Pinky Promises (The Promises #1)

by Ciara Shayee

  “Morning, Laker,” she added, smiling cautiously at him. All she could picture was his worried face and the feel of him surrounding her, crowding out the nightmare that had been so terrifying and inescapable without his help.

  Laker’s warm grin melted Indie’s exhausted body. “Buongiorno, Pie.”

  Looping her arm through Indie’s, Grace led her across the kitchen to the table where the pair perched on chairs beside each other. Laker was opposite them with Reagan beside him and Peter on the girls’ left at the head of the table. The men nursed coffees, the smell of which sent a pang of nausea through Indie’s stomach.

  Ryan. Of course, she knew by then that he was in protective custody for his own safety, but she couldn’t help thinking if it weren’t for us he’d be living a normal life.

  Riley had explained how Ryan was being taken care of by his agents. It was one of the first questions Indie and Grace had asked.

  It seemed that all she could do was wallow in guilt. Guilt for keeping Grace and Marley on the ranch. Guilt for the upheaval Ryan had to deal with. Guilt because she knew that by this time on Friday, Reagan would likely know the worst of what happened in Montana—how the scars she found him glancing at when he thought she wasn’t looking had made themselves at home on her body.

  How he’d have heard about Marley’s conception, and that of the baby she currently carried, in detail.

  “You know, when I last saw you, your dads were still mastering the braids so you could change out the pigtails every now and then.”

  Reagan and Peter snorted.

  “Still can’t do it, either,” Reagan admitted, smiling over the rim of his Number One Dad mug. Peter gruffly informed them that Heidi and Pippa finally caved and taught him about a year ago.

  Indie’s eyes flitted between her dad, Peter, and Laker; the brother Archie chose for himself. Listening to their easy camaraderie was strange.

  When she and Grace were taken, Laker was fifteen. Not quite a boy but not yet a man. It struck her then that it wasn’t just her brother who’d changed considerably in the past twelve years.

  Tall, tanned from working in the sun, and broad-shouldered, Laker had come a long way from the lanky, easily-angered boy of her memories. A neatly trimmed beard framed a cheeky, charming, lopsided grin. She also noticed that he no longer wore his hair flat to his head—it was artfully mussed, sticking up in all directions. And then there were his eyes…a beautiful, soft mint with almost chocolatey flecks around his pupils. Like mint chocolate chip ice cream; her childhood favourite.

  Indie told herself it was purely for observational reasons she was studying him so intently.

  After snapping photos on her dad’s camera of Laker feeding Marley bites of his pancakes, despite her having one of her own on a plate in front of her, Indie excused herself and settled on the window seat in the living room. Nobody followed, understanding how overwhelmed she was.

  “Is she okay?” Laker anxiously gazed at the door he’d just watched her walk through.

  “Too much to take in at once, that’s all. I think she was feeling a little sick today, too,” Grace reassured him gently. Nobody needed her to elaborate on the ‘feeling sick’ subject.

  The baby.

  It was the subject everybody was dancing around. Indie never brought it up, so nobody ever mentioned it.

  Laker, torn between knowing Indie needed space and wanting to comfort her, fought a grimace as he shifted in his seat, trailing the tip of his right pinky finger around the top of his coffee mug instead.

  ~ oOo ~

  “I’m nervous, Dad.”

  Peter tightened his grip on Grace. He already knew she was nervous; he could feel her trembling against his side. It was five past twelve. Any minute now, Roy and Mary would arrive with Pippa and Heidi.

  It would be the first time Indie and Grace had seen the now-sixteen-year-olds since they were toddlers.

  Their memories were faded from lack of use, but Indie and Grace still pictured them with sandy brown bobs and cherubic smiles in little-girl faces.

  For Grace in particular, this was terrifying. These two girls were her baby sisters. Butterflies flapped in her stomach as she considered the possibility that they might not care she was back. After all, they probably had very few memories of her, if any at all. Why should she expect them to miss somebody they didn’t remember?

  The feel of fingers slotting themselves between hers made Grace turn her head slightly to one side. Indie offered her a tiny half-smile. “It’ll be okay, don’t worry. You’re doing great.”

