Her Lovely Child E-Book

Angel Rupert

• Herausgeber: Bentockiz
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

In fact, she was secretly grateful that he had granted her as much freedom as he had, whether from innate munificence or due to the distraction of his own heavy challenges. But in the powerful performance she felt affirmed in her choice and desire. She’d not cave in to the artificial demands or expectations of an early marriage that may have freed her from one set of limitations, only to mire her in another. She was not a deep thinker, but the concert worked on her deeply.

Leseprobe

Title Page

Her Lovely Child

Unjustified Changes

Angel Rupert

Her Lovely Child / 8th of series: Unjustified Changes / By Angel Rupert

Published 2023 by Bentockiz

e-book Imprint: Uniochlors

e-book Registration: Stockholm, Sweden

e-book ISBN: 9789198847079

e-book editing: Athens, Greece

Cover Images created via AI art generators

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Introduction

Through books we come into contact with everything important that has happened in the past, analyzing also current events and putting our thoughts together to predict the future. The book is a window to the world, acquiring valuable knowledge and sparking our vivid imagination. It is a means of entertainment and is generally seen as a best friend, or as a slave that carries together all valuable information for us. The book is a friend who stays together without demands, a friend you call upon at every moment and abandon when you want.

It accompanies us in the hours of boredom and loneliness, while at the same time it entertains us. In general, a book does not ask anything from us, while it waits patiently on a dusty shelf to give us its information, to get us out of dead ends and to travel us to magical worlds.

This may be the travel mission of our books. Abstract narration, weird or unconscious thoughts difficult to be understood, but always genuine and full of life experiences, these are stories of life that can’t be overlooked easily.

This may be the start of something amazing.

Chapter One

The rollercoaster ride to get here will be nothing compared to the landing, Zach thought as the wide-bodied jet taxied to the waiting arrival gate at Logan.

He’d risen at dawn on the windswept Wyoming plateau, but that was hardly new—he’d been doing that every day for the past three weeks. What had been unusual was that he’d woke in a mattress bed in Riverton, peed in a flush toilet and brushed his teeth in a running water sink. Ruth had prepared him a gargantuan breakfast of bacon and sausage and eggs and pancakes and toast and juice and coffee then driven him out to the Riverton airport west of town. (Pete had left earlier, while he was still eating that breakfast, bidding him farewell and thanks with a firm handshake and a prolonged clasp of his shoulder as he said again, “Good luck,” his eyes not shaded by those reflector sunglasses this time, looking intently at him but also seeming somehow beady and smaller inside the close confines of the house, without the sunglasses on and the broad open prairie behind.)

He had checked his duffel packed with a few clothes (washed by Ruth the night before and all neatly folded before he slid them into the duffel) and toiletries (everything else he’d left in the truck parked in the shed at sheepcamp) at the one ticket counter in the one-room terminal beside the small paved apron and the endlessly long runway disappearing into the distance on the even more endlessly long flat and open sage desert. He’d given Ruth an awkward hug and thanked her for her hospitality and help in securing his tickets then walked across the open tarmac and past the propellers whirring in a blur and boarded the surprisingly small and frail looking plane with the six other passengers for the ten seats.

The take-off (his first) had been unremarkable (he’d been told by Allison that the take-off was the scariest part) but the fun began soon after as their little plane was tossed from side to side and up and, most disconcertingly, down by the powerful and unpredictable thermals as they did a steep climb to get above the Wind River Mountains with their snow-coated peaks glistening not so far below. With this white-knuckle initiation into the realm of flight, Zach found himself confronted with a choice that was both intellectual and visceral (with that huge breakfast being tossed around and upward in his stomach)—he could be frightened or resigned. He chose, as he invariably did when confronted with what he perceived as fate-driven circumstances beyond his control, resignation. With that choice, he settled back and enjoyed the flight and the breath-taking views out his port-side window, even as his fellow passengers, all apparently frequent fliers, grimaced beneath pale visages as they struggled to hold down their own breakfasts, one hand cupped over their mouth and the other holding the paper air-sickness bag at the ready.

He’d made his way through the bustling but easily navigable Denver airport (the old Stapleton Airifeld, some years before they opened the sprawling Denver International that was either the eighth wonder of the world or a government boondoggle, depending on whom you asked) and boarded the massive jet that could’ve held a dozen of the twin-props inside its generous cabin. They’d taken off (this one even smoother than the earlier one) on time in the early afternoon under crystal clear skies. Zach was again mesmerized by the landscape passing below—this time much farther below, with rivers seeming blue threads, interstates black line, and quarter-parcel cornfields pale-green (their plants only recently sprouted) boxes edged by tan borders that were in fact broad access roads. He especially liked the green circles of wheat-field irrigation they passed over Nebraska, those circles stretching out in all directions like some child’s idea of a pretty picture—which was maybe exactly what it was, or was meant to be.

Just beyond the Mississippi River (appearing anything but mighty from way up here) they entered dense clouds and a little choppy weather for the balance of the flight, nothing but close gray damp outside his window the rest of the way into Boston. Zach didn’t sleep (he could never sleep in a public setting) but he did drift into a shallow doze, the hum of the jet engines the only sound in the sparsely filled cabin. In that doze he felt Allison’s presence nearby, but he couldn’t see her for the fog in his brain, the fog outside the jet. Was she really there or just a figment of his imagination? He knew—the still awake part of his consciousness knew—that this question was of critical relevance and importance to his life at the moment: where was Allison? Was she beside him? Totally gone? Somewhere in between? The fog seemed to suggest the latter and he’d assume as much, had been doing so since the letter. But he also knew this might be just wishful thinking on his part, his will and desire reshaping (as it all too often did) simple fact, as in his misplaced hope to study with Barton Cosgrove, as in his dream of homesteading. Maybe Allison was just one more such impossible dream, shattered to splinters on the shoals of adulthood and its rigid constraints, its treacherous fog-bound future.

They’d emerged from the clouds when the jet began its descent into Boston. They came in out of the south, following the coastline over the suburbs of Braintree and Quincy as Zach recognized the winding line and heavy late-day traffic on the Southeast Expressway. He wondered where down there Ian and Sean and Peter and Mark were as they passed over what must’ve been Milton, Mattapan, Dorchester. At the last minute, just before crossing over the Harbor, Zach recognized the boxy building of the New England Aquarium and saw from above the narrow strip of wharf on its backside, one of his sacred hiding places. From up here it looked part of the whole, integral to the rest of the city spreading out around it, not a good place to hide or escape. But then compared to Wyoming or all the vast open spaces he’d crossed over these last hours, there was nowhere for miles to hide or find true solitude. And it was in that moment, suspended a few hundred feet above the Boston Harbor, that Zach fully realized what he’d come back to, the challenges that lay before him, made all the more daunting for what he’d seen and experienced the last three weeks.