the funeral, all the shit I’m putting her through… Fuck, you should have seen her face when I asked about an up-slip.”

Jagger’s head snapped toward mine. “You already asked about an up-slip?”

I nodded. “I have to know if I’ll be able to do it.”

He whistled low. “I’d have kicked your ass if I was Ember. You just get home after nearly dying, and you’re asking to get right back in the death machine?”

“You don’t want to get up there?”

“Hell yeah, I do. When my legs are ready, when I’m ready, but also when Paisley is ready. But I’m looking at six months before that’s even a remote possibility, and I know she needs this time just as much as I do. This has been pretty damn rough on her.”

Images of Ember played through my head. Burying her father, burning the West Point shirt, pinning my bars…my wings. The look on her face when I’d told her I was deploying, her tears that morning, the desperate way she’d clung to me, knowing almost better than anyone what could happen over there. Her soft sighs when she curled up next to me in Landstuhl, the slight way she trembled at Will’s funeral. But it was the look of shock when I’d thrown us to the floor last week that stuck with me.

She deserved so much better.

“Do you ever think that they’d have been better off if we’d just stayed away from them? Ember would have been. I know that.” The words slipped from my mouth before I could stop them.

“What. The. Actual. Fuck. Where the hell is your head at? Don’t even think things like that.”

“This life—what we do—it’s going to destroy her. I knew it back in college, and I should have stayed away, but I was too selfish. I wanted her too badly, and look what that’s brought—”

The door opened, and my mouth shut.

“We’re here!” Ember sang as she danced through the door, three boxes of pizza in her hands.

“Hey, babe.” I forced a smile for her, and she winked as she passed.

“Don’t get up, I’ll grab you a couple slices,” she ordered, taking the boxes to the dining room with Paisley following after she bent to kiss Jagger’s forehead.

Jagger looked at me, narrowing his eyes.

I shook my head and ran my hands over my face as the Skype app rang on Jagger’s television and he answered it. Stop voicing thoughts you shouldn’t even have.

“Sunday night dinner?” Sam asked from their dining room table in Colorado.

“You bet!” Jagger answered, saluting with the plate of pizza Paisley handed him.

“Pizza? Really? I thought we agreed on chicken cacciatore?” Grayson glared. “Italian, remember?”

“Pizza is Italian,” Jagger answered, his mouth full.

“There are no words for you,” Grayson said, shaking his head. We caught up on the week, as close as we could be with the eleven hundred miles that separated us.

Ember sat next to me and handed over two pieces of perfection with a beautiful smile. She was so damn happy lately that I’d gone to see Dr. Henderson. “Thank you,” I whispered and kissed her lightly. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for staying when you could so easily walk away.

I shoved my earlier thoughts to the back of my head, the dark corners where monsters, regret, and truth lurked, and coped how I did best—I locked it away.

But not before I realized how crowded it was getting back there.

Chapter Twenty-Four

EMBER

“Oh my God,” I said in disbelief as he walked through the door at the orthopedist’s office. Had it already been four weeks?

“Do you like it?” he asked, waving his arm in the middle of the waiting room.

“What is it?” I slipped my Kindle into my purse and stood.

“It’s an air cast. Sexy, right?”