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Turning, she hurried away from the mother and the single tear that began falling down Chaya’s cheek. Angel didn’t look in her eyes; she couldn’t. She wasn’t strong enough to resist and she knew it.
What had happened to her in the past years? Once, she would have lashed out at her mother and told her exactly why she knew better than to believe anything other than what she remembered. She would have ripped into her and shredded the lies with the truth and enjoyed doing it. But she couldn’t make herself do it now. All she could do was run away.
From the need for a mother who had walked away from her, from the need for a man she knew would never stay and a life she had promised herself she’d never let
herself dream of. A life secure in Duke’s arms and her mother’s life. And how very foolish was that?
FOURTEEN
Being in her mother’s home was odd, Angel thought that evening after the house became silent once again, the in-laws and outlaws having all left. Bliss was in her room chatting with her cousins on video, and Natches, Chaya, and Duke were outside.
Moving through the quiet home, checking doors and windows, ensuring everything was secure, she couldn’t help but notice the warmth and the feeling of peace that surrounded her, as well as sense that the house was actually a home.
The family room was large with a wide stone fireplace on the outside wall, a flat-screen television on the wall separating the room from the hall. Several wide, comfortable chairs faced the fireplace, while a large leather sectional faced the television. The space was designed to allow for quiet evenings as well as family gatherings, and functioned superbly for both.
In the far corner there was a round coffee table and board games stacked beneath it, bean bag chairs were scattered around it, and the shelves on the wall displayed pictures of the four girls: Bliss, Annie, Laken, and Erin. The cousins looked enough like each other that they could be sisters.
The room was a family room in every sense. Here, Chaya had found a way to display family pictures and pictures of her daughter in a way that didn’t make the room seem overly crowded with them.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves held books of every kind from children’s books to mysteries, suspense, and even a collection of teenage fiction in the form of the old Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries alongside a popular vampire series and a magic series.
This room and the kitchen were the central part of the house and Angel had noticed the first time she went through it that the layout, as well as the furniture, was arranged in a way that allowed for maximum defense in the case of a home invasion. The safe room was accessible to the main bedroom, Bliss’s room, kitchen, and living room. And she had no doubt Bliss was well versed in getting her ass to it as quickly as possible.
Moving to the fireplace once again she tipped her head to the side and studied the pictures on the mantel. There were pictures of Declan with Natches in Iraq. The young man had been only eleven. His immigration and adoption papers listed him as twenty-one when he’d come to the United States, but she knew from one of the reports she glimpsed in Duke’s file that he was actually only seventeen.
His life as a child mirrored hers in a lot of ways. The son of a U.S. serviceman who returned home and the young Afghani girl he’d married and left behind, Declan hadn’t had an easy life.
He’d been orphaned at five and learned to survive in the harsh desert landscape and within the village where his life had meant so very little to his mother’s family. Natches and Chaya’s adoption of him and his move to the United States likely saved his life. The older he became the higher the chances that he would have been taken into one of the rebel groups, where he would have eventually died.
These were the pictures she’d tried desperately to ignore the first day Duke had brought her there. Pictures of everyone except Chaya’s first child.
Alone now, the house finally cleared of all the Mackay family members save those that lived there, she found herself helplessly drawn to the family portrait on the fireplace mantel. Natches, Declan, Chaya, and Bliss. Her eyes narrowed at the picture hanging on the wall in the background of the photo. She leaned in closer, certain it couldn’t be . . .
“That’s my sister, Beth.”
Angel swung around to see Bliss stepping in from the doorway on the far side of the room leading to the hall. Dressed in shorts and a tank top, her feet bare, her long hair left loose in heavy curls to the middle of her back.
“The girl in the family picture.” The teenager walked to her slowly, her emerald eyes solemn as she stared at Angel. “She’s my sister. But Mom lost her when she was only three.”
Not “she died,” but “Mom lost her.”
“I see.” Angel turned back to the picture, her heart racing sluggishly in her chest at the sight of the inclusion of her picture.
“She used to have Beth’s pictures out everywhere, but when I started asking about her more and more, Mom moved them upstairs to Beth’s room. Every time she tried to talk about Beth, she cried.”
Angel felt herself flinch. “Your father showed me the room.”
Bliss blinked in surprise. “Wow, they must really like you, Angel. Mom doesn’t let anyone but me and Dad in that room.”
“It’s a nice room,” she said, once again finding herself at a loss for words.
“Mom was married before Dad,” Bliss told her. “When she and Dad built the house, she had Beth’s room put just the way it was in the house Beth lived in with her. All her clothes and dolls and everything.”
Bliss stopped beside her and stared at the picture, her expression a little sad.
“Every year on her birthday Mom buys her a present and every year at Christmas Mom puts a present in her bedroom. Twenty years. Mom still cries every year. . . .” Bliss’s voice trailed off and Angel felt as though she’d taken a blow to the chest.
“Why? She died.” She wanted to hate the mother that left her to die in that hotel. She didn’t want to glimpse a mother that had grieved or felt sorrow for the death.