  Even though they were standing just a foot away on either side of her, neither Reagan nor Peter heard Indie’s words. But Grace did.

  She smiled back gratefully, albeit shakily, and steeled herself as the muffled sound of car doors closing filtered in through the living room window. Laker excused himself. At the same time, Indie slid onto the sofa farthest from the door with Marley on her lap, Reagan adjusting his stance so he could see his daughter, Peter, and Grace without having to turn. With Archie anxiously awaiting a phone call to say the reunion had gone well, Reagan’s brother Theodore waiting for the ‘okay’ to at least speak to the girls over the phone, and the upcoming four days of statements weighing heavily on his mind, Reagan was more than feeling his fifty-five years.

  While washing earlier in the morning, he’d found two, new grey hairs by his left temple. In the years since his wife’s death, Reagan had struggled with the man he’d become, had struggled to come to terms that not only was the only woman he’d ever loved gone, he was left with their two heartbroken children. It took a long time for him to be comfortable within himself again, even before the setback of losing Indie.

  Now, he found himself looking into the mirror at an unfamiliar man once again.

  For twelve years, he’d been ‘the man whose daughter was kidnapped.’

  Who was he now?

  chapter eighteen

  As expected, the reunion between the two older girls and the two youngest was a tearful, emotional affair.

  As soon as the identical twins stepped through the door, their faces were drenched in tears. Grace’s took a few moments longer to appear as she tried to reconcile the toddlers she’d left with the young women they’d become, but once the floodgates had opened, she couldn’t close them.

  Indie released a single, solitary tear, watching with her legs tucked against her chest, her heart thumping wildly. Reagan and Peter were overwhelmed at the sight of the young twins embracing Grace, who, for so long, had been seen as a twin to Indie.

  For Mary and Roy, the couple who’d all but mothered Pippa and Heidi since Grace’s disappearance, the sight of their three granddaughters huddled together was everything they’d wished for. On the other hand, Indie’s defensive position and the child in her lap told them what they’d hoped wouldn’t be true—sadly, the girls hadn’t had a happy life away from home.

  Large, stormy, sea-blue eyes moved around the room to take in the reuniting family. Meanwhile, Indie felt as though her heart was breaking all over again. Heidi and Pippa had grown up to look every bit their mother’s clones, from the colour and style of their hair to their light brown eyes. Despite them having known their mother for only a year before her death, Indie could clearly see the startling resemblances in their personalities. Karen had always had a way of smiling that made you want to know what put it there. Heidi had that same expression down to a fine art. As she whispered to Grace that she’d missed her, Pippa’s voice sent a shudder down Indie’s spine—it was Karen’s bell-like tones perfectly duplicated.

  It was those realisations that were tearing Indie to pieces, because she knew that while being kidnapped wasn’t anybody’s fault but Garrett Smith’s, she was heaping the full burden of not escaping sooner on her own, too-slender shoulders. Rightly or wrongly, Indie felt responsible for her minutes-younger pseudo-sister, and it was with that thought that she shifted Marley to her hip, making the most of everybody’s preoccupation to slip away.
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  In the garden, Laker tugged at his hair with both hands, his broad torso bent over his knees as he tapped his foot against the patio. Through the open kitchen window, he heard the squeals of the girls, the sobs, and the “I love you’s”. Finally finding it too difficult to listen to their declarations, he rose quickly to his feet and stepped toward the gate.

  “You’re leaving?” A small voice murmured just as his hand made contact with the handle.

  Cocking his head around the corner, he spotted Indie looking guarded and Marley smiling widely at him from her side. Soft green eyes took in the baggy, grey, jersey jogging bottoms, fluffy pink socks and a t-shirt that obviously belonged to Reagan or Archie. The wide-striped orange and white tee drowned her, hanging almost to her knees. She looked adorable, he realised with a jolt of affection.

  “I, ah, figured you’d want to…” Laker waved a hand awkwardly towards the house. “You know…it’s been a long time.”

