Tangled Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

through. “I will pray. And I will hope.”
    Sasha waited, watching his throat work as he studied the water. She could tell he had more to say but couldn’t seem to force the words out. Finally he turned to her and gripped her shoulders. “This quest, it is nonsense, Sasha. Pure nonsense. Tony has been gone for twenty-three years. This is the foolish hope of a desperate woman.”
    Sasha agreed with him, though she wouldn’t have put it in quite those terms. She reached up and patted his hands.
    “Maybe foolish, maybe not.” She shrugged. “But I’ll do my best.” She forced a smile. “And if we get Eve involved, well, then our chances go way up, immediately.”
    He wrenched out of her grasp. “No!”
    Sasha watched, stunned, as he paced. Back and forth, back and forth, hands fisted at his sides. Beside her, Bella whimpered, and Sasha reached down to reassure her. “It’s OK, girl.”
    When Pop turned back her way, Sasha stepped into his path. “Pop. Stop. Please. Tell me why not.”
    He wouldn’t meet her eyes, just kept shaking his head, muttering in Italian.
    She reached out and grabbed his arm, holding him still. Finally he looked up, jaw clenched.
    “It is a fool’s errand. A waste of time. And when nothing comes of it? Then I will be left holding her as she cries in the night again, desperate for her baby. I can’t, Sasha. I can’t watch her go through it again. He’s gone. Our Tony was gone years ago, and she can’t—” He stopped and wiped tears from his eyes. “Your mama, she can’t let him go. And I can’t watch her suffer anymore.”
    He cleared his throat and visibly calmed himself. “Tell her no, Sasha. Tell her you cannot do this. Please. For me.”
    Sasha swallowed the lump in her own throat, trying to find words, but nothing came out. How could she refuse him? This was Pop, the man who had found her living behind the marina in an abandoned shed when she was twelve years old, a filthy, starving runaway with nothing to call her own but the clothes on her back, a gold mariner’s cross she wore around her neck, and an attitude that screeched like rusty armor. It had taken almost a week, but Pop had finally coaxed her out of the shed with Mama’s homemade bread and deep-fried fish he’d caught that day.
    Pop and Mama had saved her in every sense of the word. They’d loved her despite her attitude and had given her a home, no questions asked. After a while, she’d become part of their family and, later, part of their faith, too.
    So how on earth could she tell one of them yes without breaking the other’s heart?
    And how would she ever choose?

    Jesse figured he should head to Clarabelle’s, start packing up and pitching the endless knickknacks and doodads his great-aunt had stacked on every available surface of her pink cottage. But he couldn’t seem to leave the marina. He’d waited out the thunderstorm in his truck, and now he climbed out and wandered down the dock, stopping to study the Gulf of Mexico rolling to the west as far as the eye could see. He’d been caught off guard when his feisty aunt suddenly died in her sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-three. He’d been even more surprised that she’d left everything she owned to him.
    He still expected her to appear in the kitchen, cane tapping on the heart-pine floor, pointing an arthritic finger and scolding him for some childhood misdeed. What would she say about his stint in jail? He grimaced. She would poke and prod until the whole ugly mess spilled out. Then she’d tell him that doing the wrong thing for the right reason was still wrong. She’d thump his chest and tell him to confess, repent, and move on and live as the man she knew he could be.
    Jesse smiled at the mental image, watching the water. He propped a shoulder against a post and scanned the aging dock, listening to the water lapping the pilings and the birds fighting over scraps from a nearby fishing boat, inhaling the smell of salt and seawater and