"It's okay," Brock said, reaching up to sweep aside a loose tendril of her hair. "You all right?"
She gave him a wobbly nod, even though inside she was hardly all right. Her chest was raw with anguish and guilt, her eyes burning with welling tears. "Mitch and I argued the whole time. He thought the roads were too bad for travel. They were, but another storm was on the way, which would only make things worse. I didn't want to wait out the weather because I needed to report in for my shift the next day. So we headed home. Mitch was driving the Blazer. Libby was in her car seat in back. A couple of hours onto the highway, a tractor trailer carrying a full load of timber crossed into our lane. There was no time to react. No time to say I was sorry, or to tell either of them how much I loved them."
"Come here," Brock said, and gathered her close. He held her for a long time, his strength so comforting and warm.
"Mitch accused me of caring about my career more than I did him or Libby," she whispered, her voice broken, the words hard to get out. "He used to say I was too controlling, too stubborn for my own good. But he always gave in, even then."
Brock kissed the top of her head. "You didn't know what would happen, Jenna. You couldn't have known, so don't blame yourself. It was out of your control."
"I just feel so guilty that I survived. Why couldn't it have been me who died, not them?" Tears strangled her now, hot and bitter in her throat. "I never even got a chance to say good-bye. I was medevaced to the hospital in Fairbanks and put in a coma to help my body recover. When I woke up a month later, I learned they were both gone."
"Jesus," Brock whispered, still holding her in the caring shelter of his embrace. "I'm sorry, Jenna. God, how you must have been hurting."
She swallowed, trying not to lose herself in the agony of those awful days. It helped that Brock was there to hold her now. He was a rock of strength, keeping her grounded and steady.
"When I got out of the hospital, I was so lost. I didn't want to live. I didn't want to accept the fact that I would never see my family again. Alex and my brother, Zach, had taken care of the funerals, since no one knew when I might come out of the coma. By the time I was released from the hospital, Mitch and Libby were already cremated. I've never had the courage to go to the cemetery where they are interred."
"Not in all this time?" he asked gently, his fingers stroking her hair.
She shook her head. "I wasn't ready to see their gravestones so soon after the accident, and every year that passed, I never found the strength to go and tell them good-bye. No one knows that, not even Alex. I've been too ashamed to tell anyone just how weak I really am."
"You're not weak." Brock set her away from him, only enough that he could bend his head down and stare her solemnly in the eyes. "Everyone makes mistakes, Jenna. Everyone has regrets and guilt for things they should have done differently in their lives. Shit happens, and we do the best we can at the time. You can't blame yourself forever."
His words soothed her, but she couldn't accept all that he was saying.
She'd seen him grapple too much with his own guilt to know that he was only being kind now. "You're just telling me this to make me feel better. I know you don't really believe it yourself."
He frowned, a quiet torment passing over his face in the darkness of the Rover.
"What was her name?" Jenna touched his now rigid jaw, seeing the remembered pain in his eyes. "The girl in the old photograph in your quarters--I saw how you looked at her picture last night. You knew her, didn't you?"
A nod, barely discernible. "Her name was Corinne. She's the young Breedmate I was hired to guard back in Detroit."
"That image must be several decades old," Jenna said, recalling the Depression-era clothes and the jazz club where the young woman had been photographed.
Brock understood the question she was asking now, she could see that by the somewhat wry look in his eyes. "It was July 1935. I know, because I'm the one who took the picture."
Jenna nodded, realizing she should be more astonished than she was at the reminder that Brock and his kind were something close to immortal.
Right now, and every time he was near her, she thought of him simply as a man. An honorable, extraordinary man who was still hurting from an old wound that had cut him deeply.
"Corinne is the woman you lost?" she asked gently.
His frown deepened. "Yeah."
"And you hold yourself responsible for her death," she prompted carefully, needing to know what he'd been through. She wanted to understand him better. If she could, she wanted to help him bear some of his own guilt and pain. "How did it happen?"
At first, she didn't think he would tell her. He stared down at their entwined fingers, idly rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand. When he finally spoke, there was a raw edge to his deep voice, as though the pain of losing Corinne was still fresh in his heart.
"Back when I was in Detroit, times were very lean. Not so much for the Breed, but for the human cities we lived in. The leader of a local Darkhaven and his mate had taken in a couple of young homeless girls, Breedmates, to raise as their own children. I was assigned to watch over Corinne. She was a wild child, even as a young girl--full of life, always laughing. As she got older, a teenager, she got even wilder. She resented her father's precautions, thought he was too overbearing. She started making a game of trying to break free from his rules and expectations. She started pushing boundaries, taking awful risks to her personal safety, testing the patience of everyone around her."