The sadness inhim.
She tried to imagine him as a husband. And despite him being a brooding wiseass, she decided she could easily picture it.
Dalton “Doc” Simmons was honest and loyal. He was generous and principled. He prioritized the people in his life and, from everything she’d seen, gave respect to and was respected by everyone in equal measure.
In short, he was a good man.
Good men didn’t stay on the marriage mart for long. It made sense he hadn’t gotten to the ripe old age of thirty-eight without some lucky lady locking her ball and chain around his ankle.
Even so…Cami had known him formonths. Why hadn’t his marriage…hiswife…ever come up?
Maybe it was because Doc wasn’t the kind to overshare. Then again, neither was he particularly secretive or taciturn. For instance, she knew he was an only child. She knew he’d had a buckskin Quarter Horse named Lady growing up, and that when he was sixteen, Lady had fallen into a prairie dog hole, broken her leg, and he’d been the one to have to put her down. She knew he’d graduated at the top of his class in high school and that he’d dabbled with the idea of studying veterinary medicine before finally focusing his schooling on treating two-legged patients instead of the four-legged kind.
He hadn’t shied away from sharing any of that with her. And if someone had asked her, she would’ve said she knew him pretty well. That she hadn’t knownthistold her whatever had happened to his wife had been horrific enough for him to keep it locked away behind a wall of silence.
And not just him either. All his partners too. Not one of them had ever evenhintedthat Doc had been married.
A more circumspect woman might have kept her mouth shut. Cami had been absent from school the day they handed out discretion. “What happened?”
He raised his eyes, and it was like someone stabbed her heart with an icepick. There it was. The sadness she’d known was there. Butknowinghis sadness was there, andseeingit written all over his face in such haunting clarity were two very different things.
“She died.” His voice was always scratchy. Now it sounded like someone had scoured his vocal cords with thirty grit sandpaper.
“How?” She realized she might have pushed her allotment of nosy questions to the limit, so she was relieved when he didn’t hesitate to answer.
“She was hit by a drunk driver on her way home from work. She died on impact, and I buried her four days later. Two days after that, I walked away from my residency at Johns Hopkins and signed up for the Navy.”
She nodded slowly, an invisible lightbulb flashing over her head.
Finallyshe knew the answer to something she’d always wondered. Because who in their right mind quits a lucrative medical career only to up and join the armed forces?
Someone who wasn’t in their right mind, that’s who. Someone who was insane with grief.
“I wanted to join her in the grave,” he went on, and Cami wasn’t sure she’d ever heard a sadder sentence. “But I was too much of a coward to take my own life. I thought maybe if I became a Navy SEAL, someone would do the deed for me.”
Okay, and now it didn’t just feel like she’d been stabbed in the heart. It felt like whoever had done the stabbing was twisting the blade.
“Oh, Doc.” She shook her head as hot tears pricked behind her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t say anything to that. Simply nodded as a muscle clenched in his jaw.
“And now?” she asked quietly. Or rather, as quietly as she could and still be heard over the noise of the storm. “Do you still want to—”
“No.” He interrupted, and she blew out a harsh breath of relief. “I don’t long for death anymore. That passed.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said again, even though the words didn’t come close to capturing the depth of her sympathy. “I know the pain of losing someone. Know what it is for that lost loved one to be the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about at night. Until, one day, that lost loved oneisn’tthe first and last thing you think about. And somehow that’s worse. Because it’s like losing them all over again.”
“It’s been over a decade,” he said softly.
“As if that matters.” She snorted.
His gaze sharpened. The green in his eyes seemed to glow almost gold in the candlelight.
“Yes.” She nodded. “I’m not sure I canempathize. I’ve never lost anyone I was in love with. But I can sympathize, because I lovedmy sister. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s been two months or twenty years, I will never stop missing her. Never stop grieving her. Never stop wishing I could turn back time and stop her from getting on that damn plane.”
She thought maybe his eyes filled with tears. But he turned away before she could be sure.
After clearing his throat, he swung back around. By that time, his eyes were bone-dry. His rugged face was unreadable.
