Her Hawaiian Homecoming (Mills & Boon Superromance) by Cara Lockwood Read Free Book Online Page B

years I’ve been here. Maybe if you’d come, even once, you’d see the land is worth keeping. But you didn’t bother!”
    His words found their mark, better even than he thought they would. Allie suddenly looked as if she might slap him straight across the face.
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she ground out, eyes blazing, hands balled into fists at her sides.
    “I know you didn’t come to her funeral. What kind of granddaughter does that?”
    Allie looked stricken, as if he’d slapped her right across the face. The pain was evident, and Dallas was surprised to see it. He hadn’t thought Allie cared, one way or another. Now, seeing her face, he realized he was wrong. But it was too late to take back what he’d said. The words hung between them like a barbed-wire fence.
    Allie said nothing, just turned her back on him and stalked away. He almost called out to her, but something in the way she rigidly moved away from him stopped him cold.

CHAPTER THREE
    A LLIE F URIOUSLY SWIPED at the tears on her face. She wasn’t the one who’d abandoned her grandmother. When had Grandma Misu visited, even once, in the twenty years Allie and her mother had struggled on the mainland, moving from one job to the next? What had her grandmother ever done for her besides the annual birthday and Christmas cards she got every year, sometimes weeks late because they were sent to an old address?
    Sure, she felt bad about missing the funeral. She should’ve gone, should’ve somehow managed the heroic strength to put aside her heartbreak over Jason and just shown up, but, honestly, she’d never asked her grandmother for this land. She had never asked her grandmother for anything. How could she? She lived an ocean away in a different time zone. She knew her grandmother loved her, knew that she hadn’t been swimming in cash, but still. Part of Allie felt as if it was just one more person who wasn’t there when she needed them most.
    Long ago, before Allie’s father died, Allie had been the apple of Misu’s eye. That was what she remembered—a doting grandmother who sewed her clothes and played endless rounds of doll tea parties on her breezy veranda. But the car crash had changed all that.
    Allie still remembered the screech of tires, the sudden crack of metal and glass like a clap of thunder ripping apart the sky. The car accident had taken her father’s life and altered hers forever. One of the therapists she’d seen once had called it survivor’s guilt. But Allie thought they should just speak plainly: the accident had been her fault. She knew the truth. Her mother knew it. Grandma Misu knew it. If Allie hadn’t been in the backseat of the car that day, her father would still be alive. She’d been the reason he’d swerved into the other lane. Allie wouldn’t have spent a childhood moving from town to town, her mother chasing whatever low-paying job she could find.
    After the accident, everything had changed. Grandma Misu changed. Her only son, dead. She wouldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t even hug Allie goodbye that morning she and her mother left.
    Allie blinked fast, pushing away the memory. Dallas had it all wrong. Allie hadn’t abandoned her grandmother; her grandmother had left her first. Not that she blamed her. Allie had paid the price for the car accident: she’d grown up largely alone.
    It was why she’d fallen so hard for Jason. He had a huge family, and they all lived near him in Chicago. When she’d met them, a big Irish clan that got together every Fourth of July and nearly every other holiday, she felt like at last, she was part of a family. A real family. If she was honest with herself, she missed Jason’s sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles even more than she missed him.
    She sat on one of the bamboo chairs on her grandmother’s porch, staring off toward the rooftop of Kaimana’s house, just visible above the coffee trees in the distance. She’d have to go talk to the woman