Page 83 of Tempest at Annabel's Lighthouse
“Please, someone! Help—!” Her screams were cut off as Bear’s arm came across her mouth, dragging her back against him.
But in that moment, Rebecca’s eyes latched onto another’s that emerged from the hazy, smoke-filled street. Niina’s horrified expression summarized every ounce of Rebecca’s terror.
She was alone in the shack that Mercer had brought her to before. The place she had escaped from, an act he’d obviously recalled because her hands and feet were bound tighter now, and Bear stood sentinel outside the rickety door made of wood planks. She could see daylight through the top and bottom of the door. She could also see the heels of Bear’s boots. She was not going anywhere, even if she could wriggle free from her bindings.
Rebecca allowed the tears to come, though they had been falling longer than she’d realized. She wasn’t strong; she wasn’t a fighter. No, she had always been compliant, easily manipulated, well aware that things would go better for her if she didn’t go against Walter Hilliard. The man who claimed he was not her father. The man who had raised her because of her dead mother, Annabel. Was it true? Was he truly not her father? Or perhaps that was the thin thread of reason that had made Hilliard keep her close to him. To raise her anyway. Maybe he questioned it too. Maybe Annabel had never told him whether Rebecca was or wasn’t his, and Hilliard had drawn his own conclusions.
Annabel. Rebecca closed her eyes, and Edgar’s story returned to her. Had he loved her? He claimed to have. The unrequited love in his words, in the old man’s tone, haunted Rebecca now.
Annabel had been a miner’s daughter, Edgar had said. Hilliard had told Rebecca that she was not his child. Edgar had loved Annabel. Hilliard had married her.
Rebecca’s heart began to race. Two men, one woman, a child—Rebecca—and Annabel’s death. This was a legacy. A legacy of one woman torn between two men.
She strained to remember the date of death on Annabel’s gravestone—1852, it had a said. She would have just been born. Was she ... was she Edgar’s daughter? Rebecca’s watery gasp echoed in the shack, and Bear’s boot slammed against the door.
“Shut up!” he demanded.
Rebecca bit down on her tongue, willing away the sob that stuck in her throat.
Edgar was an old man, at least twenty years Hilliard’s senior. He would have been in his fifties when Rebecca was born, and yet Rebecca knew in a wild land like the Porcupine Mountains, age meant little when love blossomed.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the burning tears. If God had mercy, then He would come down from His heaven and clear everything up until all of it made sense. He would fill in the blanks and give answers to the questions of this tragic story.
Love wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be giving, a wellspring of joy, with a willingness to serve and sacrifice for those one held dear. Instead, in Rebecca’s story—no, in her mother Annabel’s story—what passed for love had taken on the grotesque shape of selfishness, of a motivation not for the well-being of the other, but for oneself.
At least for Hilliard it was that way.
Rebecca didn’t know Edgar’s story. She didn’t know her mother’s story either. She just knew Annabel’s, the woman who had given her life, then drowned while she had been married to Hilliard. Not to Edgar. Which meant that if Hilliard was right, an affair of the heart, if not more, had occurredwhileshe was wed to him. Edgar would have been an interloper in a marriage perhaps based on greed or selfish desire on Hilliard’s part, or desperate need on Annabel’s. Or perhaps they had both at one time imagined love.
Whatever its beginning, it soured, became divisive, and then Edgar entered ... and then Rebecca was conceived and later born.
And Annabel had drowned.
A horrible supposition entered Rebecca’s mind then.
Annabel had drowned—a woman alone in a skiff? On Lake Superior, with waves that could easily topple such a boat, unless of course the one at the helm had the benefit of expertise?Why had Annabel left the shore to row onto the lake anyway? What had driven her to face the violence of the lake’s mouth?
Rebecca stilled at the imagery entering her mind. Blue eyes as cold as the lake but filled with a protective warmth that countered the chill. Abel.
Not long agosheherself had entered the mouth of the lake—to escape a worse evil, yes. Yet the wildness of the lake was preferable to the violence that had loomed behind Rebecca. But Abel...
Hehad been there.
Hehad risked his life to envelop her in his embrace.
Hehad claimed her and their babe.
And suddenly, in the force of what love wassupposedto be, Rebecca remembered everything.
33
SHEA
PRESENT DAY
HE CAME OUT OF NOWHERE,his hand clapping over Shea’s mouth, pulling her hard against him and behind a grove of trees.
Shea squirmed to free herself, her cries muffled against his palm.
