Free Absolution by Kaylea Cross Page B

know?”
    “No.” Her voice was flat.
    So she was just giving up? No fucking way.
    Coming out of his paralysis, he stalked over and grabbed her shoulders to spin her around, ignoring her gasp of protest.
    Taking her face between his hands, he put all his resolve into his stare and forced her to meet his eyes. “Screw that, because I’m not letting you quit.”
    Her mouth tightened and her eyes narrowed, but he held her still when she tried to jerk away. “You are going to fight this with everything you’ve got, every single day for as long as it takes. No matter what it takes, you’re going to keep fighting. Got me?”
    Raw anger and resentment swirled in her eyes, 63

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    and they gave him hope. If she had enough spirit to fight with him, then she had enough strength to fight the disease.
    “You have no right,” she hissed between clenched teeth. “No right to talk to me like I’m a two-year-old.” This time when she yanked her head away he released her, but she nailed him with a look of pure murder. “Do you think I want to die?” she flung at him, crossing her arms across her breasts, her hands balled into fists. “Because I assure you I don’t.
    I’m doing everything I can to stay alive, but guess what, Luke? Sometimes medicine and will are not enough.”
    Unacceptable. He refused to even go there in the hypothetical. “Choice is yours, Em. Warrior or coward? Which is it gonna be?”
    “You bastard .” For a moment she regarded him with utter loathing. “Which one of us is the coward, Luke?”
    The words hit him like a knife in the heart, along with an avalanche of guilt. He deserved that, and maybe it was time they finally had this fight. If she needed to rip him to shreds, he was more than willing to be her punching bag as long as it helped her. So he pushed. “Meaning?”
    Her eyes, normally full of warmth and kindness, were like bottle-green shards of glass that cut him with a thousand slices. “Which one of us took the coward’s way out and took off when things got hard?
    Which one of us was too scared to stick around and work things out? Which one of us left his wife and eight-year-old son without a backward glance and never came back because he was too goddamn afraid of himself ?” Her voice shredded on the last word.
    A searing pain hit Luke’s chest, deep inside his ribs like he’d been shot with a hollow point slug. She was dead on. A fucking bull’s eye.
    His stomach was so tight it hurt. The fact that 64

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    she’d sworn twice within the last minute showed him merely a fragment of the unforgiveable pain he’d inflicted on her. “And look what happened.”
    Emily swallowed and glanced away, hurt and sadness replacing some of the anger in her expression.
    “You don’t think I’ve regretted what I did to you every single day of my life ?” he said tightly.
    She met his eyes, and the emptiness in hers scared the hell out of him. “Just proves my point that it doesn’t matter how much we want something.
    Some things are out of our control, no matter how much we wish they weren’t.”
    Because she’d wanted him back, always.
    He’d known that since the day he left, and that’s why he’d been careful to stay away. And he’d still known it when she’d stubbornly stayed the night in his hospital room, but he hadn’t dared take the comfort she so obviously wanted to give him.
    Unfortunately, nothing had changed. He couldn’t reach out to her now, not after everything else. Tehrazzi was out there, and he wasn’t going away. Luke was the only one that could make that happen, and until he did... It didn’t matter that he wanted to be with Emily, or that he’d dreamed of it since the day he’d walked out. It didn’t matter that his last sight of her had been in his rear view mirror, collapsed in a sobbing heap in the driveway, hands in her hair as she screamed his name. Begging him not to go.
    And yet he had. Driven by the knowledge that not only was