CHAPTER TWELVE
Cameron~
His response confused Warrior Woman enough that she backed away from the walker and let him go back to the living room. She had wiped up the coffee table and his pills were in little plastic boxes today. Probably a good idea, it seemed he remembered, or maybe he had dreamed, that Quincy and Rebecca had found the saucers. It was hard to know. His memory was totally shot.
“Which ones have the painkillers?” he mumbled.
“None of the ones you’re taking right now.”
“Who died so you could become Dr. D’Angelo?”
“Eleanor advised me. She consulted a pharmacist. They worked out a schedule, so you don’t take meds together where their interaction is problematic. Trust me. You were poisoning yourself before.”
Strangely, he did trust her. He resented the hell out of her interference, but he trusted her.
“Anyway, I don’t have to be a doctor to know that painkillers are only the beginning with a joint replacement. If you want the pain in your knee to stop, you also have to do the exercises so that the prosthesis becomes a working part of your body.”
She shook her head at him. “What you need is fresh air, sunshine, and physical training.” Hands on hips, she blocked his walker again and bent forward to put her face up close to his. “No, ifs, ands, or buts, Bear Boy.”
“What part of no don’t you understand, woman?”
Frankie smiled. She was beautiful, and never more so than when she smiled, but that smile froze his blood. She leaned a little further forward and kissed him smack on the lips. That shorted out whatever was left of his brain. It was all he could do to stay upright. He gripped the handles of his walker hard. He wanted to deepen the kiss, but she pulled away.
“Have you noticed,” she asked conversationally, “That you’re not stuttering this afternoon?”
“I’m usually better when I first wake up.”
“And that you’re sleeping better?”
“I figured that was because you were singing me to sleep.”
She blushed, like the sky at sunset. It was pleasant to see Warrior Woman standing with her mouth wide open, at a loss for words. But she recovered quickly. Her teeth snapped together. “That’s right, Fly Boy. I’ve been lulling you to sleep with a phoenix lullaby. Why don’t you trust me to handle your pain?”
“Want to let me sit down before I fall down?”
“Actually, no. You might as well stay on your feet. I made us some sandwiches. We’re going to eat them outdoors. In the sunshine.”
* * *
Frankie~
Cam had a hard time getting out to the pond behind the cottage. Six or seven times, she had to give him a hand. The ground was mowed short, but it was no manicured lawn, just patchy grass and weeds. The going was rough. But the real problem was that he moved like an old man.
By the time she helped him ease down onto a log, his pale face was drawn, and his clean shirt soaked with sweat. They sat under a cottonwood in the dappled sunshine and ate their ham sandwiches and drank sweet tea. At least she had made sweet tea for this Georgia boy. Like a good Texan, she drank hers straight, over enough ice to clog the Gulf of Mexico.
It was pleasant out here by the fishing tank. Daddy kept it well-stocked with smallmouth bass and trout. The catfish came on their own. She knew that Cameron was an avid fisherman. Yet in a month he hadn’t stirred himself even once to go fishing. It wasn’t as though fly fishing took that much energy if you did it from a chair.
It was hard to know how much of his retreat from the world was because of that concussion. And how much was perfectly understandable depression. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was a real thing, but even for non-shifters, she didn’t think that drugs were ever one hundred percent of the answer. For shifters that route was full of booby traps. Spear-lined booby traps.
The problem with depression was that it suppressed the immune system. No wonder he had not healed like a shifter and was still struggling with infection. No wonder he looked like death. No wonder his aura was blotchy and incomplete. He was dying. Dying by inches.
It was time Cameron tried something other than medication. The drugs had their place, but so did talk therapy, exercise, nature, natural light, and common sense. She was about to inject some perspective into this bear’s regimen. And maybe some phoenix healing. But there was no use scaring the poor thing.
“Want a brownie?” She passed him a plastic box.
“Did you make them yourself?”
As if. “I stole them from Dad’s secret stash.”
He took two. He chewed them slowly and washed them down with the sweet tea. Now that he had stopped fighting her, his face was pinking up. At least she thought that was a healthy flush under his stubble. This would be a good time, and an ideal place, for him to take bear. Except that he seemed to have developed some strange ideas about shifting.
Maybe he was worried that his knee replacement would screw up his change. Well, she wasn’t that sure herself what would happen. But he couldn’t go through life, being too afraid to find out. He had to give it a try and see what happened.
The wind ruffled the pond. Dragonflies darted here and there chasing bugs. The trout broke the surface chasing those same insects. It was both pretty and peaceful. The breeze tossed the tender new leaves of the cottonwood playfully aside. The afternoon sun suddenly blazed through this new opening.
Cam threw a hand over his eyes as if he had just been blasted with pepper spray. He swore. Long, loudly and profanely as only a serviceman could.
“Do you know why your eyes are so sensitive?” she asked when he ran out of steam.
“I assume for the same reason I have a concussion and shrapnel in my skull. Exploding shell.” His voice was terse and angry.
She patted his knee. “Sucks.”
He made a noise between laughter and hiccups. A snort of derision. “Now there’s a nice phoenix understatement.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“About what? How I led my team into an ambush? How I got six good men killed? How I fucked up totally and completely?” His voice got louder and more furious with every word. When he stopped his anger echoed in the soft air.
