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Losing Denita and Diana hadn’t hurt much at all, to Bonnie’s shame. Life had gottenbetterfor her after the twins had run away. She had always felt guilty for feeling that when she’d been a young girl.
Until Angela had set her straight.
Her oldest sisters had bullied Bonnie greatly. Even abused her emotionally, when their father wasn’t around. Physically—when they’d hit her, pinch her, knock her down, just so they could laugh when she cried.
What they’d done to her had beenwrong.
Angela had pointed that out very bluntly. Having them gone had been bestfor Bonnie in the end. It had still taken Bonnie a long time to forgive herself for being so disloyal to her father.
Hehad grieved his eldest daughters. Until the day he died.
She owed it to her parents to be here today. They would have been married sixty years today. Had they lived.
Her own mother had been killed in a vicious murder she would never, ever understand, one night when her father was away, when Bonnie had been four. It had devastated her father. And destroyed her older sisters. Bonnie barely remembered her. Or that horrible night.
He had married again. Her stepmother had been kind, loving and so full of life. Beautiful and wonderful. Bonnie missed her stepmother so much.
Bonnie wiped the tears from her eyes.
The headstone was so plain, to denote such a great man as her father.
Maybe they should have it changed now that they could afford better? She could save up, if she had to. Put his photograph there. And photos of the two women he had loved.
Bonnie leaned down. Placed the lilacs on her mother’s grave. Then more on her father’s and stepmother’s. She’d buried her stepmother next to her father on his right side. Her mother rested on his left. They had all mattered, so much.
There had been love between her father and each of his wives. Real love. The kind that lasted.
The kind that was so beautiful.
It was up to her to keep the memories for the ones who came next. But now? She had a three-hour drive home. Home.
She thought about what home meant to her for a moment.
Finley Creek was becoming home. She lived in hope the rest of the girls would move there, eventually. But Wichita Falls, where Heather and Hope lived, wasn’t that far away from Finley Creek. Less than an hour. Marcia’s family was just another thirty minutes north of that. They had time together now, as a family.
They were most definitely a family.
A disgruntled young man irritated at one of her girls had once called them acoven.
The girls had taken exception. They weren’t a coven—the Colesons were aclan.Bonnie’s great-great-grandfather and his wife had been Scottish,after all.
It was up to her to make sure they knew who they had come from.Thatwas what she was going to focus on during this next stage of life.
That, and beingGrandma Bonnieto the children her girls were raising now. And the newest, who would be born any day.
But now, she was going to drive by the old homestead. Just to see. To remember.
Then Bonnie was going home. She wanted her family.
To see what her parents had left behind that mattered most.
10
There wasno figuring out a man like Murdoch Michael Lake.
Thoughts of that pain in the ass were seriously haunting her. Distracting her. Driving Zoey crazy.
It was the kiss that had done it.
