Kane shot a withering glance over at him.
“You think I’m kidding?” Aidan shook his head, gaining courage by the thought that if Kane hadn’t killed him by now, he probably wouldn’t. “She told me what happened. Well, the gist of it anyway. And while, as her brother, I want to shake your hand for not – well, you know, taking advantage of her and all – as a man, I have to ask, why wouldn’t you? I mean, she’s obviously lost in love with you. She’s a good woman, Kane. The best. When someone like that wants to love you, how on earth could you say no to that?”
Kane showed no reaction; he stared out the front windshield, his features stony.
“She took a bullet for me,” Kane finally said. “Did you know that?”
Stunned, Aidan couldn’t respond right away. “She told me about the first time you guys met, that you were shot, but she never said...”
“She threw herself between me and the bullet. It passed right through her and into me. Even then she refused to leave me, the stubborn little thing. Instead of getting her ass to safety like I told her, she sat down on the ground, prepared to fucking die for me again, unless I got myself up and got us both out of there.”
Silence rang throughout the cab, the only sound the low hum of the thick tread over the pavement, until Aidan murmured, “Sounds like Becca.”
Kane grunted. “Yeah. So then, after we finally make it to safety, she takes off – she fucking takes off - shot and bleeding, back into the fucking jungle to try to save some of the Sisters she’d been travelling with.” Kane paused. “I told myself she was an adrenaline junkie with a serious death wish. That I was no different than any of the others she tried to save that night. It’s how I managed to live with myself for those next few months, with the fact that when she went back in, I wasn’t with her.”
“And then, then, after searching for news of her for weeks on end, she ends up here, in fucking Pine Ridge. Like the answer to a prayer and the embodiment of a curse at the same time.”
Aidan’s brows creased. “Not following you on the curse part.”
“You were right when you said she saves things. And again when you said anyone who tried to change her was a moron. You see, Aidan, the thing is, I want to change her. I want to keep her here, safe with me, and make sure she never risks anything worse than a paper cut for the rest of her life, get me? Because if anything ever happened to her, I would fucking die. Christ, when Jake told me what happened at the shelter, I swear I did fucking die for a few seconds.”
Aidan’s brows knitted further together in confusion. “So... letting her think you don’t care about her so she goes back to doing what she does with no one to watch her back is better how exactly?”
“She would grow to hate me, Aidan. She’d try to make me happy; I know she would. At least this way, I know that whatever she does, it’s because she wants to, because, as you said, that’s who she is. No one – especially not someone as strong as Rebecca – can become something they’re not, not even for love.”
“You did.”
Kane snorted. “Nothing about me has changed.”
“Really? Then six months ago, had I said the same things to you I did tonight, we’d find ourselves talking like this?”
“No,” Kane admitted (far too easily, in Aidan’s opinion), “I’d be scraping up little bits of you and burying them outside my cabin right about now.”
“Exactly,” Aidan nodded, trying to suppress the shiver that ran down his spine.
Kane swung the truck around in a perfectly executed U-turn that had the bourbon sloshing up and down both sides of Aidan’s stomach uncomfortably. Neither of them spoke as Kane made his way back to town down the winding mountain road. He didn’t even appear to be watching the road anymore; it was if he knew every turn, every bump, every pothole by heart.
Aidan hoped to hell he did. Almost as much as he hoped he could continue to keep the contents of his stomach from spewing all over Kane’s pristine interior.
“Did she tell you she’s leaving?” Aidan asked quietly as Kane pulled up in front of his townhouse.
Kane’s jaw clenched. “No.”
Aidan sighed and nodded somberly. “At the end of the month. She’s already told the realtor she’s not renewing her lease.”
“Where?”
“She wouldn’t say exactly, but I think she’s going back to the IRC. Probably down south where those tornadoes hit. I think, had she not been hurt, she’d already be gone.”
And Aidan knew, deep down, that if Rebecca left, he would never see her again. That she would not be coming back. And the only way to stop her from leaving was sitting next to him.
“So,” he said finally. “How are we going to keep her from going?”
Kane regarded him like he’d lost his mind. “We?”
“Oh, come off it,” Aidan said. “You are the only person Rebecca has ever listened to.”