Midnight Angel [Jenlisa FF]

~'~'~ Chapter 1 ~'~'~

~four years later~

The setting sun cast a low glow over the deserted beach as twenty-seven-year-old Lalisa 'Lisa' Manoban settled her tired and sweaty body onto the worn, rough stairs that stood as entryway to her recently purchased house. For a moment, she simply stared out over the empty beach. So quiet, was all she could think. Such a difference from Los Angeles and all of the exotic places she had traveled. But then, that was what she'd been searching for. Years of the fast life had taken their toll, bringing a weariness she couldn't have anticipated. Now all she wanted was some peace and quiet.

Lisa loved her job. Truly. Being a photographer was all she'd ever really wanted to be. There was something mesmerizing about being able to take a camera, really only a hunk of plastic and metal, and snap an image of something that would last beyond the subject. In the five years since she had graduated from college, she had been able to travel the world, plying her trade, seeing the beautiful; places, people, animals, and the horrid; natural disasters, poverty, famine. It had been an experience she wouldn't exchange for anything, but she'd also learned that traveling the world, through time-zones, traipsing around jungles, up mountains, eating out of cans by campfire, and all the rest, weren't what she wanted to spend the rest of her years doing.

Most of her life had been spent in nomadic existence. Traveling from place to place with her father, a tried and true archaeologist, she had never really had a home. Her father, the only parent she'd ever really had, lived on the go. Lisa had no memories of her birth mother. She'd been an undergrad student assisting on one of her father's digs in North Dakota. Their passion had flared bright and faded quick, and when the dust had settled, a baby had been left, her mother more interested in living her life than in being a mother. Despite the desertion and the circumstances, Lisa's father had never held it against her. He'd taken the child with no regret and continued on with his life, going from dig to dig, lecture to lecture, and being both father and mother.

Lisa could say little bad about the way she'd grown up. She'd enjoyed the digs as a child and inherited her father's interest in the past. Before she was four years old, she'd visited more places than a child's mind could comprehend. It had been exciting and fascinating. And she'd always been full of questions. No, she hadn't minded the way her father lived. And then, when she was about five, came the trip to Texas.

They'd gone so her father could give a lecture at a small university, and in turn had dined in a small restaurant where a pretty young waitress named Amanda had served their food. They'd gone back to that restaurant every night, and when their scheduled week trip was up, they'd stayed. Two months later, her father had married pretty Amanda and settled her family into a small house outside of town. Ten months later, Lisa had a baby sister named Roseanne. That was the only time Lisa could ever really remember having a home. But it hadn't lasted.

The need to dig, to dissect and study the past, continued to call to her father. He simply hadn't been suited to life in suburbia. He'd asked his wife to travel with him, to leave behind the home they'd built and the place she'd grown up in, and she'd considered, but in the end, it hadn't been meant to be. So, after a short eighteen months, her father had packed up his life, and his first child, returned to the life he craved, leaving his infant daughter with his wife.

Lisa knew her father had suffered, considered himself a failure, but he also knew Daniel Manoban had done the best he could. They'd returned to Texas often, sometimes staying for only a couple days, sometimes for several weeks, but never permanently. She'd loved those visits, sleeping in a real bedroom, teasing her half-sister. She knew her father would have stayed if his heart had truly been on family, but his love for his work was too strong.

When Amanda had died of cancer, Lisa saw her father cry for the first time in her entire life. The memory was seared into her mind, just as the realization of how much her father had loved his wife, and how much he'd hated himself for not being able to give her what she needed, had dawned on him. She'd been nineteen then and had just started her freshmen year of college.