TEN
Dom
THERE WAS A HURRICANE GOING on inside my mind. Everything I had ever thought about my mother was being blown away. I loved her, had trusted her, and always thought she loved me.
There was no way that was true; I could see that clearly now.
She had given my little girl away, with no remorse. I hadn’t known about anything that had happened. Might not have ever known, if Robert hadn’t brought Triss back into my life.
On top of that, she had made Triss think that I didn’t want her. That I didn’t want my own child. My mother had set me up to make me look like I was just as unfeeling as she was.
I didn’t know how to fix what she had broken all those years ago. I didn’t know how to get my daughter back without hurting her more. She was lost to me.
Just as Triss was.
Fuck, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had to make this all up to her somehow. If my mother hadn’t set her up to take the fall for Kim’s overdose, we could have been married by now. We could have had Lily and maybe even a few other children running around or on their way. We could have been happy, could have been loving each other every night, and enjoying the life we should have had together.
All of the “could haves” were killing me.
Instead, I had trusted my mother, had turned my back on the woman who had been my everything, and tossed her to the wolves while my mother had most likely sat back and watched with pleasure. I hadn’t let myself see how much she hated Triss back then, but now I could see it as clear as day. She was a greedy, soulless woman, and Triss had been the only thing standing in her way of Robert Prescott’s vast fortune.
She had nearly destroyed the woman I loved.
I rang the doorbell and thrust my hands into my coat pockets. It was cold out, but it wasn’t the reason I felt frozen tonight. While my mind was a swirl of memories and conflicting emotions, my body was almost numb by everything I had learned today.
Moments later, the door to the house I had just arrived at opened.
Once upon a time, Sawyer Brannon had been my best friend, then everything had happened with Ash, and I couldn’t even stomach him for years. Then Ash had forgiven him and they had gotten back together. Now, my closest friend was marrying my former best friend, and we had come to a truce for her sake, if nothing else. I didn’t know if I could forgive him as easily as Ash had, but after what I had learned about the past, I didn’t have room to judge him.
I had hurt Triss just as badly as he had hurt Ash. Maybe more.
Sawyer lifted his brows in surprise when he saw me standing on his doorstep. “Ash know you were dropping by?”
I shook my head. “No, man, but I need to talk to her. Is now a bad time?”
He stepped back, letting me inside the new house they had bought over the summer. His old one was the one he had bought while married to Amber, but once he had asked Ash to marry him, they had decided to get a place that was just for them, with plenty of extra room for his son Jamie and any other babies that might come along.
“Come on in. She was taking a call from her editor. She will be glad you dropped by.”
I followed him through the house to the kitchen where Sawyer offered me a cup of coffee. When I shook my head, he pulled out two beers from the huge fridge. I needed something a hell of a lot strong than beer, but it would do for now. I was driving. When I got home, however, I knew I would be spending the rest of the night with a bottle of scotch as my only companion.
“You look like hell, buddy.”
I lowered the beer but didn’t place it on the counter. “Then I look how I feel,” I assured him.
“Damn, man. I’m sorry. I remember how close you were with your stepdad. This must be hard for you.”
“I miss him, but that’s not why I feel like this,” I found myself confessing. “I just had the proof of how much of an evil bitch my mother really is shoved down my throat.”
“Shit, I wondered if you would ever open your eyes to how she really is.” Sawyer took a drink from his own beer before shaking his head. “I tried to tell you a few times, especially where your stepsister was concerned, but you refused to see it. Brice told me just to leave it alone.”
I gritted my teeth, regretting that I wouldn’t listen back then. “Yeah, well, I see it all too clearly now.”
“Honey, did you call Jamie?” Ash’s voice called out from down the hall. I could hear her footsteps on the hardwood floor as she headed for the kitchen. “You were supposed to make sure he is coming home tomorrow.”
The kitchen door swung open and beautiful, little Ash walked in, dressed in a pair of baggy sweatpants and a shirt that hung off one shoulder. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail, showing off the scar that went across her throat.
Two years ago, she never would have shown that scar off the way she was right now. Now that she was getting her happy ever after with Sawyer, though, she had become more confident about the reminder of what had happened to her seven years ago.
Even as a doctor, it had scared the hell out of me when I had traveled with Brice to Turkey when everything had happened. To see the girl I had always considered as much a sister as Kim was, a girl I had watched grow up and loved, fighting for her life … It had been worse than when Kim had overdosed, times ten.
All Ash had ever wanted to be was a journalist, and not just one who reported on fashion or local news. She had wanted to be a foreign correspondent, one who went into the war-torn countries that most were too scared to even think about traveling to. She wanted to show what really went on when war, or famine, or a million other tragic things happened to people no one ever thought about until they were plastered on a person’s television at night as they watched the evening news.
She had worked her ass off to get to where she had in her career at such a young age. She had been good at what she did, ambitious, and unafraid to do what needed to be done to get the story. That was why she had been given that last assignment that had nearly cost her, her life.
When I had gotten to the hospital in Turkey, I hadn’t known what to expect. Seeing Ash lying in a bed with her throat sewn shut, attached to life support as she fought for her life, I had been struck mute with how easily her life could have been cut short. Just a little deeper and her voice box would have been severed. She had been lucky that someone with her had been a medic because, if she had had to wait even a second longer out in the field, she would have died then and there.
It wasn’t until Ash had come around and was finally able to talk that she had unburdened herself on me. I had been the shoulder she cried on as she had finally let it all out so she could start the healing process to her heart and soul, not just her body.
I still had nightmares about what she had told me. How she had been traveling with a group of missionaries and a few lone mercenaries into one of the smaller countries just across the border of Turkey. Their small caravan had been besieged during their second night of her assignment, which was to cover the story of the local militia’s latest destruction to the country. They were taking children from their beds at night to join their cause, then killing their parents and burning their houses afterward.
Ash had been their target, not the missionaries there to do whatever the hell they did. By then, she had made a name for herself in the correspondent world, not just with major news channels and political magazines, but also with the people she was reporting on. Her face had been everywhere for years and the militia had known exactly why she was there.
The mercenaries who were supposed to be her security had been taken out, and then she was dragged into the middle of their camp, her throat slit in front of the missionaries. Considering their job done, they had left her there to die in front of the others.
Afterward, once Ash could come home, she had quit her job and found a low-key position writing for a local magazine. These days, she reported on art exhibits or whatever else her editor needed her to do that his other journalists didn’t want to cover. I knew she got bored sometimes, but she refused to even think about going back to being a foreign correspondent.
“Dom?” Ash’s hand on my arm pulled me back from the memory of watching over her for weeks as her personal doctor until she was well enough to travel home. “What’s wrong?”
Years of being such close friends had given her the ability to read me easily. She could see beneath my bullshit, which had always driven me crazy. At the same time, it made me glad that I had someone who wouldn’t let me hide or get away with shit. In another lifetime, if I hadn’t still been holding on to the love I couldn’t seem to let go of for Triss, and if she hadn’t been head over heels for Sawyer, maybe we would have tried to be more than friends.
Maybe.
Regardless, we had never felt more than a strong affection and an overwhelming need to protect each other.
I needed to unload, to get this shit off my chest, and she was the only person I trusted to not only listen, but to tell it to me straight if I stepped out of line.
“Can we talk?”