When We Met (Fool's Gold #13)(32)

He smiled at Taryn and held up the bag. “Hungry?” he asked.

“Starving.”

She pointed through the doorway. He saw the table in the dining room beyond had been set. There were beers in place, along with plates. Music played in the background.

They sat down and started passing containers of food back and forth. Taryn reached for an egg roll.

“You survived your first meeting,” she said with a grin. “That has to make you happy.”

“It was tough,” he admitted. “I’m glad you were there. The hair braiding was brilliant.”

“It can become a tradition.”

He wasn’t sure he was ready for that. “Little girls aren’t my area of expertise.”

She looked at him. “You would have preferred boys?”

A simple question to which he should have said yes. Because he’d assumed his volunteer position would be with boys. Only now, after the fact, he wondered.

She set down her fork. “Angel?”

Her voice was soft, questioning. He had a feeling that if he brushed off the question, she would go with it.

“I had a son,” he said slowly, leaning back in his chair. “Marcus.”

She continued to study him but didn’t speak. As if letting him find his way.

“I went into the army right after high school. My dad died a few weeks before graduation. The coal mines did him in and he made me promise I would get out. I didn’t want to leave the town where I’d grown up, but I knew he was right. If I stayed, I would be trapped. So I left.”

“That must have been hard.”

“It was. I got through boot camp and ended up in Louisiana of all places.”

Where he’d met a girl, Taryn thought, sensing where the story was going. She briefly wondered what Angel had been like when he was younger—before he’d met the man who’d tried to slit his throat. Maybe even before he’d begun the kind of work that had put him in that position in the first place.

“What was her name?” she asked.

“Marie. She was beautiful. Tiny and Cajun, with a stubborn streak.” He flashed a smile. “She terrified me as much as she intrigued me. Luckily the love-at-first-sight thing happened to both of us. We were married within a couple of months.”

Love at first sight? Taryn wasn’t a big believer. She’d never seen it in action. She knew that lust could blossom from almost nothing—if the women who showed up in the boys’ hotel rooms were anything to go by. But that was different. That was about power by association. The bragging rights.

Love was different. There were—

She reached for her beer, then leaned back in her seat as the pieces all came together. Angel had loved his wife and now he wasn’t married. He’d said he’d had a child, but it hadn’t been real until now.

“Then you and Marie had Marcus.”

He nodded.

She watched the emotions chase across his face and wondered what he was thinking. Love was clear, as was pain and a sense of loss.

She waited, knowing he would answer the most important question when he was ready.

“They died,” he said at last. “Marcus was fourteen and Marie was driving him to a baseball game. There was a storm. From what the police could figure out, it was a single-car rollover. The coroner said they went quickly.”

Because Angel would have asked. He knew about suffering and wanted to make sure those he cared about didn’t. She realized there weren’t any words and instead reached across the table and lightly touched his hand.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted. “I buried them, sold the house, put everything in storage and walked away.”

“Did that help?” she asked.

“No.” He squeezed her fingers once, then pulled his hand out of reach. “I spent a few months drinking. Quit my job and gave serious thought to ending it all.” He shrugged. “But I knew how much Marie would hate that. So I went back to work. But my heart wasn’t in it. Then one day, Justice showed up and talked to me about coming here. Once I visited the town, I knew it was the right decision. Fool’s Gold reminds me of where I grew up. I can get involved.”

And stay disconnected at the same time, she thought.

The idea of tragedy in Angel’s past didn’t surprise her. She’d been pretty sure he couldn’t do what he had done and not be exposed to loss. But the type of loss was unexpected. A wife and a son. A woman he had loved for years. What must it be like to be able to give your heart so completely? She’d never done it. No one close to her had done it successfully. The boys had tried. Well, not Jack, but Sam had, and Kenny... Okay, Kenny’s situation was unique. But Sam had been in love when he’d gotten married. And since then, he’d made more than one attempt to find genuine love.

“Then the girls are a good choice,” she told him. “Similar and yet different. It might have been difficult to work with teenage boys.”

He nodded slowly. “If they reminded me of Marcus. You’re probably right.”

“And now you know how to French-braid hair.”

He relaxed in his seat and smiled at her. “A necessary skill for a Grove Keeper. They should put that in the handbook.”

She grinned. “The handbook is pink. I’m thinking they assumed you already knew.”