BROKEN ANGELS (Angels and Demons Book 1) by Brenda L. Harper Read Free Book Online

saw you.
    He didn’t care. He hadn’t fallen in love with her outer beauty. It was the radiance that came from her soul and the purity of her heart that won him over.
    “I thought you might be here.”
    Stiles looked up and his heart raced for a moment. He thought for a second that he was staring into Rebecca’s face, as it was all those years ago. But then she shifted and the moonlight shone on her face.
    Gemma.
    “Hey,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “What are you doing out this late?”
    Gemma took his hand and settled onto the grass beside him. “Paul agreed to watch the kids so I could get some fresh air.”
    Gemma was Harry’s eldest child, a beautiful woman in her own right, a nurse who worked the morning shift at the hospital with a husband and two kids at home. She was more accepting of Stiles as her grandfather than Harry was at accepting Stiles as his father. Maybe it was because he had been a part of her life from the beginning, having reunited with her grandmother a mere month before her birth. Or maybe it was simply because she had inherited her grandmother’s pure heart.
    She laid her head on his shoulder. “She had a good life.”
    Stiles picked up more of the dirt covering Rebecca and watched it run through his fingers. “She deserved better than me.”
    “What could be better than an angel as a lover? Especially one who looks like you?”
    Stiles shook his head. “She deserved a man who stayed at her side consistently, not someone who came and went without notice.”
    “From what I understand, she had notice. And she also knew that you would come back into her life.”
    “I suppose. But do promises really make a difference?”
    “They did for her.”
    Stiles was quiet for a while and his thoughts were dark despite her attempts to comfort him. He felt unworthy of everything he’d been given. He felt that he didn’t deserve to be here with these people, to be the only angel left to watch over them. And he definitely didn’t feel worthy of the promise made to him after the war, that he would one day be tethered with the soul mate of his choice.
    There were too many lies…
    “I should have saved her.”
    Gemma sat up. “What do you mean?”
    “It was a heart attack. I felt it coming on. I could have stopped it. But she asked me not to.”
    Gemma was quiet for a moment, touching the mound of dirt herself, and running her hand over it as if she were petting a large dog. And then she took a deep breath as though to steady herself.
    “A couple of days before she died, Rebecca came by the house to see the children. She was moving a little slowly, deliberately, as if she was hurting. I asked if she needed something, if I could take her to the hospital and have Daddy prescribe something. You know what she said?”
    Stiles studied her face, but he didn’t ask. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
    But Gemma continued anyway.
    “She told me that she’d lived a long life. That she’d seen the world before the war, before everything changed. She’d lived through the loss of her mother and then her father. She’d known great love, contented love, and the love of a mother for her children. She said she’d experienced just about every high and low that a human being is meant to know.” Gemma stopped, a soft smile touching her lips even as a single tear fell from her eye. “Then she said that she believed there was a cycle of life that had been disrupted by the war, but that nature was slowly trying to repair that disruption. And that she was ready to be a part of that cycle again.” Gemma reached over and touched Stiles’ arm. “She wanted to die. She was ready for whatever comes next.”
    “But that’s just it,” Stiles said softly. “I no longer know what comes next.”
    “But isn’t that part of the mysteries of life? We aren’t supposed to know.”
    Stiles studied her eyes—eyes so much like his own—and wondered how a whole species could be so content with the unknown.