To Love & Betray by Shelly Ellis

Author:Shelly Ellis [Ellis, Shelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Leila

“I’ll only be gone thirty minutes . . . forty-five minutes, tops, Mama,” Leila said as she cradled her infant daughter’s head. The baby was perched in Diane’s arms.

Diane smiled and shooed Leila away. “Go on, honey. Enjoy your run. We’ll be fine. I’ll rock Angie for a bit and then we’ll sit on back and watch a Lifetime movie. Won’t we, Angel?” Diane tutted to her granddaughter, who was guzzling hungrily from her milk bottle, oblivious to her mother and grandmother.

“Are you going to watch the movie, too, Izzy?” Leila asked her eldest daughter, who was lying on her belly at the foot of Diane’s bed. The young girl tore her eyes away from the game she was playing on her iPad. She stared at Leila like Leila had just lost her mind.

“Uh, no, Mom,” she answered dryly. “I’m not watching that movie. I’m only a thousand points away from topping my highest score. I have to concentrate.” She then returned her attention to the iPad’s screen.

Leila chuckled and leaned down to kiss Isabel’s dimpled cheek. “Well, good luck with that.” She headed to the bedroom doorway. “I’m gonna run, then take a quick shower, then come back here. See you guys in a bit.”

A minute later, Leila was walking down the stone steps of Murdoch Mansion. She paused on the asphalt driveway to do her stretches and check the knots in her shoelaces. She then put in her earbuds and began to jog down the driveway toward the tennis courts.

Leila hadn’t been running in months, not since Angelica was born. Paulette thought she did it to lose the baby weight.

“Maybe I should start running, too,” Paulette had murmured a week ago before glancing down at her curvy hips. “Aunt Ida’s right. I am getting a bit thick.”

But the truth was, Leila really jogged to clear her head. In the early days, when she had first arrived in Chesterton from San Diego, she used to go jogging around their old neighborhood twice a week. She had jogged to escape her worries about her vengeful ex, her mother’s foreclosure, and her ever-growing pile of bills. She no longer had those worries but had developed new ones. She worried about the state of her new marriage. She worried about whether Evan would have to go back to jail and about what would happen to her and the children if he did end up behind bars again. But those worries disappeared as they always did when she ran, as she basked in the warm sunshine.

Leila ran the first mile humming with a few upbeat Beyoncé tunes playing on her iPod. She jogged past the tennis courts then a manmade pond. She took the asphalt path through the clearing into a line of trees. As she did, the world darkened around her. The sun that had been beating down on her head only seconds earlier was now cloaked by the tangled limbs and leaves of the oaks and maples overhead. Leila jogged

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