Page 34 of One Wild Texas Night
After three in the afternoon, she was ready for a break and went to Jake’s library. Wearing new jeans, new sneakers and a new blue T-shirt her own size, she was thankful to have some new clothes. Idly, she roamed around the room, looking at a large collection of books of all genres.
She glanced down on a lower shelf and saw a small scrapbook. She pulled it off the shelf and saw it was Jake’s baby book. Smiling, she sat on the floor to look at it. When she finished, she replaced it and looked at the other books.
On the bottom shelf, she noticed what looked like another scrapbook pushed back where it was almost hidden by books. She pulled it out to look at pictures of Jake when he was in high school. As she closed it to put it back where she found it, a couple of pictures fell out.
She picked them up and looked at a picture of a family—a tall, slender, balding man, a woman who had short, straight brown hair and a big smile. There were four kids, two girls and two boys. The tallest boy looked anywhere from sixteen to eighteen. The others ranged in ages from that to the youngest girl, who looked five or six. Claire wondered who they were. Probably relatives of Jake’s, she assumed. More Reeds who didn’t live in this area.
She put the picture back and started to move on to the next thing, but she stopped. Something had looked vaguely familiar about the woman. She picked up the picture again to stare at it intently while her heart beat faster. She placed her finger over the woman’s hair to just look at her face only.
Claire suddenly felt frozen, as if she was in ice water.
Ten
She stared at the picture, and the chill she felt deepened, making her shake. And then her icy feelings began to change, her temperature climbing as shock changed to fury.
She was certain she was looking at a picture of her sister. Her hair was different, and she was heavier and older, but it had to be Regina. Regina and Jake’s brother, Sam, and their family.
As she held the picture and stood, Claire shook with anger. The scrapbook fell from her lap, hitting the floor with a clatter, but she didn’t even notice.
She stared at the picture in her hand again. It couldn’t have been more than a year or two old for Regina to have a son taller than she was and looking at least sixteen or older. Jake had contact with Regina and his brother. He had a picture of them and their family, so he had to have been in contact. And not that long ago.
She thought of the intimacy she had shared with Jake, sharing her feelings, her body, her hopes, her fears, even her heart. And all the time he had known where his brother and her sister were. He had known about their family. He had to have known and had to have been in touch with them to get this picture.
Regina and Sam had four kids and Jake had known this—how long?
Had he known about them since they left Texas?
In her memory, Claire always thought of Regina just as she had been the night she left. The woman in the picture bore little resemblance to the sister Claire remembered, but everyone changed with time.
Regina had dyed her blond hair brown, or maybe it had just turned brown, because there were a lot of gray streaks now. Her naturally curly hair had been straightened and cut very short—a style she’d never worn before she left home. That was the biggest change, plus the glasses, but those could easily be fake. Or by this time, they might be real. It was difficult to recognize her but not impossible, and Claire hurt again. She had loved Regina, always missed her and thought about her and hoped she was happy.
Claire looked at the picture again. “Regina,” she said, running her finger over her sister’s picture.
Sam had his arm across her shoulders. He had changed as much as Regina. The hair loss was why she just glanced at him. Sam had had thick brown hair and wore it long. Now it was thinning, leaving a bald spot on the top of his head. His hair was short, with streaks of gray. How old was the picture? It couldn’t be very old.
“I’ve missed you so,” she whispered, looking again at Regina’s picture. For Regina and Sam to stay away all these years, they must have felt terribly threatened by her brothers and her dad. At the time they disappeared, they probably were right about the reaction of the men in the Blake family. She didn’t want to think about what they might have done to Sam. But she knew they would have just barged in and brought Regina home.
And Jake knew where they were, had contact with them and hadn’t said one word to her. Anger shook her and was as strong as the hurt she felt that he would do such a thing. He hadn’t trusted her at all.
Clenching her fists, Claire trembled with rage, feeling betrayed. She had made clear to Jake how much Regina had meant to her. And he had just listened and never said a word, keeping quiet when she talked about how much she had loved her sister, how much she longed to know Regina was happy and well.
How could he have been so deceitful? How could he have held back and not shared that he knew Regina had a family?
At that moment she was so angry that she was glad he wasn’t present so that she had time to pull herself together and think before she told him how she felt. It was probably something like this—some huge deceitful thing—that snowballed into the old feud they were all locked into.
She wanted to get away from Jake, away from his cabin. She couldn’t go home to her ranch, because there was still no place to stay on it. She found the website for the hotel in Persimmon and booked a room.
She looked at the picture again. At the four children. Then she realized she was an aunt. Aunt Claire. She turned the picture and saw Regina’s neat cursive writing: Sam Jr., Claire Lynn, Becky and Charles. Their grandfather’s middle name.
“Claire Lynn,” she read aloud, looking at a picture of a teenage girl with curly brown hair. “Claire Lynn,” Claire repeated, certain Regina had named their first girl for her. “Aunt Claire,” she said aloud, still stunned to discover the picture.
How could Jake have kept this from her? The question tore at her repeatedly as she thought about how she had poured out her heart to him about her pain and overwhelming sense of loss when Regina and Sam eloped.
She shook with anger and pain. She yanked up her phone again to make arrangements to be picked up and driven to Persimmon, where she already had a suite. She didn’t want to spend one more minute with Jake than she had to.
She heard boots in the hall and looked up to see Jake standing in the doorway.
Eleven
