Chapter 64 #2
That was longer than I expected. “Before Diamond Creek?”
“Arkansas.”
I glanced toward the porch again, trying to picture a younger Jasper riding beside the man standing in front of me. “Was he already Romeo then?”
Angel’s mouth curved. “No. I gave him that name.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
For the first time since he walked through the door, Angel looked genuinely amused. “You married him. You really need me to explain?”
I groaned. “Oh.” My eyes widened when his words sank in. “OH. Oh God.”
“Exactly.”
I covered my face with my hands. His laugh was quiet this time, but there was no mistaking it, and something loosened inside me. Not enough to erase everything. Enough to let me look at him again and wonder about the questions I hadn’t let myself ask yet.
Most of what I knew about Angel came from other people, pieces of a life that existed before mine, and suddenly he was standing close enough to answer for himself.
“Can I ask you about my mother?”
Whatever amusement had been in his expression disappeared. “Yeah.”
I hesitated, realizing I didn’t even know where to start. “What was she like?”
Angel looked toward the window, and for a few seconds I thought he might not answer. When he finally did, his voice was quieter. “Smart. Stubborn as hell. Funny when she wasn’t trying to be.” His mouth shifted faintly. “And trouble.”
The last word held something the others hadn’t.
I watched his face. “You knew her well.”
“Yeah.”
There was an entire history inside that answer I knew nothing about. “Were you together?”
His jaw tightened slightly and he closed his eyes. “For a while.”
That explained how I existed. It didn’t explain the way he looked when he talked about her.
“Did you love her?”
His eyes came back to mine.
“With every fucking breath I took.”
The answer settled differently than I expected.
There were a hundred questions waiting behind it now—questions about Kaylah, Angel, Steele, and everything that happened before I was born.
I didn’t want those answers here. Not with Mac’s blood on the floor, a broken table between us, and the gunshot still trapped inside my head.
Angel looked back at me. “You don’t gotta do this now.”
I frowned. “Do what?”
“Figure out what I am to you.”
The words hit somewhere I hadn’t protected. He didn’t say father. He didn’t ask me to.
“I don’t know who you are to me,” I admitted.
“I know.”
“I already had a dad.”
Angel’s face didn’t change.
“He raised me. He loved me. I don’t remember everything about him anymore, and sometimes that scares me, but he was my dad.”
Angel nodded. “Okay.”
That was all. No jealousy. No claim. Nothing that made me feel as if loving the man who raised me was somehow taking something away from the man standing in front of me.
“And Granny adopted me.”
“I heard.”
“And Frank and Georgie are my brothers.”
Another nod.
“And Charlie—” I stopped.
Charlie was harder. Because explaining Charlie always made something inside me feel exposed. And now there were more people I had to explain it to. Had to justify my choices to.
Angel saved me from having to. “I know enough.”
I studied his face. “Does that bother you?”
“What?”
“That I had a baby.”
Something dangerous moved through his expression so quickly I almost stepped back. Then I realized it wasn’t aimed at me.
“No.”
I waited.
His gaze sharpened. “Does somebody make you think it should?”
“No.”
“Good.”
There were apparently several versions of Angel. The uncertain one. The man who killed Mac without hesitation. And this one, who looked prepared to hunt down anyone who had ever made me ashamed of being Charlie’s biological mother.
Jasper had known Angel for fourteen years, seven of them spent riding in the same Arkansas Chapter. I could see how some of Angel had rubbed off on him. They were disturbingly alike in some ways.
The thought made me smile.
Angel noticed. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
“You and Jasper are more alike than either of you would probably enjoy hearing.”
His expression went flat. “Take it back.”
I laughed. Really laughed. It hurt afterward because everything inside me was still too tight, but it felt good anyway.
Angel watched me, and the strange look that crossed his face made the laughter fade. “What?”
He shook his head.
“No. You don’t get to do that,” I told him.
“Do what?”
“Look at me like that and then say nothing.”
He hesitated. “You look like her when you laugh.”
The room went quiet again.
I didn’t have to ask who; I knew he was talking about my mother.
Kaylah.
