Free Broken Angels by Anne Hope Page A

the glass, winking stars salted the black cloak of night.
    Rebecca approached the bed, where the girl lay in a tangle of sheets, her hair draped over her forehead like fallen straw. She looked serene, almost angelic.
    Peace was infectious, hypnotic. It made you want to believe it would last forever. But it couldn’t. Reality wouldn’t allow it. Even now it hovered in the air, as pervasive as it was invisible, waiting to awaken with the sun.
    In her arms the girl clutched something white. At first Rebecca thought it was a blanket. Upon closer inspection, however, she realized it was a sweater. She recognized it because she’d given it to Lindsay for her twenty-eighth birthday, a short six years ago. She’d picked it for its warmth and softness. No wonder Kristen favored it. It didn’t hurt that the garment probably still carried the scent of her mom’s perfume.
    Rebecca reached out, assailed by the sudden urge to brush Kristen’s hair from her face, to stroke her dimpled cheek. Instead, she placed the stuffed animal at her side.
    “Sweet dreams,” she whispered.
    Then, with a last lingering glance at the girl’s dozing face, she left the softly lit room and slipped into the waiting embrace of night, where regrets dimmed and her failures didn’t clang quite so loudly.

    Something boomed. A shrill cacophony that slithered into her consciousness and yanked her from a dreamless sleep. Rebecca moaned and covered her head with a pillow, but nothing short of deafness could block out the racket pummeling her brain like a jackhammer. What was all the commotion?
    She crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the door, half expecting to find the house on fire. Maybe Zach had decided to cook again. He was adept at many things, but cooking wasn’t one of them. Once, on their anniversary, he’d decided to bring her hash browns and scrambled eggs in bed. She had a sneaking suspicion that he’d unwittingly broken the yolks and tried to cover his blunder by insisting he’d intended to scramble them all along. Whatever the case, he’d forgotten to turn off the burner, while failing to remove the oily pan from the stove. When they’d come down quite some time later—she blushed recalling the heated love they’d made on that rain-swept morning so many years ago—the pungent smell of hot oil had burned their nostrils.
    Instantly, the neglected pan had ignited in a burst of orange flames. Zach, always ready to take charge of a situation, had rushed in and attempted to extinguish the blaze with a glass of water. Big mistake. He’d nearly incinerated his eyebrows.
    It hadn’t been funny at the time, but now the memory made Rebecca’s lips quirk with amusement. She’d never loved him more than she had at that moment, when complete ineptness had afflicted him and left him cursing.
    She grabbed the baby-blue robe she’d left on the dresser by the door and ventured outside. No inferno raged. No flames crackled and roared with deadly intent, yet the house still simmered with a furious undercurrent of energy. Noah and Kristen whizzed past her, howling like injured wolves. For a second she wondered if they were in pain, then realized they were only playing.
    From his room, Will hollered.
    Blinking to chase the cobwebs of sleep from her eyes, she hurried to see what all the fuss was about. The door to Will’s bedroom was open, so she stole a glimpse inside. The sight she beheld made a smile spread through her. Zach was on the floor, wrestling with Will. He clutched a diaper in one hand while struggling to pin the baby down with the other. Will kicked, screamed and writhed. Tiny feet and fists flailed.
    “Sit still, you little rug rat,” he muttered between oaths.
    Again, Rebecca had a vision of him tossing a glass of water onto a flaming pan. There were many kinds of fire, and this was definitely one of them.
    She edged into the room. “Need some help?” she offered.
    He started at the sound of her voice. His gaze rose to her