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Hell, she made his dick so damned hard.
• • •
The curtains were pulled around the small cubicle, the dimly lit area meant to be comforting, Angel was certain. Machines hummed and beeped and the sight of her mother on the narrow hospital bed, attached to those machines, stole her breath.
She appeared to be asleep.
Her once vibrant will had disguised the delicacy of her build somehow, because she now looked frail, fragile, as she lay beneath the hospital sheet.
Her once golden brown hair looked darker, her face pale beneath the light, dark shadows giving her eyes a bruised appearance.
Angel approached the bed slowly, lips trembling, fighting not to cry as relief poured through her at the sight of her mother’s chest rising and falling slowly. Her hand lifted from her side as though to touch Chaya’s, then fell back in place, her fingers trembling.
She was only barely aware of Natches moving to the opposite side of the bed, his hand clasping his wife’s as it lay at her side.
“Hey, baby, you awake?” he asked, his voice rough, low. “I brought someone to see you.” Reaching out with his other hand he pushed back the hair that fell over her brow, his fingers lingering to stroke down the side of her face.
“She’s sleeping. Leave her alone,” Angel whispered, glaring at Natches. “Let her sleep already.”
His lips quirked into a grin. “Know how Duke is always telling you to stop thinking so hard?” he asked. “It’s because sometimes, those around you can actually feel the gears rolling in your head. I can feel the gears rolling in her head. Don’t you? She’s there. It just takes her a minute, that’s all.”
That sense she sometimes got of certain people, Angel realized. She could stare at them and sometimes she knew before they opened their lips if it would be the truth or a lie.
It never failed that if she concentrated hard enough, others around her could sense her tension as well, though. Like Duke. Sometimes Tracker and Chance could as well.
“She does that, too?” she whispered, staring back at him, suddenly inordinately pleased that she shared that with her mother.
“It’s what makes her such an intuitive interrogator,” he told her, stroking Chaya’s arm. “She said that about you once. That she could look at you and feel you thinking. Feel the gears rolling in your head and the lies ready to spill from your lips.” He grinned back at her. “It made her crazy, too.”
“I should have told her sooner.” She’d never forgive herself for that. “I should have come to her when I first remembered, but she wouldn’t have liked me then, Natches. Even I didn’t like me.”
She cursed worse than a sailor on leave, drank too much, smoked too often. Even Tracker and Chance hadn’t known what to do with her or about her.
“She would have loved you first, straightened you out second,” he assured her. “She does that, you know? She has a way of convincing those she loves to love her back, and to want nothing more than to please her.”
“That was all I wanted when I was little.” She could hear her laughter drifting through her head, her mother’s love, even when she messed up, and her determination to find a way to do better.
“You were her light when I met her.” Natches’s voice was reverent. “While she was in the hospital in Iraq, we made plans for me to come to Canada to meet you. Then she learned she’d lost you, and she lost herself, too. She never let you go, Angel. In her heart, you were always alive.”
Chaya’s eyes lifted slowly, blinked, then focused in on Angel as she stood by the bed.
Angel stared down at her mother, wishing she knew what the other woman was thinking, feeling. Pain clouded her mother’s brown eyes and drew a slight furrow to her brow. She looked groggy, and Angel knew why.
“I hate those drugs when Ethan pumps them in me,” she told her mother softly. “Makes me feel all wacky. Like I don’t know if I’m really real or not.”
Her mother’s face softened, though the drowsiness remained.
Angel licked her dry lips, fighting her tears and the complete horror she felt that she’d nearly lost the mother she hadn’t even had a chance to get to know.
“Hey, Mom.” Bliss moved in closer to her father. “I told Dad you were going to wake up. Now don’t try to talk to me, or I’ll fuss at you.” Her youngest daughter grinned mischievously. “You just lie there and let us spread the love for a while.”
Emotion filled Chaya’s face, her eyes. Her fingers moved against Natches’s as he gripped them and brought them to his lips.
They drifted down again, that drowsiness pulling her back, Angel knew all too well.
“You should tell her about Duke asking you to let him marry Angel, Dad,” Bliss suggested playfully. “I thought he was so cute.”
He had been cute, Angel admitted silently.
