She Loves Me (Harmony Pointe #3) - Melissa Foster Page 0,129

angel who had been dropped in my path. She was beautiful to me, maybe not so much to the other guys. She had bright red, almost orange hair, cut super short, and she had acne scars and other scars. The kind of scars most people turn away from, brought on by a rough life and mean hands. Not mine, though. Never mine.” Marshall looked down at his hands, tears glistening in his eyes. “From the moment she looked at me, I felt sparks, man. I’m talking where-have-you-been-all-my-life sparks. I’ll never forget the way she looked me up and down, like she’d seen far better men, and I’m sure she had, but it just made me want to be better than them. The first thing she ever said to me was, ‘If you were a bird and could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?’ My buddies walked away at that point. But I couldn’t have walked away if I’d wanted to. I had only one answer. I said, ‘I’d follow you,’ and she said, ‘Cool. Let’s go.’” Marshall wiped a tear from his cheek. “She was reckless and crazy and so fucking smart I could barely keep up with her thought processes.”

“She sounds incredible,” Harley said, clearing his choked-up throat. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet her.”

“We’d planned to come here. She was twenty when we met. I was twenty-four. We were wild. Too wild, and reckless, drinking, smoking, living what we thought was the good life. When things got too heavy, we partied harder.”

Harley silently prayed his brother hadn’t been the cause of her death, because that was a torment he didn’t think anyone could get past.

“After a while she realized she’d missed a few periods, and when we found out she was four months pregnant we stopped all that shit.” Marshall made a fist and covered it with his other hand. “We were going to do everything right, be responsible parents. We both got life insurance, got clean, and figured when the baby was born we’d come back here and try to start over. We thought the baby would be a way to break the ice, you know? Who can turn away an adorable baby girl? We had big plans. Annie had run away when she was fourteen. We were going to head to Colorado with the baby and find her family after we were settled back here and things were good with you guys.” He pressed his lips together, his eyes glassy again. “Life was good, you know? I mean, Annie’s moods were up and down, but we figured that was hormones. But then our little girl . . .” He held his hands out, palms up, and tears spilled from his eyes, pulling tears from Harley’s. “She was . . .” He gritted his teeth, cleared his throat. “Destiny, that was her name. She was stillborn.”

Harley opened his mouth to speak, tears wetting his cheeks, but there were no words to soothe his brother’s pain. He opened his arms and Marshall moved into them, struggling to regain control.

“She was so small, so perfect, Har,” Marshall choked out. He pushed back from Harley’s embrace and pulled his wallet from his back pocket. “Annie insisted we take a picture. I didn’t want to, but I’m glad we did. It’s all I have left.”

He pulled out the picture and handed it to Harley. His sweet wife lay in a hospital bed holding their tiny baby in her arms. The baby was swaddled in a pink-and-white blanket. She had wisps of red hair, and she looked peaceful, like she was sleeping. But the anguish in Annie’s eyes told their sorrowful story, drawing more tears for his brother’s losses. The picture was creased and faded, the corners curled and frayed. Harley could only imagine the hours Marshall had spent looking at it.

“They’re both beautiful,” Harley said. “I’m sorry, Marshall.”

“I know. It was a long time ago. Six years since we lost her.” He wiped his eyes with the base of his hand and said, “After that, we both went to shit. We moved from one town to the next, trying to start over, but we’d fallen too far. We were both devastated, but Annie couldn’t break out of it even when she was drunk, you know? She couldn’t let go enough to find herself. I tried to get her help, took her to doctors.” He wiped the remaining tears from his cheeks and said, “They gave her meds,