  Indie let out a low hum, frowning at the garden. He fleetingly wondered if it looked different to her. Little about either house, Reagan’s or Peter’s, had changed in the years she’d been absent, but the garden had been altered the most. The pond was gone, making way for Carl-Roman’s sandbox, and the garden furniture Laker made had replaced the old metal bench.

  “How’re you feeling? Must be weird, huh? It was strange for me, and I was here just before Christmas.”

  As soon as the words left his mouth, Laker regretted them; as if she needed reminding that it had been years since she was last there.

  Despite his worry, Indie simply dropped her head in a nod, sliding down the wall to sit on the patio with her knees drawn up, Marley sitting across her legs chest-to-chest with her mother.

  “I didn’t expect everything to be so different, but the same.”

  The breeze swept her words towards Laker, who had frozen with his hand on the gate. The same gate he, Reagan, and Archie had worked on together in December when the last one fell and broke in a particularly violent storm. He was torn between wanting to join Indie, but not wanting to frighten her by getting too close. Even though she’d let him hold her that morning, he didn’t want to test her boundaries without a good reason. It wasn’t always easy to be sure how close was too close.

  “It’s like…we were in a place that changed with the seasons, but apart from that, it just…stayed the same. Here, not so much.”

  The look of childlike bemusement on her face as she tilted her head at him took Laker by surprise. The rush of nostalgia was strong, blurred memories from their past shoving unapologetically to the forefront of his mind.

  “It’s like someone hit pause on us and fast forwarded the rest of the world. Do you know what I mean?”

  Laker took note of two things. The first was the lilting drawl to Indie’s words. It was more noticeable when she spoke in full sentences.

  The second was the strong urge he felt to scoop this poor, heartbreakingly sad girl into his arms so he could squeeze all the hurt from her body until the goofy smiles he remembered reappeared. It was virtually irrepressible.

  “I can’t even imagine what it’s like,” he eventually forced himself to utter, pushing out a breath to relax his tense muscles.

  “You can—” Indie paused, gulping hard enough that Laker could see the movement of her throat from six feet away. “You can sit. If you want.”

  After a hesitant pause to give her time to change her mind, Laker crossed the patio and perched on the edge of the deck chair she’d indicated with a dip of her head. He eyed her carefully for signs of fear or stress, but she seemed calm enough, still a meter or so between their feet. Though Laker expected her to talk some more, she didn’t, so they lapsed into a semi-comfortable silence broken only by the occasional squawk of a seagull overhead or a car zooming down the bypass on the other side of the lake at the back of the house.

  Laker couldn’t suppress a chuckle, when, a few minutes later, Indie’s body shook with a hearty yawn. “Tired?”

  She hummed, eyeing him with her cheek resting on top of Marley’s head.

  “I would’ve thought you’d have slept like a baby. You looked exhausted last night.”

  Her eyes switched from wary sea-blue to guarded dark turquoise within an instant. She couldn’t make herself look in his direction. “Sorry. About last night.”

  “Hey, you’ve got nothin’ to apologise for, Pie.”

  At that, Indie’s eyes darted towards him. They shared a careful smile. ‘Pie’ had always been his nickname for her when they were younger because she’d always been more than a little obsessed with banoffee pie. Laker had begun using the nickname when she was four, and never let it go.

  Saying it then, seeing the way the solemn girl’s face lit up at just the mention of it, made Laker’s stomach warm with a sense of pride. If being the friend to her he always had been helped make things better, he was more than happy to be that again.

  When Reagan found them five minutes later, the stormy quality to her eyes and the agitated tapping of her foot were the only things hinting at her nerves.

  “Are you okay, baby girl?”

  Indie shuffled her body, facing her dad’s confused, half-smiling face. “I’m…I’m good, Dad. I thought Grace, and the girls, would want some space.”

  “Hey, we want to see you, too.” Pippa appeared behind Reagan with a careful smile on her face, and Heidi soon joined them. As the girls sat themselves down beside each other within arms’ reach of Indie, Laker watched attentively for signs she was distressed. He didn’t see any, but when she shot him a funny glance as he tried to leave he pretended he was only going to get a drink; he returned quickly, settling himself back on the recliner, a silent sentry guard.

  ~ oOo ~

  The day passed in a slow whirlwind of learning new faces, new voices, and sharing old memories.

