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“You don’t know who we really are,” she told them all. As she spoke, her words were slightly slurred. She was exhausted and in pain.
“We should stop this now.” West looked up to Jake. “Can’t this wait?”
“No. I need to tell you now. I might chicken out later.”
Her lips trembled. She reached out and grasped West’s hand. He massaged the back of her neck, feeling how tense she was.
She cleared her throat. “I got home three nights ago, after I spoke to West. After he told me . . . well, it doesn’t matter now, I guess.”
West could feel Jake’s eyes on him but he didn’t look up. His hand tightened around hers then he quickly loosened it, not wanting to take the chance of hurting her.
There was a soft knock on the door before Mia opened it. Alec walked over to talk to her briefly and when he returned, he held a glass of chocolate milk, with a straw. He handed it over to West, who let go of her hand to grab it. He pulled it out of her reach.
“West?”
“Got a need to take care of you, sunshine,” he whispered in her ear. “And you need to let me.” She looked up at him. He thought she was going to argue. But she seemed to get that he needed this.
And so she lay still without protesting as he held the straw up to her mouth and she took a few sips.
“Mia said Doc Harper is on his way out,” Alec told them all.
She looked back up at Jake, who gave her a patient, kind look in return.
“When I got home, it was close to nine. He didn’t used to drink bourbon until later, but over the past year or so he’s started hitting the hard stuff earlier.”
“He drinks a lot?” Jake asked her.
She snorted. “Define a lot.”
West rubbed his fingers through her hair and massaged her scalp. “Yeah, he drinks a lot. I kind of have to tell you about the past in order to tell you about the now.”
“You tell us what you need to, darlin’,” Jake told her.
She let out a deep breath. “My parents died when I was twelve. They were working in the Congo, with a group of missionaries. Some rebels raided the village they were staying in and took all the missionaries, including my parents. There should have been a ransom demand. If there was, we would have paid it. Would have gotten them back.” She let out a small sob, and his stomach dropped. He felt her pain as though it were his own.
“I didn’t even know about any of it until afterwards. Until Spencer came to my boarding school to tell me they’d been murdered. The rebels shot all their hostages without even trying to ransom them.”
Fuck. He couldn’t imagine what she’d gone through. How losing your parents at twelve in such an awful way would feel. He couldn’t remember his mom; she’d left when he was young. His father had been a self-serving asshole. But he’d always had his brothers.
“What happened then? Didn’t you have other family?” Jake asked.
“No,” she said quietly. “My dad had a sister, but she died of breast cancer when I was young. My grandparents were all gone. It was just Spencer and me. I usually spent most of the year at the boarding school. It was an okay place and I had friends there. But, after they died, I just didn’t want to stay there anymore. I wanted to be with Spencer. He was in the army at the time, but he got a discharge so he could take care of me.”
“As he should have,” Alec told her. “Older siblings are supposed to take care of younger ones.”
The way Alec had taken care of all of them. But West knew it wasn’t that way in every family.
“He gave up everything for me.”
“You’re his sister. You’re precious,” West told her. How could her parents have left her like that? Taking care of other people instead of their daughter?
“I felt bad that he left the army for me. Spencer was a good man back then. I’m not sure how you can go from being such a good man to becoming what he is now. He sold our family house, neither of us could live there. Too many memories. And everyone knew what happened to my parents. It was too hard. So he bought some land in a different state. He always loved horses, and he had the money to pay people to do everything else.”
She let out a small breath. “My parents never updated their will once I was born. Everything was left to Spencer, not me. He always said he’d settle money on me when I reached eighteen. Then he decided that was too young, so he said I had to wait until I was twenty-one. Then he pushed it out to twenty-two. I finally stopped asking. I started thinking I didn’t deserve it.”
“You could take him to court,” Jake told her.
“Yeah, but how am I going to pay for a lawyer? Every time I try to get a job, he steps in. I’ve got some things I can sell, but it wouldn’t be enough.”
