This time I turned around.
“Thank you for what you did for me.”
Choked up and struggling after hearing those words when I felt so much like I failed, I just nodded before walking out the door.
Wrapping my hand around the handle of the mug, I took a pull of the cold beer and let it slide down my throat. And then I sat there as I always did, nursing the one I allowed myself—only one, again because of my mother—and thought about everything Dusty had said.
Along with Dusty’s voice in my head, I also couldn’t stop reading the text that had come through weeks ago from Patience.
Patience:I will rescue you. Please come home.
I hadn’t replied. Because what was I supposed to say? I didn’t know that I could go home, be rescued, or was even worth rescuing.
Movement had me stirring from the replay of our conversation as the stools on each side of me at the bar were pulled out. I looked to the right and then looked to the left, taking in the men who had occupied the seats.
Well fuck.
It looked likemy time alone was up.
“Fancy meeting you here,” the one on my right said.
I rolled my eyes. Yup, actually rolled them. I blamed my sister and her friends for that move because I’d grown up seeing it so many damn times.
“Did you just roll your eyes?” the guy on the left said.
Grumbling something unintelligible under my breath had them laughing.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” My gaze scanned the bar. “Or are there more of you lurking around somewhere I haven’t seen yet?”
That got more chuckles out of them.
I didn’t know why they thought they were so funny, but I knew I wasn’t getting rid of them any time soon.
Nope, Lyric and Gyth were on a mission.
And there was no stopping them until they finished what they came for.
Chapter Five
PATIENCE
“They wentwhere?” I screeched.
We’d all sat down to dinner, but Lyric was missing. Without thought, I’d asked where he was, and Ruby averted her gaze and didn’t respond.
“For heaven's sake, tell the poor girl,” Gramps grumbled.
After the longest sigh I’d ever heard, Ruby explained that Lyric and Gyth had gone to see Jett.
Autumn and Griffin both whined that they’d wanted to go too.
“I miss my brother,” the little girl said.
Tristan was born after Jett had left so he wasn’t attached to Jett, but he copied everything his sister and Griffin did, so he had to jump in with a whine of his own in agreement.
Ruby and Jett were Autumn’s brother and sister, but when Ruby and Lyric adopted Autumn, she began calling them Mom and Dad. After everything she’d been through, she longed for that connection.
My eyes strayed to my son. He longed so much for Jett to be his daddy.