  The two younger girls spent most of the day with tears streaming down their faces. For them, it was an enormous day. The few memories they’d had of Indie and Grace had long vanished, replaced by stories they’d been told over the years by people who’d known them better. Seeing the girls in the flesh was a completely different experience.

  Mary and Roy were emotional, too, unable to fully comprehend the sight of their granddaughter and her best friend back in their homes. Roy, a retired policeman, struggled to put his flesh and blood in place of victims he’d seen throughout his forty-year-long career.

  As afternoon morphed into early evening, Peter showed his mother and father-in-law over to his house, setting them up in his room while his youngest daughters fell into theirs, shell-shocked but overwhelmingly happy. Then, he returned to Reagan’s house where he planned to sleep on the sofa not already occupied by Laker.

  Late that night, the moon shone, effervescent and glorious, in the midnight sky. Indie stood silently at Reagan’s bedroom window, watching wispy grey clouds drift across the inky sky. Grace and Marley slept soundly behind her, the spot she’d vacated cold and empty.

  It seemed like only yesterday she’d been looking up at the same moon from an entirely different continent, living a completely different life.

  ~ oOo ~

  Tuesday morning dawned unseasonably bitter. Indie, having not slept a wink the night before, was in the kitchen over an hour before anybody else in either house stirred. Laker was the first to join her.

  Scrubbing the sleep from his eyes with a balled-up fist, he hung his calves over the end of the sofa and stretched his back until it popped quietly. His groan didn’t wake Peter, who had finally worried himself into a deep slumber at around three o’clock. The ivory sofa creaked slightly beneath Laker’s weight as he shifted himself sideways, tossing long legs encased in a pair of dark grey, checked pyjama bottoms off the seat. Stretching out his arms to pull his muscles until they protested, Peter’s huff of breath from across the room made him jump.

  “Cazzo!” he cursed, rubbing his beard with one hand while fruitlessly trying to tame his sleep-mussed hair with the other. It
was more habit than anything, as his hair had never sat quite right unless stuck down with copious amounts of gel. Permanent bed-head, his uncle had once called it. He’d taken to hiding his hair beneath a dark grey cap he’d acquired when he was ten, and never went anywhere without it; it sat on the coffee table nearby.

  Thinking about his uncle reminded Laker that he should probably contact them. He knew they were away visiting his aunt’s relatives in Australia, but they’d want to know what was going on.

  A few moments later, his stomach released a growled protest at not being fed, so Laker pushed his body up and off the sofa before padding through to the kitchen. He was stunned to find he wasn’t the first person up, even though it wasn’t quite six a.m.

  The large breakfast bar was covered in bowls and plates; some full, others awaiting their contents. The smell of freshly-squeezed orange juice hitchhiked on the breeze sneaking in through the slightly opened French doors—along with the aroma of freshly baked bread, which he spotted Indie pulling from the oven. His eyes flew away from the food when he heard a sharp gasp.

  Indie gazed at Laker, wide-eyed and seemingly shocked. He offered her a sheepish smile. “Sorry, I didn’t realise anyone else was up. You must have been making a load of noise, and I slept through it all.”

  Having spent a few weeks around Indie by now, Laker quickly realised his error. She wouldn’t have made any noise. She very rarely did.

  When it became obvious he wasn’t going to get much out of Indie just yet, Laker walked the long way around the kitchen to the sink where he grabbed a glass from the draining board, pouring himself a glass of cold water to soothe his gravelly throat. From the corner of his eye, he watched Indie slowly resume her task. She set the steaming bread on the counter, closed the oven, and adjusted the dial.

  For the next few minutes, Laker simply observed, ever-hopeful she’d open up to him again. Unbeknownst to Laker, this behaviour, this mountain of food she was preparing, was a defence mechanism. It was what she knew, what she’d become used to. Cooking meals for the ranch had been her task for nine years or so; she and Grace had taken over sole responsibility for the kitchen when they were eleven. Allowing her old habits to manifest once again was her way of keeping her mind occupied, giving it menial tasks to deal with rather than the terrifying trial she’d face later that day