Aedan: Harrison Ambush – Erotic Tiger Shapeshifter Romance by Kathi S. Barton

heaped on her.”
    He sat down. Cruelty? How was that even possible? He’d been honest. With her and with himself. Sort of. Aedan watched his parents as his dad asked his mom what a four letter word was for idiot, and she told him fool. Aedan had no idea why, but he was pretty sure that there wasn’t a clue like that in the crossword puzzle that his dad was working on.
    When he got up to leave, he didn’t bother kissing them good-bye. Neither of them said a word when he told them he was leaving. It was as if he wasn’t there, that it mattered little to them that he was hurting by their rejection. He’d not done anything wrong; not so far as he could see, he hadn’t. Why were they making him out to be the bad guy in all of this?
    Going home, he was met at the door by Winnie. He told him that he’d been cleaning the bedrooms, and asked if he wanted the things that Mr. Neal and Nikki had left behind, that he’d put them in the living room for now. Aedan told him to put them in a box, and that he’d make sure that they got them. When he went into his living room, there was the bundle of things on the table that Winnie had told him about. Aedan picked up the first thing he saw.
    It belonged to Paddy, he knew it at first glance. It was his wallet, with nothing in it but pictures. No credit cards or cash. Not that he would have taken either, but Aedan was surprised by their absence. There was a photo album too. The picture on the front was of a child, and he had a feeling it was Nikki.
    Leaning back on the couch, he flipped it open to the first page. It was a folded up newspaper article that was yellowed with age. He pulled it out, feeling slightly guilty about what he was doing, but read the headline and decided that he needed to read this. Local Family Gunned Down in Home. He looked at the date and realized that it was Nikki’s family.
    He read it all the way to the end of the long story. It told how Nikki’s father, Nicholas Neal, had been a good cop and a better man. A loving and wonderful father and husband as well. It told how one day Nicholas had walked in on a robbery and had saved two people, the owner and his wife, in a robbery of their store that had gone bad. The would-be robber, a man so high on something that he could barely speak, had tried to kill Nicholas, but only succeeded in wounding the man. The robber was killed when Nicholas, having no choice, had shot the man to save himself.
    Then three days after Nicholas had been sent home from the hospital, his wounds barely healed, the family of the robber had broken into his home and murdered him and his wife, Anastasia, as well as shot the couple’s only child. It said that she was not expected to survive either.
    The townspeople were outraged that something like this could have happened to their hometown hero, and had rallied around the child until her grandparents could come and see to her. The murderers of the family had been put in jail, and there had been no word on what was to happen to them at the time of the article.
    Aedan looked at the picture that accompanied the article of the little girl and her family on a beach somewhere. It had been a picture taken during a family vacation, he’d bet. Their faces were full of love and laughter. The date under it with their names was a month prior to the newspaper article. There was another picture in the article, this one of her bloodied body laying between those of her parents. The sheets over them were dark with what he could only assume was blood. Aedan felt his heart ache when he thought of what he’d do if something like that would happen to his own family members.
    Aedan moved to the first photo in the album. It was a newborn baby, chubby and asleep. As he moved through her life, pulling out more newspaper clippings and reading them, he gained a picture of Nikki that he’d doubt very much anyone else would have ever known. Pictures of her and her grandparents on trips. Paddy and her at a shooting