Total pages in book: 203
Estimated words: 199654 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 998(@200wpm)___ 799(@250wpm)___ 666(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 199654 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 998(@200wpm)___ 799(@250wpm)___ 666(@300wpm)
Seeing my reflection, I steady myself with my hands on the sink and stare at myself. I look and feel shaky and kind of… traumatized.
I hear his voice in my mind.
Color me shocked as fuck, because guess what? It’s you.
The anger in his eyes when he said that…
The way he practically spat out those words?
Or maybe he spat the other words at me, but not those… I don’t even know. My brain feels like it’s whirling. And I’m so, so angry I can’t even linger on the things Jason said. I just… can’t even fathom anything other than getting through this thing right now, getting home. Trauma and anger. I don’t know which one is stronger.
“Hurry up!” the guy outside the door shouts.
He leers at me as I walk back to the stairs, muttering something in his language that sounds offensive when I pass him.
As soon as I’m going down the stairs, the door slams and the lights go out, plunging us into darkness and nearly making me fall.
Grabbing the railing, I pause and listen, not understanding what they say as they leave, but I can pluck out a few words here and there, including arcano, which must be about us.
10
JASE
Though the lights go out while she stomps back down the stairs I clearly saw she’s looking like that shit sandwich is floating under her nose. She’s intentionally not looking at me, but she’s fully aware I’m watching her. My eyes have already adjusted and hers probably have, too.
Arguing between the three of them goes on for a few minutes in whatever language they’re speaking before the voices fade and there’s the sound of multiple sets of receding footsteps.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Fuck off.”
“Fuck off? Fuck off?”
“Did I stutter?”
Oh, poor Bailey. I’m the bad guy. For not fucking around with the feelings of my best friend’s baby sister? I’ve never led her or any other woman on. Not once. And I’ve never looked at her that way. Not even when she grew up, one day being that little shadow following me around with her crooked pigtails while adjusting her giant eyeglasses to me coming back from school ignoring that she suddenly had the body of Marilyn Monroe and in addition to looking at me like I hung the moon, she started staring at me with come-hither eyes.
Of course I had to steel myself against that, block it out. I’m not the only one who had to ignore her transition into a knockout, either. You just don’t go there unless you have a death wish and want to give Greyson a legit reason to rip your dick off. And I’d be the same if an alpha I knew would eventually identify a mate was sniffing around one of my sisters. One of my sisters has a family with a beta, the other is all but engaged to a guy she met at school who she hasn’t brought home yet. And then there’s Sherry – a different story, but up until she showed she was a maneater I would’ve been protective, too. Bailey’s no maneater. Bailey, to my knowledge, doesn’t date.
Am I the asshole for not taking advantage of my best friend’s much younger sister’s crush on me when I’ve always known I’d eventually identify my fated mate?
Apparently so, judging by her attitude.
I’ve intentionally kept things casual with every female I’ve screwed around with, so I don’t fuck their feelings up later on. Any female who’s dropped any hints of anything serious has been told, no, I can’t give anyone that.
I’ll have that later and knew when it happened, I wouldn’t want anything unfinished with another female. And the fact that my folks are constantly bickering also meant that no, I didn’t want a relationship before I had to have one where some woman would feel she has a license to hassle me about everything under the sun including about shit before we became official the way my mother does with my pops.
Also, watching what Joel went through with his high school girlfriend stuck with me. They were warned against getting too serious, but they didn’t listen and then they were ripped apart when her fated mate identified her.
There was nothing Joel could do to stop it. And it tore him up. Pops’ council had to get involved, keep Joel from putting his ass on the line because he was ready to throw down and challenge that alpha for a female who wasn’t fated to be his.
Was that shit fair to her mate? No. The guy was treated like he was a thief around here even if everyone knew we couldn’t stop it. He used to be a friend to several guys in the pack; his pack used to do some lucrative business with ours. That all ended when he claimed Susie. He doesn’t come around at all to avoid Joel.