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Propping one hand on her hip she narrowed her eyes on the door. They didn’t miss family meals. He expected her to be there. As though she were three again.
“As though they consider me family.” Bitterness threatened to overwhelm her.
“Being a bitch isn’t going to help the situation, Angel,” Duke accused her, causing her to turn and glare back at him. There was no anger in his expression, but she could see the disappointment there.
“What the fucking hell do you and Natches want from me?” she snarled, the emotions tearing through her finally boiling over. “God damn the two of you. Son-of-a-bitch Mackay misfits. You’re a fucking plague with no hope of a cure. Leave me alone already or get the hell away from me!
“‘We don’t miss family meals in this house,’” Angel mocked Natches’s order. “Who the fuck does he believe he is? My father?” She sneered, but it was the pain that added the insulting tone. “Not hardly. And when did that woman learn to cook without trying to burn the kitchen down at the same time? She couldn’t have cooked when I was three if her very life depended on it. And you.” She pointed at him then, her gray eyes like thunder clouds rolling over the mountains. “Being a bitch, am I?” She sniffed at the accusation. “I have yet to be a bitch. I was actually putting myself out to be fucking nice.”
His brow arched at the statement, lips quirking in challenge as he watched her flush with anger.
“Sorry, sweetheart, that’s where you’re wrong,” he informed her. “For the situation and the emotions ripping at both of you? She was doing her best to hold back the need to grab you and hold you while you were doing your best to keep her as far from you as possible.”
The bitter, jeering laugh that passed her lips was painful to hear, Duke acknowledged.
“Dying to hold me, was she?” She snorted, that sneer curling her lips causing his hands to touch her, his heart aching to take away the pain. “I guess that’s why she couldn’t possibly tell Bliss who I am. Right? Because she just loves me so much, doesn’t she, Duke?”
The emotions raging through Angel didn’t need a gentle touch, though. She was looking for a fight instead. How many times had he watched her burn like this until she became lost, completely alone in the fury consuming her? It never failed that she’d end up in a fistfight with someone when she was like this. If he, Ethan, Tracker, or Chance didn’t manage to stop her.
“She’s dying to hold you,” he assured her. “And all you wanted to do was draw blood. You’re not that person, baby, to deliberately hurt an innocent person.”
He was pushing her and he knew it. Pushing the anger and the pain, but until she acknowledged the fact that she felt it, she’d never get past it.
“Innocent? You think you know so much, don’t you?” She flipped her hand toward him dismissively. “All your fucking research and your big file on my life. You don’t know a damned thing. You’re so-called facts? Those aren’t facts, those are other people’s ignorance of the situation, nothing more.”
His brow arched at the deliberately goading statement.
“Did you see the file?” he asked knowingly.
She hadn’t, and part of that was his fault, he admitted.
“I lived it,” she exploded, pointing at him accusingly. “Every second of the last twenty years I lived the life that . . . woman,” she spat, “left me to live. I don’t need to read your fucking file. I was there!”
“You were three, not an adult,” he reminded her, frowning back at her, his gaze harsh. “Just because you remember the event doesn’t mean you understood it. Or that you remember it correctly.”
Her eyes narrowed, her fists clenched at her side.
“Don’t presume to pretend you know anything about my memories, because I assure you, you don’t,” she snapped furiously.
A fine tremor raced through her, the emotions she kept so carefully contained inside her tearing her apart.
“Because you refuse to discuss it,” he told her calmly, shrugging at the accusation. “Because you tell no one, Angel. You keep it all inside you and draw your own conclusions, just as you did when your mother tried to explain to you about Bliss.”
“Bliss’s mother,” she burst out, that finger pointing out again,
her voice hoarse. “Not mine.”
“Your mother, Angel.” His expression hardened, his arms going over his chest in that dominant pose strong men seemed to like so well. “You share a mother with your sister. Chaya is your mother as well, whether you want to accept it or not.”
The hell she was. Angel didn’t have a mother. She hadn’t had a mother for twenty years and she didn’t need one now.
“Not my mother,” she rasped, enraged now. “My mother would have come to get me, no matter what. She would not have let my sister die in my arms because she couldn’t drag her ass away from Natches Mackay. . . .”
And there it was, the answer he’d searched for, the reason Angel had refused to inform her mother she was still alive. The reason why the fury was threatening to engulf her now.
“Chaya was in the hospital when you were at that hotel, Angel,” he told her carefully, watching her, wondering just how much she knew about her mother’s last days in Iraq. “She’d been grabbed in Iraq and tortured for hours when Natches found her. She was lucky to be alive.”
She inhaled raggedly, teeth clenching, a tremor shaking her body as she fought to bring herself back under control, to force the shield back in place.
