Free Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance by Jasinda Wilder Page B

more. I thought I’d only have maybe thirty years with you. And then I did lose you. They barely brought you back, and then there was no guarantee we’d ever get a match.  
    “Do you have any idea what it was like for me, Lachlan? Sitting in that room for two months, watching you lie there, unconscious, kept alive by a machine, knowing I’d have to be the one to tell them to pull the plug? I knew you didn’t want to be kept alive like that. And I’d—I’d made a deal with myself. We’d wait for three months, maybe four, and if there wasn’t a donor in that time, I’d—I’d have to let you go. And I would have. But…can you even fathom what it was like? Knowing—thinking I’d have to watch you die a second time?”  
    She’s standing closer than I think she’s ever gotten to me. Inches away, so I can smell her perfume and see the makeup under her eyelids and on her eyelashes, and see the lipstick on her lips. “Don’t—don’t waste this, Lock. Please…please don’t. I know you’re mad at me. I get it. I deserve it, maybe. That’s fine. But don’t…don’t waste this.”  
    She leaves me then, going back into the house, shutting the door quietly behind her.  
    And I stay out on the deck, watching the sun go down, sobering up, and repeating her words over and over and over.  
    Don ’ t waste this.

Going nowhere with no one but me

    Ardmore, Oklahoma

    I slide the tip of the thermometer under the little girl’s tongue. “Okay, now just hold still for a few seconds for me. All right, good job, Eva. Now I need to look in your ears, okay?”
    I go through the motions. Temp, ears, reflexes, nose, the works. Routine checkup. The next patient is the same. And the one after that. Then a young guy arrives with a sprained wrist and a concussion—he got tossed off a mule and landed the wrong way. All the usual stuff you’d expect to see as a physician’s assistant in a small rural town. The whole day goes that way. A summer cold. Some stitches in a forehead. Prescription refill. An annual physical.  
    As the PA, I take ninety percent of the patients. Dr. Amos Beardsley is going on eighty-five, and he really only sees the patients who’ve been with the practice for several generations, so I get the rest, the walk-ins, the checkups, the refills, the sutures and fractures and concussions and “is this rash normal” sort of questions.  
    It’s work.  
    It keeps me busy, and that’s all I need.  
    By the time the last walk-in has been seen, everyone else has cleaned up and shut down. Just as I prepare to close up for the day, a teenage girl arrives, too embarrassed and scared to ask her parents for contraceptives.  
    Finally, I grab my purse and head out to my vehicle. I’m tired, ready for bed. It’s seven o’clock, and I was at the office before seven this morning, and I didn’t have time for lunch. I’m still in my lab coat; still have my stethoscope draped over my neck.  
    I climb up into the cab of the truck and slam the door closed. I lower both windows to let the heat of the Oklahoma summer billow out. I’m already sweating, and I’ve only been in the truck for two seconds. It’s only going to get worse, too, because this old wreck doesn’t have AC.  
    I could afford a new truck, of course—I make decent money. But this was Ollie’s truck. He fixed it up himself, back in high school. When I first moved down here, after the accident, I visited Marcus, Ollie’s younger brother. We didn’t click, Marcus and I. He was country, and I’m…not. We just don’t see the world the same way, and I think the grief of losing Ollie was too much for both of us.  
    But Marcus was sympathetic to my grief, and realized my need to have something to connect me to Ollie. So he gave me this truck. I paid to have it looked over, anything broken got fixed. I spent more on it than it’s worth, probably, and it still breaks down all the time. The AC went at the beginning of the summer, and I just