Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
“This was not how we were going to end up, you and me.” She gently rubbed her thumb back and forth over the white wrap. “We were going to cure cancer. We were going to… change the world. We were going to…”
Save my life, she thought.
Considering where she was now—out of money, out of hope, out of time on so many levels—she had to marvel at the sheer arrogance she’d been sporting as she’d moved her underground operation to the property here in Walters, and started working with that vet at the Wolf Study Project. Back then, in what she now thought of as her previous life, she’d been a big swinging dick in the pharmaceutical world, making waves, aware that the Grim Reaper was hot on her trail, but determined to outrun him with Gus’s magic drug.
Their Vita-12b.
Twelve versions to get it right. Twelve and a half, actually.
“But you’re alive.” She put her other hand on her stomach. “And so am I…”
For now, she tacked on to herself. And given the cramping in her uterus, her own blood loss, and all the cancer cells in her body, she supposed that was a sliding scale with a steep slope into her grave.
“You know something,” she whispered. “That wolven is right. I am in love with you.”
Her eyes shot up to Gus’s battered face, but he remained unconscious, and she wondered where he was, where that beautiful mind of his had gone to. Was it still in the husk that had been so sorely abused? Or was the damage so great that he was gone, even as his body lived on?
Tears came to her eyes, making the vision of him in the hospital bed go wavy.
“Do you remember where we first met?” She wiped her cheeks and sniffled. “I do. I can recall exactly where we were.”
As she spoke softly, she wanted to reach up and caress his face, but that seemed like an invasion of his privacy since she’d never touched him like that when he’d been awake. The closest they’d ever gotten to that kind of line-crossing had been that one time they’d been about to kiss, when she’d finally finished fighting her attraction and he’d looked at her as a woman.
He’d stepped back, though. Stepped away. Stopped… everything.
“You were speaking at that symposium on immunology at Stanford.” She smiled at the memory, and it felt good to go to a lighter place, back when they’d both been stronger. “All those clinicians and researchers in their ties and jackets, with their somber PowerPoints. And then you took the podium.”
She had to wipe her eyes again, and as she drew in a shuddering breath, she smiled through the sadness. “God, I can just picture you taking that stage. You were wearing blue jeans and Converse high-tops. You had on a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, with that blimp on it. Those tight-ass bastards were twitching in their seats, whispering under their breath—and you just stood there in those lights, with a half smile on your face because you knew you were smarter than all of them. You didn’t care what they thought of you or how much they disapproved of you for all the wrong reasons. You had the mic—and you blew them away. Right out of the water. Your ideas were groundbreaking, your research in its infancy, your career about to begin. I knew then and there… I had to work with you. I knew you were the one.”
Lowering her eyes, she shook her head. “And then you came here. I never expected to be afraid of a living soul, but you rattled me. You, with your concert t-shirts of bands I’d never heard of and your cans of Coke. Everyone looked up to you in the lab. Worshipped you, really. I worshipped you—and I tried distracting myself. I did.”
Glancing down at her stomach, she thought of the blond guard she’d slept with for a couple of months. Who’d then been killed. The pregnancy had been an impossibility, something that never should have happened after chemo had cooked her ovaries.
Something she had never been able to tell the man about before he’d been murdered on her lawn.
Gus had told her about the baby. The screening tests for her trial of Vita-12b had revealed everything, and almost instantly, she’d been determined to keep it—even though that meant she couldn’t be patient one for their drug. She’d told herself that a child would be her legacy, and she’d decided to leave the baby to Lydia to raise as soon as the cancer got too far advanced.
Lydia was going to be a great mother someday. And her broken heart was going to need something to live for.
Deep down, though, she’d known the pregnancy couldn’t last. She wasn’t a genetics expert, but the chromosomes she’d put into the mix had to be deficient. They just had to be. And… they had been. The miscarriage was all very logical from a medical point of view. The human side of things? That was proving difficult. For someone who had never wanted to be pregnant, who wouldn’t know what to do with an infant if she were handed one for just a hi-hello, she was shocked by the sadness.