Tainted Kiss (Tainted Knights 1)

Kin wasn’t going with us on tour. It had surprised me when they had announced that she was staying behind. She’d written two of the songs on the album that we had made, and I knew Jace was dreading the tour without her. Regardless, Kin was staying behind to help her best friend, Lucy Thornton, plan her wedding. She was the maid of honor, or whatever the hell they called them.

Jace cleared his throat. “But, yeah, bring her.”

I nodded. “I’ll run it by her, so we might see you there.” I unlocked my car and opened the door. “Tell Kin I said hey. Be safe.”

“Yeah, you, too.”

EIGHT

Santana

As much as I loved doing photo shoots with my celebrity clients, I had a bigger passion for family sessions. It was seeing the love for each other each family member had sparkling out of their eyes, and the genuine smiles on their faces as the parents looked at their children, and vice versa.

Today, I had already done two, and I was nearly done with my last one.

This one was harder for me than the other two. We were at the beach, the wife was heavily pregnant with twins, and had a toddler running around, throwing sand everywhere. Other than the giggling little girl in pigtails, however, no one was happy about this shoot. The husband was in the Army and was being deployed to Iraq for eighteen months in two weeks.

Seeing the utter heartbreak on the wife’s face as she tried to smile up at her husband was slowly killing me inside. The tears the husband couldn’t hide as he touched her stomach so lovingly was shattering a few of the walls I had kept locked up tight with the memories of my father leaving for his last deployment.

The sun was at the perfect angle behind them, and with the little girl still tossing sand in the air and running around giggling like she didn’t have a care in the world, I started snapping away. The pictures were going to be beautiful, perhaps some of my best work. But a picture wouldn’t be able to take the place of this woman’s husband as she had to be both mother and father to her children while he was away. Those pictures wouldn’t hold her at night, or rock their newborns to sleep.

It was only when the tot got bored with throwing sand and decided she wanted to try eating it instead that we called it quits on the shoot.

I had plenty of amazing shots to edit and send to them.

I gave them both a hug before they picked up their little girl and headed for their car. I watched them go. He was dressed in his Army uniform, carrying the toddler on his shoulders, holding his wife’s hand as they slowly walked along the beach.

Without thinking about it, I lifted my camera and took a few more shots. I would include them in their package for no extra cost, but I wanted one for myself, as well. I was going to include it in the showing I was doing at a small gallery in Santa Monica. I wouldn’t put it up for sale, but it was just too beautifully heartbreaking not to share.

Once they were out of sight, I started picking up my equipment and finally looked at my phone. I’d texted Kale almost half an hour ago, and he had said he was on his way. There was a single message from him saying he’d gotten held up by an accident, but he would be there soon.

Smiling at the little heart he had put at the end of the message, I grabbed my things then headed for the parking area.

The sun felt good on my skin, and I was glad I had worn shorts and not my usual jeans. Piling my hair on top of my head in a messy knot, I put my sunglasses on and let the sun soak into every pore. I hoped the extra vitamin D would make some of the ache in my soul ease, but with each step I took, my heart cracked open a little more.

Before I could reach the parking area, I had to stop.

Dropping my gear on the ground, I sat down on the sand beside it and pulled my knees to my chest. I couldn’t stop the tears as they filled my eyes.

I pressed my forehead to my knees as memories flooded back and tried to drown me in the pain of loss.

I was a daddy’s girl. He had been my whole world. It had been just me and him against the world when he was home. When he was deployed, it had been just me against the big cruel world.

My mother had split on us when I was three, right after my dad had come home from his first tour. While he was gone, she’d hooked up with some guy from high school, and they had both abandoned their families. I hadn’t seen her since.

My dad, he hadn’t been all that heartbroken over losing my mother. The only reason they had even gotten married was because he’d been about to deploy and she had told him she was pregnant with me. He had come home a few times throughout that deployment, but I couldn’t remember.

He had been everything every little girl deserved in a daddy. He was my hero, my best friend. My earliest memory was of him coming home from work, dog-tired, but still all smiles for me as he laid on our living room floor and colored with me. We had done everything together.

When I was six, he had gone on his second deployment. He had been gone for eight months to Kuwait, and I had to move in with his half-sister for those long and lonely months. If there had been anywhere else I could have gone while he was away, even if it was a damn group home for orphans, I would have jumped at it.

Aunt Imogen was older than my father by twelve years. They shared the same father but had different mothers. They hadn’t grown up with each other and barely knew one another, so I couldn’t really blame my dad for not knowing what he had dropped me into when he’d gone away the first time.

My aunt didn’t like many people. I was pretty sure she didn’t like herself half the time. Therefore, when she had gotten stuck with me, she’d made it clear pretty quickly that I was there only because my father had offered to pay her.

For the first month, she had locked me in my room and only let me out to go to school. Thankfully, I had my own bathroom, but my bed had been little more than a mattress and a blanket.

There were no toys to play with, no books to read, no coloring books or crayons. Nothing. It had been lonely there, so when I got to school every morning, I would talk and talk and talk until the teacher would get upset and send me to the office for disrupting the class. That usually meant the principal calling Aunt Imogen. Finally, she got tired of getting the phone calls, and eventually stopped locking me in my room. That meant I got to watch television, but it was still lonely because my aunt was rarely home.