And what the hell was with the insistent tugging?
He shifted his arm away from the annoyance, and finally, it stopped. A soft hand patted his cheek.
“Vaughn? Are you awake?” The patting turned into a light smack. “C’mon, you asshole! Wake the fuck up! If this car goes into the river, I’m not jumping in after you.”
Sage.
His heart did some incredible acrobatics behind his ribs, and he peeled his eyes open. She was perched precariously on a steep downhill slope, one hand on the car door to keep from sliding. Mud streaked her clothes and face and leaves were stuck in her hair, but she appeared to be in one piece.
And she was still here. She hadn’t run.
She. Hadn’t. Run.
“You’re here.” His voice sounded like gravel, but he couldn’t clear the roughness out of it. “You’re still here.”
She released an explosive sigh. “Thank God. The car’s not stable. Every time I try to reach in and unbuckle you, it slides farther downhill. You need to get out of there.”
His brain wasn’t working at full speed, and it took him several seconds to process what she was saying.
“Vaughn!” She tugged on his arm again. “C’mon! The car is going to crash into the river. You need to move!”
As if to prove her point, the car slid a few feet, and she jumped back with a yelp, landing in the mud on her butt. “Vaughn! Move!”
Yeah. Moving was a good plan. Now if he could just get his body to cooperate…
Slowly, he reached down and found the buckle, but it took several precious moments to find the button. When he did and the belt released, he poured out of the seat like two hundred pounds of half-melted Jell-O. The car slid forward again, and he banged his chest against the steering wheel.
Damn. She wasn’t kidding about the car crashing into the river. It was going down, just a matter of when.
He batted the deflated airbag out of his way. No wonder his head was thundering in beat with his heart—it had probably gotten an up close and personal meeting with the bag. Which, granted, was better than the windshield, so he really couldn’t complain.
Sage appeared at the door again and gripped his hand, helping him out of the wreck with a surprising amount of strength. She was no weak, wilting flower. She was strong and capable, and there was zero chance he’d ever break her.
That was sexy as hell.
He landed in the mud beside her, and for a long moment, neither of them moved. The car slid another few feet, and he finally sat up, though it was a chore.
“My bag.” He shoved himself upright, staggered. “We’ll need it. Supplies—”
Sage gripped his arm. “No, you’re injured. You don’t have to play Superman. I’ll get it.”
He sank back down, partially relieved, but mostly annoyed that she was right. He was more injured than he wanted to admit. His body was still healing from the bomb blast, and he’d put it through hell since getting the cast off his leg a few weeks ago, trying to prove…he didn’t know what. His masculinity? His badassness? His immortality? But all he’d proven was his stupidity, and he was paying for it now.
Oh Christ, he hurt.
He’d had a lot of internal injuries after the bomb, and it’d be just his luck if the car accident had screwed up his insides again. He should probably haul his ass to a hospital and make sure he wasn’t bleeding out.
Except if he suggested the hospital, Sage would run again. He’d been pretty doped up on pain medication the last time they were in a hospital together, but he distinctly recalled how twitchy it had made her.
All right. No hospital.
He was fairly certain he wasn’t seriously injured, just really fucking bruised and battered. He’d live. And with that thought, he gathered his strength and shoved himself to his feet again as Sage returned to his side.
“Now what?” she asked, shouldering the bag.
Vaughn glanced around, orienting himself to their surroundings. “The SUV’s gone?”
“Yeah, they took off. Didn’t even bother to check to see if we were dead.”
“They didn’t want us dead. There are easier ways to kill a person.”
In the glow of the headlights, he saw her go pale.
She gripped the strap of the bag tighter. “So they were…what? Sending a message?”
“I think so.” He nodded and immediately regretted it as pain sliced through his temple. He rubbed his forehead with his fingers. “We need a place to lay low. The motel in town is our best option.”
Sage eyed him up and down. “But it’s probably still a good three-mile walk. Can you do it?”
