So who was watching over Mom? Bliss wondered, when Margaret Cawthorne lay dying and her husband, though seemingly concerned, was involved with another woman. She gave herself a quick mental shake. She had to quit thinking in those terms. Her mother, rest her soul, was gone. Yes, her father had been unfaithful, less than true, and a liar, but that was all in the past. Now he was marrying a woman whom Bliss couldn’t find it in her heart to hate. As she’d told Tiffany, she couldn’t dwell on the sins of years gone by but had to focus ahead, on the future. With her father.

And with Mason.

She pushed that wayward thought aside. Mason and she were having an affair—that much was true. And she knew that she loved him, but never had he said he loved her; never had she felt that he cared for her as she did for him.

Once again, she’d let him play her for a fool. But not for long.

As soon as John and Brynnie were married, she was moving back to Seattle.

What was the old saying, something like it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

Bliss wasn’t convinced.

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

“This time, Mason, you’ve really flipped!” Patty Lafferty hoisted one of her bags into the back of his truck. Overhead, a jet taking off from the airport roared upward into the cloudy heavens. “Do you really think I was somehow involved with Uncle—if that’s what you’d call him—Isaac’s disappearance?”

“You took off around the same time.”

“Give me a break.” Eyes as gold as his own sparked angrily. “So what?” She glared at her brother as they stood toe-to-toe in the airport parking lot. “You don’t believe me.”

“You’ve lied before.”

“Not about something like this! Oh, Mason, come on!”

He frowned at her and wished he could believe her, but she’d been in more scrapes than he cared to count.

“Swear to God!” She licked two fingers and held them up beside her head as proof of her integrity and innocence. “Scout’s honor.”

He snorted.

“Oh, for the love of God, Mason, think about it. Why would I help Isaac disappear?”

“You tell me.”

Another jet screamed down the runway.

“I can’t!” She threw her hands up in the air. The wind caught the long red-blond strands of her hair, tossing them in front of her face. “Why won’t you trust me?”

“Past history.”

“I just went to Mexico for a while.” She climbed into the cab of the truck and played with the frayed hole in the knee of a disreputable pair of jeans.

“Maybe you’d like to tell me why?”

“Maybe not. It’s none of your business.” Her jaw was set and she slid a pair of sunglasses onto the bridge of her nose.