Page 10 of Guarded By Them

Ryan stepped in beside us. “Here.” He selected something in an orange packet that started with the letter ‘R’. “These are peanut butter and chocolate. You can’t go wrong with that combination.

I smiled at him gratefully. “Thanks.”

The guys paid and we carried everything back out to the car. Kodee had bought a few sodas as well, and he handed one to each of us.

“You want me to drive?” he asked Ryan.

“Nah, I’ll be fine for a while.”

“We’ll cover a little more distance, then get off the interstate and find a motel,” Kodee said, “and then I’ll make some calls and see what we can do about getting Rue a passport.”

I gave him a hopeful smile. “Do you really think this friend is going to help you?”

Kodee nodded. “Yeah, he owes me, and I wouldn’t be taking us all there if I thought he wouldn’t help.”

I knew I had to trust Kodee. He’d never given me any reason not to in the past. But even so, the thought of meeting another stranger made me nervous.

Trusting people wasn’t one of my strong points.

Chapter Four

Ryan

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I HADN’T ACCEPTED KODEE’S offer to drive yet, mainly because I knew how he felt about driving. I wasn’t sure he’d even gotten behind the wheel since he’d lost his family in a car accident. Now probably wasn’t the best time to start.

We drove for another hour, the car filled with the crackling of chip packets and the crunching of snacks. It helped to distract me from the pain I was experiencing in my leg. Fluid had accumulated in my stump during the drive, and made the fitting of my prosthesis uncomfortably tight. The stump had swollen and was putting pressure on the socket, and I was getting phantom stabbing pains where my foot and toes would have been.

Dillon threw cheese puffs at the back of Kodee’s head to wind him up, and when Kodee picked them up and threw them back, inadvertently hitting Rue as well, she squealed with laughter, huddling herself into a ball and hiding her face with her hands.

They were making a mess of the inside of my car, but hearing Rue laughing made it not matter.

I hated seeing the bruises around her neck. I could hardly believe I’d been the one who’d caused them. When we’d been inside the gas station, and the woman had walked in with the child, I’d seen the look she’d given us. We’d looked as though we were thugs—an image we’d always worked hard to avoid—and my first thought was that if she saw the bruises on Rue’s neck, she was going to think one of us did them. And then I realized one of us did do them, and that she would have been right. Yet I couldn’t marry myself with the image of a man who hurt a woman, even when it hadn’t been deliberate. I still, in a way, saw myself as innocent, though I was far from it.

As well as the PTSD, I hated not being as physically capable as Kodee and Dillon. Before the explosion and losing my leg, I’d been able to run ten miles in the space of an hour. Now I limped just making it to the bathroom and back.

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