It irked that she had to ask. Irked more that, yes, in his current state, a three-mile hike was going to be a struggle. “We’ll go up to the road. It’ll be smoother, faster.”
“What if we see the cop again?”
“We’ll see him before he sees us. If he shows up again, we’ll duck into the trees. C’mon.” He turned and looked up the embankment at the road overhead and tried not to groan. “Let’s move.”
Chapter Nine
The road was endless, with no town in sight. Nothing but empty asphalt, towering pines, and the silence of the night broken by the rushing water of the river as it snaked through the ravine alongside the road.
Sage paused and stared ahead at another hill. Her feet hurt, her head hurt, and every muscle in her body ached, threatening to lock up with every step she took. “We should have reached the town by now.”
Vaughn released an explosive sigh and kept moving. “Is this your version of ‘are we there yet?’ Because, yeah, it’s just as annoying.”
He was limping. He was trying not to show it, but Sage saw the slight hitch in his usually smooth gait. He was hurting just as much as she was, probably more, and she feared his injuries were worse than he wanted to let on.
In an instant, she flashed back to November and saw him lying so still in a hospital bed, wrapped in a cast from ankle to hip. All the tubes and monitors and bandages…
Her stomach twisted at the memory. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said through his teeth and glanced over his shoulder at her. “But if you keep asking me that, I might just jump into that ravine and put myself out of my misery.”
She snorted. “And let me get away with all of my crimes? Have you gone soft on me, Vaughn Wilde?”
He said nothing more and continued trudging along the deserted road with a single-mindedness that was maddening.
Fine. If he wanted to do this the hard way, she’d just have to call him out on his bull. Hands on her hips, she planted her feet and made her voice into a whip. “Vaughn. You’re limping.”
His shoulders tightened, but he still didn’t stop, didn’t glance back. “If the cop was telling us the truth, we should be reaching the motel soon.”
“That’s what you said a mile ago. And I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to doubt his word. That guy wasn’t exactly the most trustworthy law enforcement officer I’ve ever met. You know, since he sold us out to the bad guys and all.”
That finally stopped him. “Motherfucker,” he said under his breath and swung around. “He told us to put on our seatbelts. He knew they were going to play a game of bumper cars with us.”
She nodded. “Exactly. He lied to us. There is no motel. If there was, we would have found it by now. We’re lost.”
“We’re not lost.”
“Oh, please.” Exasperated, she flopped her arms in the air. “For all we know, the next town could be twenty miles away. And besides that, we’re in Deliverance territory out here. What if we do find the motel and the locals aren’t real big on southern hospitality?”
“We’re not lost,” he said again, enunciating each word. “SEALs don’t get lost.”
Out of all the very valid points she’d just made, leave it to him to get hung up on that. “You’re not a SEAL anymore.”
“It’s not something you turn off when you leave the teams, vixen. The tr
aining stays with you for life and SEALs. Don’t. Get. Lost.”
She held up her hands in surrender. “Okay, you cling to that delusion. In the meantime, I want to check your phone for a signal again.” She’d been forced to give it back when he realized she still had it, and anxiety had been playing her spine like a piano ever since. What if Marcus texted again? So far, the phone hadn’t found a signal since the crash, which was both a blessing and a curse.
“I told you,” he said and grabbed the phone from his pocket. “Battery’s dying. We can’t keep checking it. We’ll need the juice when we do finally have a signal again, which…” He checked the screen. “Is not now. Fucking thing.” He pocketed it again. “What do you remember from the GPS?”
She sighed and sat down on a large rock beside the road to give her aching feet a rest. “I don’t know. I was more concerned with the car following us.” She closed her eyes, thought back, tried to picture the map in her mind. “I’m pretty sure there is a town, but it’s closer to the state highway we needed to take to get to Atlanta. That’s still at least seven, maybe eight miles away.”
Vaughn crossed to her, nudged her over so he could sit, too. He groaned as he lowered himself to the rock and rubbed the leg he’d been favoring. “Damn.”