“Everyone died? Your whole team?” she asked quietly.
After a long time he spoke. “I don’t know. I think so. Tell me, did the colonel and Tasha go back to Yuma today?”
“First thing this morning.”
“I may have dreamed it, but I seem to remember your brother coming by and telling me that one of the guys survived.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Probably just wishful thinking.”
“This morning?”
“I probably hallucinated it.”
“Have you been hallucinating?” His fever had been high enough to induce delirium.
Last night he had thought she was a dream. She had ruthlessly taken advantage of that. Her insides pulsed gently in remembered passion. But seeing as he hadn’t mentioned the episode, she had to believe he had either genuinely forgotten or really did think it was just a fever dream.
“Yeah,” he didn’t elaborate.
Frankie gave that some thought. There were limits to how much you could learn about pharmacology and medicine online. But she and Eleanor had done their best. Vivid hallucinations of all kinds were common side effects of the sleeping meds he had been on. So were sleepwalking, sleep driving, sleep eating.
Lots of people had wound up dead or in Emergency after taking this new generation of sleeping pills. Who knew what they would do to a shifter’s brain chemistry?
“Since I started organizing your drugs, have you kept hallucinating?”
“That’s the trouble with hallucinations. They seem so danged real. How do I know if they have stopped?”
“There is that. But if one of your buddies made it back, we can probably find out. You got a name?”
“Onesalt. Sgt. Nelson Onesalt.” His head drooped. His voice wavered. “Spelt the way it sounds, One Salt.”
“Give me a moment.” She whipped out her cell phone and ran a search. “This guy lives in Arizona, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Wife named Zoe? Three kids.”
“Yeah. Two boys and a girl.”
“Looks like your buddy Onesalt is a hero. He is recuperating at home. His wife is posting pictures of him and the kids on Facebook. I’d say he’s alive, all right.” She handed Cameron her phone. Onesalt smiled at the camera while three small boys hung off his arms like piñatas.
“That’s Nelly.” The hand holding the phone shook like an aspen in a high wind. “He never was the world’s most handsome guy, and now he looks worse than I do, but his kids don’t seem to mind.”
The color that had come into Cam’s face had drained away, leaving it white rather than gray. She stole a look at his aura. Panic warred with hope in the erratic currents. Parts were flaring. Other parts rippled unsteadily. Maybe in his condition the emotional relief had been overwhelming.
Had she done him harm or helped? She felt so helpless and ignorant. She wished she knew if she should be trying to adjust his brain waves and heal his aura. Best to pretend she knew what she was doing.
“Nap time,” she announced. “Want to race me to the house?”
* * *
Cameron~
He had been dreaming. Not about the ambush. Not about Onesalt. About something soft and soothing, followed by hot, sweaty sex. He opened his eyes cautiously, but the living room blinds were tightly drawn. He could hear a distant humming that seemed to be part of his fading dream. Frankie. He had dreamed about Frankie.
Probably a sign of his moral decline. A fellow had no business having red-hot wet dreams about a woman like her. Not unless he had honorable intentions. Trouble was, he was so used to thinking of her as his fated mate, it was hard not to fantasize about her. But if he wasn’t a bear, he didn’t have a destined bride. And Warrior Woman was never going to be his wife.
Maybe if his mind ever got less mushy, he would be able to feel bad about his dreams. Right now he just felt buzzed by the fact that she was in the house humming. The dream he had come out of was fading away. But he seemed to recall that she had ridden him hard and fast. It wasn’t as vivid a memory as the dream he had had on the night of the wedding. Now that had been a dream worth reliving.
He got cautiously up from the couch, looked around for his walker. It had vanished. His cane was leaning against the coffee table. He had to use it to hobble down the hall to the john. It was probably his imagination that he looked less drawn. Being around Frankie buzzed all his senses, but it wasn’t likely that her presence was actually lifting the gray veil between him and the world.
The guy in the mirror still needed a haircut and a shave. Had he really put on his dress uniform and his medals without a visit to the barber? Gone to church looking like the wrath of God? He supposed he must have, since he remembered sitting beside Tasha while Frankie sang.
She was still singing. A song without words that made his blood move and his head stop pounding. They said that phoenixes could heal. Apparently so. Was she in the house or just in his head? He had hallucinated her so often that he couldn’t be sure.
He rubbed his stubble. He could at least remove a layer of bristle in case she was hanging around. He began to whistle as he lathered up and kept going through stroking the razor over his face. He rinsed off and combed his hair. Wondered why the colonel had not ordered him to clean up.
Onesalt was alive. Harrison had said so. Frankie had shown him pictures with Zoe and the kids. Son of a bitch. He ought to call. That was the bare minimum he owed his teammate. He patted his pockets. Where had he put his cell? Without the walker, the bedroom was a lot further down the hall, but he made it.
He was tempted to lie down on the freshly made bed to rest, but he forced himself to look for his phone. He found it in the bureau drawer. Dead as a doornail. Then he had to hunt for the charger. That turned up in the outside pouch of his duffel. Why hadn’t he ever unpacked it?