BooksBarbecue
Back The Jump Save as PDF
Chapters (52)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Acknowledgements
  5. BOOK ONE
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. Chapter Eight
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Chapter Fifteen
  21. Chapter Sixteen
  22. Chapter Seventeen
  23. Chapter Eighteen
  24. Chapter Nineteen
  25. Chapter Twenty
  26. Chapter Twenty-One
  27. Chapter Twenty-Two
  28. Chapter Twenty-Three
  29. Chapter Twenty-Four
  30. Chapter Twenty-Five
  31. BOOK TWO
  32. Chapter Twenty-Six
  33. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-One
  38. Chapter Thirty-Two
  39. Chapter Thirty-Three
  40. Chapter Thirty-Four
  41. Chapter Thirty-Five
  42. Chapter Thirty-Six
  43. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  44. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  45. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  46. BOOK THREE
  47. Chapter Forty
  48. Chapter Forty-One
  49. Chapter Forty-Two
  50. Chapter Forty-Three
  51. Chapter Forty-Four
  52. Epilogue

Alan picked up the child gently and ran with her from the room, Donna and Candy following. He took her to the room he had found Donna in and she saw Kassim inside with a large cut over his forehead, talking to himself in an Indian dialect.

Inside the room, Alan placed the child gently on the bed, but Donna knew as soon as she looked at her that she was dead. Her tongue was swollen, it was noticeable in the bright light, and her lips were blue. Her large brown eyes were half-open.

Donna stared at the broken body for a few moments and then she became aware of a high-pitched keening noise. For a while she wondered where it was coming from, maybe from the child, then she felt Alan’s arms around her and she realised that it was coming from inside her, and out of her mouth.

Alan stared down into the strained dirty face of Donna Brunos and felt his heart move inside his chest. All her longing and need was written in her eyes, every defeat etched into her face. Yet also, in the back of her eyes, there was an inner light, strength that hadn’t been there before. He had glimpsed it once or twice, but now it was the making of her. Donna Brunos, wife of Georgio, was gone.

Donna Brunos, Woman, had taken her place.

Holding her tight, he let her cry herself out. The child’s broken body was an outlet for everything that had ever befallen her and instinctively Alan Cox knew that.

It was this underlying softness, the capacity Donna had for caring deeply, that attracted him to her.

As he held her, he heard the destruction of the hotel all around them and felt whole once more, cleansed of every wrongdoing ever attributed to him. He likened the feeling to one the soldiers must have felt at the end of the war, when they opened up the gates of the death camps.

He was wiping out all his past misdeeds and writing a new page in his life.

A life he wanted to share with the woman in his arms.

She had become like a drug to him, and now he knew that he needed her more than he had ever needed anyone or anything in his life.

And with the destruction of Georgio Brunos’s memory, there was a chance he just might get her.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Donna was sipping a glass of lemonade, while Alan and his henchmen were sorting out the last of the Bay View Hotel. One of the men, a bull-necked heavyset individual with deep brown eyes and thick wavy hair, was speaking rapidly into the phone in Urdu.