Paradise Valley (Virgin River #7)(67)

“Give yourself time to—”

“No! I don’t want this anymore! It’s not going to work!”

For the first time since she showed up at his grandmother’s door, he saw tears collect in her crystal-blue eyes, but they didn’t spill over. “Worked pretty good for you a few minutes ago, Ricky.”

He was quiet a long moment. “Let’s get out of here, okay? I think I hurt my leg.”

A few minutes later, she pulled up in front of his grandmother’s house. She stared straight ahead and said, “You could let me be your friend. After all we’ve been to each other.”

He looked at her profile. “No. I can’t. I’d just use you and hurt you. I’m sorry, but that’s it.”

She turned toward him. “You’ve gone nuts. This isn’t you at all—and it’s not just the leg. You’d better get some help with it, Rick, before you throw away everything good in your life.” When he didn’t say anything for a moment, she said, “Get out then. You know how to get in touch with me.”

Rick wasn’t all the way up the porch stairs before Liz drove off, and not slowly. Angrily. She sped out of town. It was Friday night. Hadn’t she said she worked for her aunt every weekend in the store? Maybe he got that wrong…. Anyway, she was gone, and that was good. Two months of ignoring her didn’t send her packing, but this last deal would.

He got himself in the house and saw that the note he’d written his gram was still on the kitchen table. He dropped his jeans and unfastened the leg. He unlaced the running shoe and worked the prosthesis out of his jeans and leaned it against the sofa. He pulled up his jeans and sat down on the sofa. He grabbed the leg by the titanium pylon and threw it across the room. It clattered to the floor over by his gram’s old piano. Then he put his head in his hands and felt the sting of tears in his eyes.

What the hell had he done? He had planned to tell her, calmly and sanely, they couldn’t be a couple anymore. She should get on with her life, forget about him, find herself a guy who could take her the places in life she deserved to go. He even had a little speech about how she should go on with school, get herself real smart and snag an intelligent man who was going to earn a decent living and not bring mayhem into her life at every turn. And what had he done? Practically raped the girl! The fact that she hadn’t tried to stop him didn’t undo the fact that he’d been out-of-his-mind desperate, driven and rough. If she had told him to stop, could he have?

“Ricky?”

He lifted his head from his hands to see his gram standing under the living-room arch, clutching her old chenille robe together.

“I heard a loud noise….”

Thank God she couldn’t see well enough to catch the tears in his eyes, on his cheeks, the leg across the room. “Sorry, Gram. I took off the leg and dropped it. It’s really heavy. Sorry I woke you.”

“You sound like you’re getting a cold.”

“Maybe, yeah,” he said, sniffing. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

“You need your walker?”

“I got it. It’s right at the end of the couch.”

“Can I get you anything, honey?”

“I’m fine, Gram. But thanks.”

I’m not fine, he thought. I’m a f**ked-up mess. What the hell have I done to myself? To everyone else? Was I born under some kind of curse?

All in one day, he’d beat up two of the most important people in his life—Jack and Liz. All day long he’d been an ass**le to Jack and now look what he’d done to Liz—had sudden forceful, rough sex with her, and then told her she had to go away and leave him alone. He felt lower than a worm. And yet he couldn’t for his life think of a better way to handle the situation. It was better for them if they didn’t care about him so much.

There were going to be more people to deal with. People he didn’t want pulling for him, being kind to him, befriending him when it could only come back on them in a bad way. Everything Ricky touched, as far as he was concerned, blew up. Just like that goddamn grenade in Iraq. There was also Preach. Mel. The boys from Jack’s squad. Connie and Ron. The whole frickin’ town.

Then he realized with a shock—he was ashamed of having been blown up. Now, that made absolutely no sense, but there it was. He should have come back from Iraq with some head troubles, but not this kind. He’d listened to guys in that stupid support group talk about shame at having been wounded, shame at having to put their families through dealing with a disabled vet, and he thought it was beyond ridiculous.

But here he sat, on his grandmother’s floral couch, knowing that everything in his head would be different if he had returned to Virgin River with two legs. And he didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. There was no changing things.

He didn’t sleep well, but when he got up, real early, the first thing he did was use his walker to get to his gram’s front porch and look across the street at Connie’s house, right next to the corner store. And there was Liz’s car. It had a dewy coat over it—it had been there a long time. Where had she gone after dropping him off? Obviously she hadn’t gone home to her mother’s in Eureka. His head began to pound. Had she gone out to the woods or river to cry?

Rick felt like a monster.

He hid out the whole day. He could have walked down to Jack’s and been friendly, but after ditching the welcome-home party, he thought he’d just play the wounded Marine for a while longer, let everyone think he wasn’t up to public appearances. So Jack came to him.