I looked down at my hands. “Do you have pictures?”
“Yeah.”
My head came up.
He already had his phone out, but he didn’t approach. Instead, he unlocked it, found whatever he was looking for, and held it toward me from where he stood.
I crossed the space between us enough to take the phone.
The woman on the screen was younger than I expected. Beautiful. Brown hair. Bright eyes. A smile that looked like she had been caught in the middle of laughing at whoever held the camera.
I stared.
This was different from Angel’s photograph. I had studied him looking for myself. With her, I didn’t have to look very hard.
“Oh.”
Angel said nothing.
I swiped carefully and found another. Kaylah sitting on the hood of a car. Another with two little girls I knew had to be Kinsley and Kyllian. Another where she looked directly into the camera with the expression of someone seconds away from doing something she had been told not to do.
I smiled despite myself. “I have that face.”
“Yeah.”
“Jasper hates that face.”
“Smart man.”
I laughed softly and kept looking. There were more. Not hundreds, but enough to give me pieces of a woman I would never meet. Someone preserved inside the phone of a man who had loved her.
When I finally handed it back, my fingers brushed Angel’s. He went still. So did I. It was barely contact. Nothing.
Except apparently it wasn’t.
I pulled my hand back slowly, expecting Angel to move closer. When he stayed where he was, I asked, “Did you really look for me?”
His expression changed. Not dramatically. Angel didn’t seem built for dramatic expressions. But I saw it.
“Once I knew there was a you to find,” he said, “I didn’t stop.”
My throat tightened. He’d only known I existed for a few months, and somehow knowing he had spent those months looking for me made the answer harder to absorb.
I had spent eighteen years without knowing there was anyone out there searching for Kaitlyn Grace Ward, while he had spent every day since learning about her trying to find where she had gone.
I nodded because speaking suddenly seemed harder than it should have been.
Angel looked toward the doorway. “I can go.”
My eyes snapped to his.
“I know you weren’t ready. None of this changes that.”
He meant it.
That somehow made it worse. Or better. I wasn’t sure.
He slipped his phone into his pocket. “King has my number. Romeo does too. You want something, you call. You don’t, I leave you alone.”
Then he turned.
Panic came out of nowhere. Not the kind Mac had caused. Something quieter. A door closing before I had decided whether I wanted it open.
“Angel?”
He stopped immediately.
I stared at his back for a second before he turned around. The words felt strange. Too big and too small at the same time.
“Could you stay for a little while?”
He didn’t smile. I was grateful for that. If he had looked too happy, I might have wanted to take it back just to escape the weight of giving him something.
Instead, he nodded. “Yeah.”
That was enough.
Jasper came back through the doorway a few minutes later, took one look at Angel still standing near me, and somehow managed not to ask a single question. He crossed directly to me, wrapped an arm around my waist, and kissed my temple.
“We can leave.”
I leaned into him. “Home?”
His mouth curved against my hair. “Home.”
I looked around the cabin that had hidden us for two weeks. The kitchen where Jasper had made terrible coffee. The couch where we had talked until sunrise. The bedroom where hiding had stopped feeling like hiding and started feeling like the beginning of something neither of us had planned.
There was blood on the floor where Mac’s body had been.
The peace we found in the bayou was gone.
I expected that to hurt more than it did.
Maybe because Jasper’s arm was around me.
Maybe because Angel was still standing across the room instead of disappearing.
Maybe because for once leaving somewhere didn’t mean losing everything I had found there.
I looked up at my husband. “You meant it?”
His brows drew together. “That usually requires context, Cher.”
“About teaching me to shoot.”
Understanding spread across his face. Then came the grin. The one that had caused my biological father to name him Romeo long before he ever knew me.
“Oh, I meant it.”
“How soon?”
“First fuckin’ thing.”
“Before coffee?”
He looked genuinely offended. “I said I’d teach you to shoot, not commit a crime against humanity.”
I smiled.
Home.
For most of my life, that word had belonged to places and people I eventually lost.
This time, home wasn’t a place I could lose. It was Jasper. As long as I had him beside me, it didn’t really matter where we ended up.