“We should rest.” Cold seeped through her leggings from the stone and for the first time, she realized how much the temp had dropped. Her breath was starting to fog against the air with each exhale, too. And of course as soon as she noticed it, she started to shiver. “It’s getting colder.”
“Could be worse. We’re lucky this part of the country seems to be having a mild February.” He hesitated, then wrapped an arm around her and pulled her in against him. “Still, it’s cold enough that we’re in very real danger of hypothermia. We should set up a camp, build a fire, and wait out the dawn.”
“You can do that?” For all of the survival skills she’d honed in the last five years, she’d never mastered the art of wilderness survival. Honestly, hadn’t wanted to try. The urban jungle was more her speed. “You can build a fire?”
“Well, I could….” He smirked. “If I were still a SEAL.”
She bumped him with her shoulder. “Asshole.”
“I think I prefer the more colorful ‘twatwaffle.’” He stood and held out a hand to help her up. “I’ve been dying to ask. What the hell is a twatwaffle, anyway?”
Ignoring his hand, she got to her feet. Not out of any sense of stubbornness, but because she was afraid of hurting him. “When we reach civilization, look in the mirror. You’ll find a perfect example right…” She drew circles around her own face with one finger. “There.”
He gave a bark of laughter, and she couldn’t help but grin. She missed a lot about their short-lived relationship—the strangely easy rapport they’d had and, dear God, the mind-blowingly hot sex—but most of all, she’d missed bantering with him. He’d always been able to make her laugh with his dry wit, something she hadn’t expected when she first met the big, brooding man in the elevator at Jude and Libby’s wedding.
In truth, she’d found Vaughn a little intimidating during that first meeting, and her inner rabbit had kicked in. She’d run as far and as fast as she could away from him—only to return to her room and find her fiancé in a frightening rage after an encounter with his ex-girlfriend.
She’d never seen Preston angry before. He’d been so mild mannered, which was why she’d chosen him. He’d seemed like a safe bet, but the way he’d ripped up the hotel room was a vivid reminder of a past she wanted to forget. She’d called off the engagement right then and, although she’d wanted to run from him, too, her friendship with Libby and the fact she’d been a bridesmaid had made her stick.
She’d returned to the reception like nothing had happened and drowned her sorrows in revelry and champagne. She tended to be a mopey drunk, though, and when the reception had started winding down, she’d staggered onto the beach to do just that—mope over her horrible taste in men.
Why was she was only attracted to the psychos?
She watched Vaughn walk along the edge of the road, searching for… she didn’t know what, and then she remembered him stumbling toward her that night on the beach, obviously having had one too many drinks himself. She remembered how sweet she’d thought he was for his drunken attempts to cheer her up. Remembered how hot she’d burned the first time they’d kissed under that dancing palm tree…
Okay, maybe she wasn’t only attracted to psychos.
She was more attracted to Vaughn than she’d ever been to any man in her life, and he was a good man with a good heart—once you got past the solid wall of brooding, intimidating intensity he erected around himself. If she had the luxury, he was the kind of man she’d want for the long haul. Only, she wasn’t going to get long haul. She was lucky to get right now.
But oh, how she wished circumstances could be different.
“Over here,” Vaughn called as he left the road, breaking through her thoughts.
She followed him down an embankment and found him circling a small clearing, picking up twigs and branches as he went. “Is this where we’ll camp?”
“Yeah, it’s a good spot.”
She eyed the clearing. A good spot? All she saw was a bare patch of leaf-strewn earth. What exactly was good about it?
Her doubt must have shown on her face, because he added, “It’s flat, dry, has a good canopy overhead in case Mother Nature wants to be a bitch and dump on us. Plus, we can see the road, but anyone driving by won’t be able to see us.”
The idea of staying here overnight gave her the sensation of ants crawling over her arms. She told herself bedding down here was pretty much the same thing as walking along the road—either way, she wasn’t leaving the woods tonight—but that didn’t help. She hugged herself. “I don’t know about this. Maybe we should—”
“What? You already pointed out it’s getting cold, and we still have a long hike. We’ll be better off staying put and warm until the sun comes up.”
