Page 77 of Under the Mistletoe
“I think I need to return them to their mangers. Besides, you don’t need a wooden Jesus, let alone ten of them. The real one is with you right here.” Devin pointed at the teary-eyed girl’s chest and kissed the top of her head. Alani nodded, and Devin scooped them into a bag.
Ten minutes later, she and Logan were headed out to his Bronco. “I have to do the live Nativity.”
“I know. We’ll make it happen.” He wrapped his arms around her. “Liam should be back then, and I’m sure he’d help too. It’s going to be okay.”
Maybe. But whether it was the look in Heather’s eyes when Alani had confessed or the whispered exchanges between couple, something in Devin’s gut told her that the heartbreak for Alani wasn’t done yet and Devin couldn’t protect her from it.
thirteen
He had an hour until he needed to leave for the live Nativity. Maybe he should send the chapter to Christina and be done with it, but the ending lacked the punch he wanted. Logan hovered the pointer over the send button. Surely it was good enough. Though if he sent it like this, he wouldn’t be satisfied—which meant his readers wouldn’t be satisfied.
Logan shut the email and reopened the Word doc of chapter twenty-one. He scanned the beginning, then slowed his reading.
* * *
“I don’t blame you for Orin’s death.” Astryn’s voice echoed off the rock wall of the overhang. It wasn’t quite the safety of the deep cave Rand preferred, but it at least protected three of their four sides. “I blame myself.”
What was she talking about? “You couldn’t have saved him. You weren’t even there.”
“But I should have been because I was the only one who could have.” The rawness of her voice nearly broke his resolve to keep his distance. Her voice dropped to just above a whisper. “At least, that was what your mother told me.”
“My mother?” Nothing but a deep humming filled him, all the grief roaring like a river. “You never met my mother.”
“But I did.” Her shoulders sagged, and she dropped to sit on a rock, her back resting against the stone wall. “Tall, fair Orin had her jawline, but you have her eyes. Only the color was different. She had one blue eye, one green.”
Icy awareness dripped through his veins. “Who told you that?”
“I just told you”—she pulled down her ratty bun and twisted it back up before securing it—“she visited me in the garden.”
“Like a ghost?” Had the girl gone mad?
“No. She was clear about that. She said she lived now in the Land of Plenty with Origin and he had sent her with a message.”
His heart pounded so hard her words were almost muffled.
“She told me about the power of the pendant and how it is a gift that belongs to Origin, not to me. And then she told me…” She swallowed and dropped her head. “She said…”
He knelt down in front of her, drawing closer, but took care not to touch her. “What did she say?”
His voice was more firm than he intended, but his mother had been ripped from his life too soon, and he’d spent too many nights longing for one more word from her. If Astryn had received a message…
“She told me that one day I will be forced to make the choice between life and love.” Her voice cracked. “Don’t you see?”
Rand just started at her because no. He didn’t see.
“At the last minute, Orin asked me to accompany him. He asked me to go see the castle and then return with him before the wedding.” She brushed a tear away, leaving a streak of dirt behind. “I was supposed to be with Orin so I could save him. I failed him. I failed you. I failed Anathia. Cambria. Everyone.”
Rand’s legs began to shake, and he dropped back into a seated position. He still didn’t understand how or why she believed she could’ve saved Orin, but the thought that she could have been with Orin during the attack—that Rand could have lost everything that day—made everything around him spin as all warmth drained from his face. Losing Orin had been devastating. But losing Astryn would destroy him.
He took in her tear-stained face. Losing Orin had wrecked her.Forced to make the choice between life and love.Orin had been her love. Somehow Rand had still been holding onto a fraction of hope that she had been marrying Orin out of obligation.
She tilted her face to him. “And now I have ripped you from your country with no solution. We don’t even know if we are running toward or away from the enemy.”
* * *
And even now, it needed one more line. And yet he had nothing.
A chime on his phone had him reaching for it. There was an email back from his editor. He clicked it open, but all Sandy said wasSee Track Changes for a few tweaks.
