Rescuing Brinley (Delta Force Heroes: Guardians #1)

Prologue

Preschool

Brinley sat at the top of the stairs, listening to the adults talking down in the living room.

She was supposed to be asleep, but she woke up thirsty.

She’d started to head downstairs, but stopped when she heard Mommy talking with her friends.

She was never allowed to sit with the adults, always shooed upstairs to read in her room.

And Brinley always did what she was told. She didn’t like the look on her mommy’s face when she disobeyed.

Even at four years old, she knew Mommy didn’t really like her.

Not like other mommies liked their children.

She yelled a lot. Got a weird look on her face when Brinley came downstairs in the morning.

Scolded her for not brushing her hair, for not using the special cream she bought to “tame” it…

whatever that meant. But the cream smelled funny.

And when Mommy pulled her hair back into a ponytail, it hurt because it was so tight.

As she sat at the top of the stairs, listening to the women talking, Brinley slowly began to understand why adults seemed to whisper to each other when she entered a room. Why they stared at her with odd looks on their faces. Why they treated her differently from other kids.

“When are you due?”

“A month and a half.”

“Are you nervous about the birth?”

“Only that this baby will come out just as ugly as Brinley.”

“She’s not that bad.”

“Yes, she is. I can’t believe something that looks like her came from me. If I hadn’t birthed her, I’d insist she wasn’t mine.”

All the ladies laughed at Mommy’s comment. Brinley didn’t understand all of it, but every muscle in her body tensed because she guessed they were laughing at her, not because her mommy had said something funny. The conversation continued.

“I swear to God if Callista has the same frizzy, crazy, freakish red hair as Brinley, I’m going to send her back.”

Everyone laughed again.

Her mommy went on, as if encouraged by the response.

“When I saw Brinley for the first time in the hospital, she looked like a deflated balloon wrapped in a blanket. Her eyes were too big for her head, her nose was crooked, and she looked like a plucked chicken…wrinkled, red, and screaming her bloody head off. She was ugly as sin. Everyone in the room pretended she wasn’t, but I could see it in their eyes.

They felt sorry for me for having such a hideous baby.

“Then everyone said she’d grow out of it, that all babies are weird-looking.

But they were wrong. If anything, she’s only getting worse.

Her hair is totally out of control, her eyes are still way too big for her face, her ears stick out, her nose is too big…

and those freckles! Ugh! They’re multiplying like cockroaches, no matter how much of that special lotion I apply to try to make them fade. ”

“Freckles are the worst.”

“They are! She’s such a huge disappointment. An embarrassment. But I’m hopeful that Callista won’t be anything like her sister, especially since they have different fathers. She’ll be the daughter I dreamed of having before Brinley.”

“How’re things going with Gary?”

“Fine. It’s no secret that I married him for his looks. I mean, there was no way I was having another child with my ex. I dumped his ass as soon as I could and chose Gary because he’s tall, good-looking, and he does what I tell him.”

More laughter.

But Brinley barely heard it. She brought a hand up to her face and touched her nose. She didn’t know it was too big. Her mommy had mentioned something about her ears before, but Brinley had no idea they weren’t normal either.

She scrubbed her cheek with the palm of her hand, as if that would somehow remove the spots on her face that her mommy apparently hated.

She’d been so excited to have a baby sister. It would be like having a real-live doll to take care of. But now, knowing how Mommy felt about her made Brinley feel as if she couldn’t breathe.

“What do other children think of Brinley? I know she’s only in preschool, but still…kids can be amazingly blunt.”

“For now, they don’t seem to notice how she looks.

But they’ll figure it out soon enough. Brinley’s going to be the butt of everyone’s jokes.

She’s definitely going to be bullied. But she’ll have to learn to deal with it.

She has a lifetime of being made fun of to look forward to, she might as well learn to cope at a young age. ”

“That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?”

“Probably. But what good will lying to myself do? Short of plastic surgery to fix everything that’s wrong with her, there’s not much that can be done.”

Brinley stood up and quietly walked back to her room, her thirst forgotten. Her mommy’s words echoing in her head.

