Wife to Love by MK Moore
Excerpt Wife To Love by MK Moore
© 2018 MK Moore
Still in edits and subject to change
Prologue
Robby
The last nine years have been grueling in a way most people don’t ever experience, let alone stuffed into such a short amount of time, all before I was twenty-five. When I graduated from high school at fifteen, I took the next logical step and went to college. I went the pre-med route and graduated from college at the ripe age of eighteen. I loved it. I was proud of myself, as was my family. Though they didn’t always know how to handle me. My mother and stepfather tried to give me have a normal childhood experience, but I was an outcast. Sports drove me crazy because I was not good at them. I was tall, skinny, gangly. Your average nerd. Girls never gave me the time of day. Even my brothers Derek and Jason, and my sister, Ronnie treated me like a leper. I know they were young too, but I couldn’t understand it then. I was so lonely that I plowed through all my coursework in record time.
I could have done anything, but I had a calling to serve my country.
I joined the Army while I was in medical school and the rest is history. The Army helped bulk me up and gave me the kind of friends that last a lifetime.
I just completed my last tour and have been debriefing in Germany for the last week. When I woke up this morning, I thought it was just an ordinary day in a foreign country. Little did I know that my whole world would change. I originally opt to find my own way home and my flight leaves Berlin in two days. I am enjoying sightseeing and not following a strict schedule for the first time in years. I have a week’s worth of beard growth and no plans to shave. It will take some time for my hair to grow out from the Army issue buzz cut, but I will never have a scheduled haircut again.
Since I’ve seen all Berlin has to offer, and clubbing holds no appeal for me, I am ready to head back to my hotel room by early evening. After I leave the bar I had dinner in, I hear a scream ring out. A scream that was so full of anguish and despair, I stop dead in my tracks and take off running in the opposite direction. Toward the scream.
As I run into the alley, I collide with the screaming woman. Her eyes look haunted but quickly change to something like relief when we collide.
I lift her with ease and she goes lax and the screaming stops. She quickly passes out. Her face is covered in blood, but I can tell it’s mostly hers. I look down the alley and see a man, dressed in black staring at us. How fucking cliché. I memorize his face. He’s ugly, with dark hair and weirdly vivid green eyes. I dash my eyes down lower, to his hands. He has tattoos on them. With the way he is holding his pathetic looking knife, I can see the top of his hand says DEATH. Nice. I want to go after him, for hurting who I can only describe as mine, but I know she needs medical attention immediately. Turning away from him, I carry her out of the alley. He’d be an absolute idiot to follow me out here and try to finish whatever it is he had planned.
Reaching into my pocket, I pull out my cell phone and call 112 for the police. I can’t explain the visceral reaction I am having towards her, but I find that I don’t care. For the first time in my life, I don’t need science to explain this.
While I wait for them, I quickly check her over. I find nothing, but her US Passport attached to her, under her clothes. Smart girl. She must have read the same Frommer’s guide that I did.
Salenah Renee D’Agostino, 22. She has a beautiful name. I can’t help but wonder what she is doing here. Does she have a man somewhere waiting for her? The jealous nature I didn’t know I had comes rushing forth. Surely, she is not with the dick from the alley. That had to be a crime of opportunity. Was he trying to rape her? My fists clench at my sides. Her long skirt is twisted around, but that could have happened running to me. What kind of sick bastard does this to someone? It goes against my very nature. I brush her dark brown hair out of her eyes, which are still closed.
My medical brain wants me to help her, but I know that there isn’t anything I can do for her on the street. I can immediately see that she has a huge cut on her face from her right eye to down to her lip. Head and face wounds bleed profusely, but this cut is very deep. She needs stitches badly. I didn’t see anything else outwardly wrong with her, so I use my shirtsleeve to clean her face up a little. I note that she still hasn’t woken up, but as the old blood wipes away and I see her face for the first time, my chest constricts, and my earlier assumption that she is mine is pounding through my head again.
I feel like I need to go back to that alley and kill that fucker. That thought goes against my oath to save lives, not take them away, but for this girl, I’d do it. Even though I was in the Army, and know how to shoot, I had no call to use my weapon while overseas.
I feel like a caveman right now and that is something I’ve never felt before. Like every damn thing in my life just clicked into place. I had a feeling that I would never again know loneliness and for some reason, I gathered that she wouldn’t either.
I was so lost in my thoughts, I do not notice the ambulance pulling up to the curb. When they EMT asks me, “In welcher Beziehung stehst du zu dem Patienten?” What is your relationship to the patient?
I say the only thing that comes to my mind. “Sie ist meine Frau.” She is my wife.