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She’d drive herself insane. The nightmares would kill her.
“Stay safe, Angel,” Chance ordered, the dark raspiness of his voice assuring her of his concern, his affection. “Don’t make us have to bury you. I promise, I’d consider every Mackay I come across an enemy if that happened.”
“Really, Chance?” She would have laughed at that comment if she could have found any laughter inside her.
“Really, little sister,” he promised. “All shit aside. Really.”
• • •
Through the window, Bliss saw Angel’s face as she left and felt fear explode in her chest at the complete devastation she glimpsed in her sister’s expression.
Breaking away from her cousins, she headed back to the office as her mother suddenly shot out the door and all but ran to the store entrance just in time to watch Angel, Tracker, and Grog ride away.
What happened? What had her mom done to make Angel leave? Angel would have never, ever left, knowing Bliss was in trouble. She knew Angel wouldn’t do that. Angel loved her. And Angel was tough, she knew how to fight, how to shoot, and how to use that very distinctive knife she carried at her hip.
“Mom?” She stared at her mother’s face as she turned to her. It was almost white, her brown eyes filled with . . . something. Something that assured Bliss her mother had done something she never should have done.
She’d made Angel leave.
“What did you do? Why did she leave?” Confusion overwhelmed her.
Her mother shook her head.
Bliss cl
enched her fists furiously. “Why did you make her leave, Mom? She’s my friend.”
“Pick better friends,” her mother cried, tears glittering in her eyes as she swung away, leaving Bliss to stare at her back.
Pick better friends?
She backed away from her mother, feeling her cousins come around her, drawing her away to the other side of the store. But all she could hear was that anger in her mother’s voice.
Pick better friends?
Angel wasn’t just her friend. . . .
THREE
Natches Mackay waited, not quite patiently, in his home office that night. Through the window he stood next to, he could see his cousins, as close to him as brothers, in the room behind him.
Dawg was pacing, his impatience more volatile than his or their other cousin’s.
Rowdy was the one who kept drawing his gaze, though, as he stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, directly in front of the picture of Chaya and the child she’d lost all those years ago.
Everyone claimed Bliss was a female replica of Natches. Black hair, green eyes, the Mackay features softened and finely sculpted into what was rapidly becoming an exquisite beauty. If that were true, then Beth Dane had been her mother’s mini-me, just as Chaya had called her.
Even at three her resemblance to her mother was incredible and promised to become even more so. Features Natches could close his eyes and see a hint of in Angel Calloway’s face.
A child that DNA tests had proven dead, yet she lived. And she’d lived for twenty years without the mother who had grieved for her every second of that time.
He knew the two men he was watching. A lifetime spent with them had ensured it. And because of them and Rowdy’s father, Ray, he’d survived a childhood that should have seen him dead. And because he knew them so well he knew they were restraining themselves, restraining whatever was on their minds.
“The two of you are too quiet,” he said, turning to them as they waited for the lesser-known cousin who had called earlier. “Just say it and get it the hell over with.”
The two men turned to him, but it was each other they looked to first. Dawg shook his shaggy black head, that tiny hint of silver at the sides giving him a more distinguished look than Natches had expected before it showed up.
“I believe her.” It was Rowdy who spoke up, his somber, sea-green gaze piercing as he stared back thoughtfully. “The minute she said she was Bliss’s sister, I knew what was bothering me about her since I met her, and when she left the marina, she looked broken, Natches. Whether she’s Beth Dane or not, she believes she is.”
