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“The doctor can shove it for all I care. Blast it all, anyway.” He yanked on his boo
t, rolled to his feet and stood without so much as swaying. If nothing else, John Cawthorne was blessed with more than his share of grit and willpower.
Bliss cleared her throat. “I thought you should know that Tiffany stopped by. She was looking for you, but when I told her you were here, she decided she didn’t want to come looking for you.”
John’s face softened. “Well, I’ll be.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, Dad. She wasn’t all that friendly.”
“But she tried.”
“Yeah.” Bliss nodded and didn’t bring up the fact that she and her elder half sister had nearly had a shouting match. She’d said enough. Whatever happened next was between Tiffany and John.
“See there?” Brynnie sniffed. “I’ve always told you there is a God and He’s watching over you.”
So who was watching over Mom? Bliss wondered, when Margaret Cawthorne lay dying and her husband, though seemingly concerned, was involved with another woman. She gave herself a quick mental shake. She had to quit thinking in those terms. Her mother, rest her soul, was gone. Yes, her father had been unfaithful, less than true and a liar, but that was all in the past. Now he was marrying a woman whom Bliss couldn’t find it in her heart to hate. As she’d told Tiffany, she couldn’t dwell on the sins of years gone by but had to focus ahead, on the future. With her father.
And with Mason.
She pushed that wayward thought aside. Mason and she were having an affair—that much was true. And she knew that she loved him, but never had he said he loved her; never had she felt that he cared for her as she did for him.
Once again, she’d let him play her for a fool.
But not for long.
As soon as John and Brynnie were married, she was moving back to Seattle.
What was the old saying, something like it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
Bliss wasn’t convinced.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“This time, Mason, you’ve really flipped!” Patty Lafferty hoisted one of her bags into the back of his truck. Overhead, a jet taking off from the airport roared upward into the cloudy heavens. “Do you really think I was somehow involved with Uncle—if that’s what you’d call him—Isaac’s disappearance?”
“You took off around the same time.”
“Give me a break.” Eyes as gold as his own sparked angrily. “So what?” She glared at her brother as they stood toe to toe in the airport parking lot. “You don’t believe me.”
“You’ve lied before.”
“Not about something like this! Oh, Mason, come on!”
He frowned at her and wished he could believe her, but she’d been in more scrapes than he cared to count.
“Swear to God!” She licked two fingers and held them up beside her head as proof of her integrity and innocence. “Scout’s honor.”
He snorted.
“Oh, for the love of God, Mason, think about it. Why would I help Isaac disappear?”
“You tell me.”
Another jet screamed down the runway.
“I can’t!” She threw her hands up in the air. The wind caught the long red-blond strands of her hair, tossing them in front of her face. “Why won’t you trust me?”
“Past history.”
