tried to doubt him but she couldn’t. For the first time since they’d met, she knew Gabriel O’Rourke was telling her the truth.
HE TOOK HER to a small private airstrip, three hours away from where they’d been. They didn’t speak the whole trip, both occupied with their own thoughts and regrets. He’d let her ride in the passenger seat after they’d finished their coffee, his fears growing dimmer with each mile he put between the house on the quiet street and them. When they arrived and he’d parked, Gabriel turned to the young woman beside him.
He thought he’d aged, but Alexis Mission now looked like an entirely different person. Part of the change was at his insistence. They’d stopped at a twenty-four-hour drugstore and gotten a bottle of bleach and some harsh makeup. In a service-station bathroom near the interstate, the brunette he’d grabbed inside the Mission home had become a blonde with a slash of red lipstick that didn’t match her skin tone.
The changes to Alexis Mission went beyond just the physical, though. Her eyes were completely empty, her demeanor that of another person. She was someone less sure, he decided. Someone less confident, the darkness of depression already settling into her soul.
A small Cessna taxied out of a rusted hangar to their right and headed to where they were parked. Behind the plane, the tips of the mountains were just beginning to glow in the rising sun’s rays. Gabriel handed Alexis an envelope and she took it woodenly, placing it in her lap.
“There’s some cash in there to get you by until the money is wired. My people at the other end will give you more.” He held out a small white card and she took it, too. “That’s how you can reach me. It’s a drop number.”
She looked at him impassively.
“You call it and leave a message,” he explained. “Then I phone you back. You won’t ever get me directly. The system doesn’t work that way.”
Her eyes went to the piece of paper with the phone number written on it. She stared at it for a moment then she crumpled the note into a ball and opened her fingers. It fell to the floorboards.
“You might need that,” he said softly.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “You’ve done enough already.”
Her stiff reply wasn’t a compliment. Alexis Mission held him accountable for everything that had happened because she had no one else to blame. Similar damnation had been heaped on him before.
But he hadn’t cared then.
He felt the need to say something. “Alexis, your family was… Your mom and dad…”
“Don’t bother,” she said. The swosh of the plane’s rotors drawing close, she opened the van’s door, a wave of frigid air sweeping into the vehicle as she stepped out. She spoke through the window, her fingers gripping the edge so tightly her knuckles went white. “I don’t want to hear whatever you’re trying to say to me. I’ve had enough of your lies to last me forever.”
Her glittering gaze met with his, then she turned and walked away.
CHAPTER THREE
Ten years later, Austin, Texas
ALEX WORTHINGTON dusted off the last table in her workroom and picked up an errant paintbrush that had escaped her notice. Tucking the brush into a nearby drawer, she surveyed the area one more time. When Claiborne Academy’s final bell rang at Thanksgiving break, most of the staff fled as quickly as the students, but not Alex. She liked to return in January to a tidy space and a fresh start.
Fresh starts were her specialty. She’d had quite a few of them.
Claiborne itself represented one of the better ones. Alex had been the school’s resident artist for almost four years, her longest stretch anywhere. A private facility, the exclusive Austin school that blended art and technology was the favorite of parents who had plenty of money and wanted to spend it on their kids. When they’d hired her, she’d warned the administrators she wasn’t a teacher and they’d said they weren’t looking for one. Claiborne was innovative—the facility needed someone who would “guide” the children into developing their own creativeness, not teach them.
Atypical in its schedule as well as its philosophy, the academy shut down completely between Thanksgiving and New Year’s so the students and their families could head across the globe to second homes and exotic vacations. The faculty escaped as best they could and collapsed…working at Claiborne demanded a lot.
Alex was different though. She didn’t mind the hours any more than she minded tidying up her area, especially at this time of year. For obvious reasons, the holiday stretch always left her feeling restless and anxious. She usually planned an out-of-the-way trip herself, but before she could make reservations this year, Ben had called.
They’d married six years ago. After two, they’d divorced but had remained really good friends. Ben had asked her to spend Christmas with him and Libby, his twenty-year-old daughter. Alex couldn’t turn him down. Twenty-five years her senior, Ben was dying from a rare liver disease and he wouldn’t see another Christmas. If he wanted Alex with him, then she had to go. She owed him that much…and probably a lot more.
Taking down the last of the few decorations she put up each year—a gathered stalk of dried corn and apples—she told herself she’d get through tomorrow, then concentrate on Ben and Libby. They each needed Alex in a different way, and helping them would take her mind off her memories and all the ghosts that came with them.
But just thinking about the past summoned everything to her. Her fingers suddenly tightened on the dried corn husks and pieces of the chaff fluttered to the floor. She stared at the yellow bits, then all at once, despite her best intentions, her heart started to pound and her mouth went dry. With a quiet groan, she closed her eyes. Behind the lids, the image of her mother’s wreath appeared. The lopsided arrangement looked just as it had on the door of the house in Los Lobos the day Alex had come home from Peru.
Gabriel O’Rourke’s face came next, but before it could fully form, a voice broke the silence.
“Hey, you’re supposed to go home first and then fall asleep!”
Alex’s eyes shot open. Randy Squires, Claiborne’s dean, stood in the doorway of her classroom and grinned.
She smiled gratefully at the tall, balding man. Randy was a sweetheart and he never failed to make her feel better, no matter how badly the day had gone. If she let him, she suspected he’d give his right arm to make her happy, although he’d never come out and asked her for a date or made any kind of obvious move. He was too professional for that, but even more importantly, he sensed the wall Alex kept around herself and respected it.
“I’m too tired to go home and go to bed,” she lied. “I think I’ll just hibernate here like some big old bear until January. Is that okay?”
He strolled into her classroom and perched on the edge of her desk. “No fancy trips this year? No big vacation?”
Alex shook her head and explained Ben’s situation.
“I’m sorry to hear he’s so ill.”
“I am, too.” She sat down at one of the tables in front of her desk. “Ben’s a nice guy.”
“Your
