Freedom…
Such a simple word. Only two syllables. But it was packed with power.
Freedom…the name Hew had given to his motorcycle.
She looked at it now, parked just beyond the tree line. A crowd had gathered to gawk, and no wonder. With its blue-gray paint job, hand-tooled leather seat, and gleaming chrome pipes, the bike was a work of art.
Freedom...because that’s what it meant to him. Freedom from his past. Freedom to build something that was wholly, uniquely his. Freedom to take off whenever the open road called.
She turned back to him now, shading her eyes against the sun. He had the most beautiful profile. Sharp and masculine. A face hewn from granite.
“You’ve never said much about your folks,” she remarked quietly. “Do you know anything about them aside from how they died?”
The muscle in his jaw flexed beneath the cover of his well-trimmed beard. For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t answer. Thought she’d finally hit on the one subject he wouldn’t touch.
Then he said, “They were high school sweethearts. Supposed to get married after graduation, but they never got that far.”
“So young.” She shook her head. “Too young to be taken like that.”
He’d told her they’d been gunned down in a mass shooting at a music festival. But he hadn’t elaborated beyond that.
“Mom was eight and a half months pregnant with me when it happened. Accordin’ to the police reports I read after I was old enough to go lookin’, seems like she was one of the last ones shot. Which I reckon is how I’m here with ya now. When the paramedics arrived on the scene, my mom was gone, but they could still hear my heartbeat.”
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say, but it wasn’t that.
Yes, she’d known he’d lost his teenage parents when he was very young. But she hadn’t realized he’d lost them while he was still in the womb!
Jesus!
Tentatively, she reached for his hand. When he squeezed her fingers, she bit her lip to keep from sobbing at all the tragedy he’d suffered before he’d ever breathed his first lungful of air.
“My father’s body was found over hers,” he said quietly. “Guess he tried to shield her. Didn’t work, though. She’d already been hit. Paramedics cut me out of her in the back of the ambulance.”
Sabrina’s breath caught, sharp and jagged. Horror bled into heartbreak until her chest ached with both of them.
She could see it all so clearly. The terrified girl. The dying boy shielding her and their unborn child. The carnage and the mud and the blood.
It took everything she had not to weep. For the young mother who never got to hold her child. For the brave father whose last act had been one of sacrifice and love. For the baby boy who’d entered the world already steeped in loss.
She should say something. But what?
It was all too cruel. Too much. Too awful for words.
“I’m so sorry, Hew,” she whispered, because it was all she had.
“Don’t be. You weren’t the one on a roof bangin’ on a long gun and takin’ out a bunch of kids just tryin’ to have some fun.”
“I’m sorry for the world,” she clarified, her voice trembling right along with her chin. “Sorry it lets monsters run loose. Sorry it treats orphaned kids like afterthoughts. Sorry for every hug you never got. Every Christmas you spent alone. Every birthday nobody remembered.”
“Even kids with parents go without,” he murmured, turning to bring his face within inches of hers. His breath smelled of spearmint and sunshine. “You did.”
She closed her eyes.
It was true. Her parents had been more interested in getting drunk and high with their other deadbeat friends than raising kids. But she’d had Cooper. And Diana at the diner. And various neighbors who had ensured she had hand-me-downs to wear to school and haircuts when her ponytails got too heavy.
He’d had no one.
“How did you do it?” she asked, gently pulling off his sunglasses to see his eyes.