She grumbled. “I hate that I was right.”
“C’mon.” He crouched down, cleared away the dead leaves from a spot on the ground, and started layering the sticks he’d collected into a teepee. “Haven’t you ever been camping?”
“No. The closest I’ve come is—” Realizing how much she was about to reveal about herself, she stopped.
He glanced up. “Is…?”
“Nothing.”
His expression said he suspected it was more than nothing, but he didn’t call her out. Instead, he set about making the teepee. When he finished, he grabbed his bag from her and dug through it.
“Now what?” she asked. “Do you rub two rocks together?”
“I could. Or…” He found what he was looking for and held it up. “Use a lighter.”
“You’re not a smoker. Why do you have a lighter in your bag?”
“Never leave home without one.”
She found a downed log, sat, and propped her chin in her hand. “I thought it was Tabasco sauce you never left home without.”
He reached into the bag again and pulled out a plastic bottle. “Have that, too.”
“That’s not going to start a fire anywhere but in your gut.”
He chuckled and slid it back in the bag. “Now you sound like my buddy Quinn. He thinks I’m crazy for liking the stuff.” As he spoke, he crawled back over to the teepee and flicked the lighter. Within seconds, the small pieces of wood underneath caught. He blew on it, fanning the flames until the whole thing was engulfed.
Sage scooted closer and warmed her hands over the flames. The heat was delicious, a wonderful reprieve from the February chill.
Vaughn sat back, groaning a little as he stretched out his legs. He dragged the bag of snacks from the truck stop between them, found a bottle of water, passed it to her, then grabbed one for himself.
“There was this one morning during BUD/S—that’s the training program for SEALs,” he explained after taking a drink when she
opened her mouth to ask what it was. “It’s, in a word, brutal. The instructors take you to your limit and then give you a big fucking shove past it. So this one morning, we drag ourselves to breakfast, and we’re all starving, miles beyond exhausted, and aching in places we didn’t know we could ache. Most of the guys just shoveled in their food on autopilot, probably not even tasting it. But me?” He laughed with the memory. “I was so tired I was delirious, and this stubbornness kicked in. I wasn’t going to eat a bite without my Tabasco sauce. And with the instructors ragging my ass the entire way, I dragged myself to my bunk for the bottle. That was when Quinn started calling me Tabasco, and the nickname’s stuck ever since. There are a few guys on the teams who probably don’t even know my real name.”
It was impossible not to hear the nostalgia in his voice. “You miss it.”
He opened his mouth as if to protest, but he closed it again without uttering a sound and stared into the flames. “Yeah. I do. A lot.” He glanced over, and his lips twisted in a self-depreciating smile before he took another gulp from his water. “Not being on the teams…it feels like….like I’ve had a leg knocked out from under me while I’m standing on stilts.” He offered her a bag of pistachios.
She waved it away. “What do you mean?”
“Hell. I don’t know.” He sat in silence for a few seconds, cracking open the nuts, tossing the shells into the flames. “I told you about how my parents were killed in a gas station robbery gone bad when I was eleven…”
“I remember,” she said softly. She didn’t remember the whole story, but she did recall the complete heartbreak in his voice as he’d related it. She remembered her heart cracking open just like one of his pistachios. She remembered soothing him the only way she’d known how…with her body.
“Yeah, well.” He tossed another shell into the fire. “I always had my brothers, and they always had my back, but…I struggled without my parents. For years, I was so angry and probably depressed. After high school, Greer wanted us all to join the military so we could pay for college. Greer and Reece went into the Army. Cam, Air Force. Jude, Marines. And I chose the Navy without really putting much thought into it. Figured I’d do my four and get out…but I found my place there. And then when I joined the SEALs, I found a second family and a steadier support system than my brothers were able to give. It was exactly what I needed.”
Running Wilde Page 8