Page 71 of Wilde and Untamed
His mouth quirked in a faint smile. “You act like I would’ve made it through med school.”
“You would’ve.” Of that, she had no doubt.
Still, he didn’t respond, focusing too hard on stirring the soup.
“I’m not going to let it go,” she said.
He sighed and turned to face her, leaning against the counter. “Trauma surgeon,” he said, his voice so quiet she almost missed it. “I wanted to work in a big city ER, where every day would be different, where I could...”
“Where you could save people,” she finished for him.
A flash of vulnerability crossed his face before he masked it with a shrug. “Something like that.”
He had always been the steady one, the planner, the guy who kept everyone else’s recklessness in check. She’d never once considered that he might have had dreams beyond Wilde Security.
The image hit her suddenly—Elliot in scrubs instead of tactical gear, those steady hands stitching wounds rather than field-stripping weapons. It fit him so perfectly that she felt a pang of loss for the path he hadn’t taken.
“And you gave it all up for your family.”
He didn’t answer immediately.
“When I was in college, Dad, Uncle Cam, and Uncle Vaughn were all pretty severely hurt during an op,” he finally said. “Davey was a SEAL by then, so he was off Christ knew where. Most of my cousins were away in college or the military. Dom was in high school. It was just Cade and me there, so I took a semester off school and helped Uncle Reece with logistics. And Cade...” His mouth tightened. “Well, Cade was doing what Davey does now. He basically stepped into Uncle Greer’s role, helping run the company while everyone recovered. When I got back to school, I joined ROTC, changed my major to international relations, commissioned, and never looked back.”
The Wilde family operated like a military unit, she realized. One went down, one stepped up. No complaints. No delays. No debate. Just the job, as natural as breathing. She’d always known that about them, but hearing it laid out so starkly made her understand something fundamental about Elliot that she’d missed before.
“So you sacrificed your dreams for theirs,” she said, watching him measure cocoa powder into two chipped mugs with the same meticulousness he brought to everything else.
“It wasn’t a sacrifice.” The words came out too quick, too practiced, like he’d been telling himself that lie for years. “The company needed me. My family needed me.”
Rue shifted on the couch, wincing as her ankle protested the movement. “But what about what you needed?”
Elliot went completely still. When he finally spoke, his voice was carefully neutral. “What I needed was for my family to survive and succeed. Everything else was just... secondary.”
That was the thing that cut the deepest—how sincerely he believed it. She’d spent her whole life running precisely the opposite direction, refusing to be that person who bent herself into a shape someone else needed. For years, she’d believed that was the only way to come out alive. To stay herself, no matter what. But here was Elliot, a living rebuke to that philosophy, and instead of seeming diminished by it, he just seemed… more. More solid, more essential. More impossible to shake loose from her brain, which was probably half the reason she’d resisted him so stubbornly for so long.
He ladled the soup into mismatched mugs and brought hers over, crouching to set it on the tiny table next to her. “Careful, it’s hot.”
She cupped the mug in her palms and let the steam scald her nose. Chunks of potato and carrot drifted near the surface, hopeful as survivors.
“Thanks,” she said, and meant it more than it sounded.
He settled on the floor in front of her, back against the couch, one leg stretched out stiff, the other bent at the knee. His shoulder was purpled with a faint bruise above the collar of his shirt. There were at least three cuts along his knuckles, each one bandaged with haphazard strips of medical tape. He looked as battered as she felt. She wondered if he’d even noticed.
She sipped. The soup was criminally salty but warm, and her stomach snarled at the first taste. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
He half-smiled, the way he did when he didn’t believe her but wanted to.
They ate in quiet, the only sound the faint hum of the generator and the occasional creak of the wind rattling the station.
“You would’ve made a good doctor. You could still do it, you know.” She set her empty mug down, warming to the idea. “When all this is over. Go back to school, become Dr. Wilde. The world will always need more surgeons.”
He took a long pull on his soup before responding. “It’s not my dream anymore.”
“No?”
“No. I love my job.”
“Then what’s your dream now?”
