“Then I owe him a great debt. He brought my baby home to me.”
Tears prickled behind Lana’s eyelids. “The FBI arrested him. I didn’t have time to clear everything up. It all happened so fast, and then…he was gone.”
Sarah rubbed her shoulders in a familiar maternal gesture. “Tell me about him. This Deacon.”
God, where did she even start? She could see the questions swimming in her mother’s eyes, but she had no idea how to answer them.
Sensing Lana’s dismay, Sarah chuckled. “How about we start with an easy one?” She paused. “Do you love him?”
Chapter 17
Lana burst out laughing. “You call that easy?” Leave it to her mother to ask the one thing she’d been agonizing over for weeks now.
“Well, do you?” Sarah prodded gently.
She bit her lip, letting the question settle. “Yes,” she confessed. “But he doesn’t love me.”
Before she could stop it, a stream of words rushed out of her mouth. She told her mother everything. The night at the Louvre. The men on the train. The horrifying discovery that Deacon was involved in her abduction. Their time on the run. His final declaration to her.
When she finished, her heart was beating wildly, and her palms went damp as she voiced one last thought. “We don’t have a future, Mom.”
Sarah smoothed the top of Lana’s head. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, for one, he’s not interested. He says he doesn’t want to be a father or a husband. He thinks I deserve better than him.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t even know anymore,” Lana burst out in frustration. “From the start, I saw something decent in him. I was convinced that deep down he was a good man. But then he shut down on me. He said some really hurtful things, too. And…and he was involved in my kidnapping! I know he redeemed himself in the end, but maybe he was right all along when he kept telling me he wasn’t a good person.”
Her mother fell silent for a long moment, then shifted in her chair so they were face to face. “Oh, honey, you still don’t get it, do you?”
Lana faltered. “Get what?”
“Baby, nobody is all good and all bad. We all have our dark moments, our shades of gray.” Sarah sighed. “Do you think Deacon’s actions saved your life?”
“I know they did.”
“And are those the actions of a bad man?”
She bit her lip again. “No, but…”
“But nothing. You know, I’ve always worried about you,” her mother admitted. “You want everything to be beautiful and perfect. You always have, even as a child, and I supposed that’s admirable in many ways, but it’s also unreasonable at times. Nobody is perfect, honey. You need to learn to accept the good and the bad. It’s okay to seek out the best in people, but if you remain blind to their flaws, you’ll only hurt yourself in the end.”
“Maybe. But none of that matters.” Her eyes stung. “He doesn’t love me.”
“Sure he does.”
She had to grin at her mom’s careless tone. “Oh, does he?”
Sarah began to recite facts. “He protected you from his boss. He helped you escape. And Jim said Deacon threw himself on you when the bullets started flying. That, my darling, is love.”
“Or duty,” she whispered. “He felt he owed me something. How do I know that’s not the reason he did all of that?”
“Well, there’s a simple way to find that out.”
“There is?”
“Ask the man if he loves you,” Sarah said with a tiny smile.
“I would, except he’s in jail,” she pointed out.
“But he doesn’t have to stay there.” Her mother’s smile widened. “We’re Kelleys, honey. Might as well make good use of our connections, no?”
Deacon paced the small cell, his boots wearing away at the floor. His shoulders tensed at every noise, every random creak that sounded in the holding area of the police station. It was foolish, believing someone would actually come and give him news of Hank Kelley’s condition, but he was going crazy not knowing. Lana would be destroyed if her father died.
He’d actually had to use all his strength to keep her down when the gunshots had been blazing above them, and yet she’d still managed to climb out of his grip to run to her father. He’d never forget the look on her face, that steely determination to get to a person she loved.
Funnily enough, he’d felt that same determination in his own blood. The need to run after Lana and keep her safe had been as powerful and basic as the need to breathe.
He froze in front of the bars as a sudden realization dawned on him.
In that moment, with his self-preservation in jeopardy, his head in danger of meeting a bullet, he’d only been thinking about Lana.
Would his father have done that?
A harsh laugh burst from his mouth. No, he was fairly certain his dad would’ve used his mother’s body as armor to save his own skin.