Ugly. Plucked chicken. A disappointment.

Mommy was embarrassed to be seen with her.

She’d had no idea there was so much wrong with her until now. Had no idea how ugly she was.

Brinley picked up the teddy bear she slept with every night and held it tightly to her chest as she curled into a small ball on her bed. She didn’t cry though, simply stared into space as everything she’d heard played over and over in her head.

Some of the things her mommy had said and done in the past made more sense now.

How she always told her to put the hood up on her jacket when they went outside.

When she told Brinley to keep her head down and not look people in the face.

How she gushed over some of her friends’ children, going on and on about how pretty they were—but she’d never told Brinley that.

Ugly…

Embarrassment…

She had no idea how long she’d been asleep when Brinley suddenly woke with a gasp.

Her dream had seemed so real. She was standing on a platform surrounded by kids and adults. They were all pointing at her and laughing. Making fun of her hair, her spots, her ears that stuck out, her big nose, saying she had weird alien eyes…too big for her face.

And in the back of the crowd was Mommy, holding a child, paying no attention to Brinley but completely focused on the beautiful baby girl in her arms.

The tears came then. Silent and steady. They slipped down her little cheeks as if a faucet had been turned on.

If her mommy thought she was ugly, it must be true.

Fifth Grade

Brinley did her best to ignore the whispers and stares from the group of girls on the playground. She’d dealt with them all her life and was mostly immune to their mean comments and how they did their best to make her feel like an outcast.

Because truthfully, she was an outcast. She didn’t have any friends. It never bothered her much in the past, because Callista had always been her friend.

Her little sister was exactly what their mom had hoped for.

Pretty, even as a tiny little baby. She had auburn hair, not bright red like Brinley’s.

It was straight, not curly and frizzy. She had freckles, but they were few and subtle, not all over her face and body like Brinley’s were.

And all the doctors said she was going to be tall.

Even as a first grader, she was outpacing her peers on all the height charts.

But the best thing about Callista was how much she looked up to and loved her big sister. She was sweet and happy, and she loved spending time with Brinley when they got home from school. Or, she had…

Things were slowly changing.

Their mom had begun to enter Callista into beauty pageants for little girls. Brinley was also forced to tag along, if only to carry bags and act as her sister’s helper. Callista had won her first competition. And the second.

It was rare these days when she didn’t win the competitions she entered. She was so pretty and confident, and she loved being onstage, being the center of attention, which was the complete opposite of Brinley.

The nightmare she’d had when she was younger continued to plague her.

It was always the same thing, she was standing on a stage being laughed at and everyone pointing out all the things that made her so ugly.

Her mom always stood in the back of the room, ignoring the way her daughter was being made fun of, paying attention to Callista instead.

Brinley avoided being in the spotlight whenever and however she could.

She had no problem fading into the background.

She didn’t fight back when people called her names or made fun of her hair, or freckles, or anything else they could find to pick on her about.

Her only refuge had been inside her home, playing with her little sister.

Except now that Callista had started school, and because of the attention she got from the pageants, the little girl who used to adore her big sister was transforming right before her eyes.

She was more interested in pageant clothes, in hairstyles, even all the makeup she got to wear.

At six years old, the girl was quickly becoming aware of how pretty she was—and how not pretty her older sister was.

Just that morning, Callista had told Brinley she didn’t want to sit with her on the bus.

All the times their mom had casually mentioned how weird Brinley looked, how she’d never be pretty like her sister, likely never get any attention from boys, had finally begun to make a difference in how Callista treated her. How she saw her big sister.

She was beginning to want to distance herself from Brinley, especially at school.

It hurt.

A lot.

Brinley had learned to have very thick skin over the years. But having Callista—the toddler who once came to her for reassurance when she felt sad and crawled into her bed during storms—look at her with so much judgement was as painful as anything Brinley had experienced.

She was standing in the shade by the building, trying to ignore the hurtful words the girls in her class were saying about her, when another girl Brinley had never seen before walked straight toward her.

The new girl was pretty. Had long brown hair that curled beautifully at the ends, didn’t have even one freckle on her face, and her nose was perfectly portioned.