I'll be fine. I just need to sit for a few minutes. I've done this a hundred times. Please don't."
You can't pay for an ambulance, Cole said slowly. No. You can't pay to get your leg looked at. No, but you can fix a $25,000 motorcycle in 20 minutes with parts you paid for out of your own pocket and hid on the back shelf so nobody would get in trouble. Emily's jaw tightened. She didn't answer that one either.
And Cole Walker looked at this woman gripping his arm on the floor of his own garage. A woman who'd apparently rather crawl than let a hospital bill land on her. A woman who'd spent her own money and risked her risked her own job to keep him alive on a road she'd never ride with him. And something in his chest, some old hard thing that had gone unmoved for a very long time, cracked right down the middle.
"Okay," Cole said quietly. "Okay, no ambulance." "Thank you.
I'm going to drive you myself." Her eyes flew up to his. "What? No, Mr.
Walker. I don't need. That wasn't a question. And it's Cole." He was already sliding one arm behind her back. Reese, get her jacket.
Cody, get the truck up front. The crew cab, not that thing you drive. Marcus, he looked up. You find out where the closest place is that'll see her and won't shake her down for it. There's got to be a VA clinic or something within an hour.
He looked back down at Emily, and he must have felt her go rigid the instant he said the letters VA because his eyes narrowed. "What? What was that?"
Oh, nothing, Emily said too fast. That was not nothing. I just said VA and you went stiff as a board. He studied her face and Cole Walker was nobody's fool and the pieces were starting to line up in his head in a way that was making his stomach turn over.
Emily, the way you fix an engine, the way you knew that chain was going to jump under load, the way you're sitting here on a busted leg telling me your problems aren't anybody else's burden. He said it very carefully. Where'd you learn to do what you did to my bike? And Emily Carter on the floor of Thunder Ridge Customs, surrounded now by four men who an hour ago hadn't known her name and now couldn't take their eyes off her, looked up at Cole Walker and knew that the wall she'd spent months and maybe years building was about to come down whether she wanted it to or not.