Page 88 of Grumpy Sunshine

But the thought of me not having one didn’t sit nearly as bad with me as the thought ofhernot having one.

I was a good rider.

I paid attention.

However, the thought of Aella possibly getting hurt while on the back of my bike sent a panic like I’d never felt before tunneling through me.

“I was trying to decide how much to tell you about my fucked-up family,” I admitted.

Her eyes looked curious, but she didn’t push.

In the end, I gave her a condensed version of the full truth.

“My dad abused my sister, and Copper walked in on him doing that.Copper understandably lost his shit, and beat my dad to death with his bare hands.Since my dad was a bigwig in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he had a lot of people on his side that had a lot of money lining their pockets.Copper was sentenced to a hefty sentence and only got out fairly recently,” I explained quickly.

Aella studied me for a long moment before saying, “I hope that your sister is okay now, and that she doesn’t blame herself for her brother going to jail.”She looked down at her feet for a long second before saying, “I’ve done a whole lot worse.”

Intrigued, I was about to ask her to elaborate when I heard a screech.“Where have you been?”

We both looked up to see a woman who looked nothing like Aella running toward her yelling, “Sister!”

Aella grinned widely and started jogging toward her twin.

Though how they were twins, I would never know.

The background check that Apollo had run on Aella was thorough.

I knew everything there was to know about her that was out there to find, but this was one conundrum I wouldn’t be able to understand without asking.

The two women met, and I watched in amusement as they twirled around each other and spoke over each other a mile a minute.

It was when they finally ran out of breath that the woman, Silver, turned to me and said, “Is this the man that you’ve been crushing on since forever?”

I grinned wickedly, but Aella didn’t find her sister nearly as amusing as I did and slapped the crap out of her across the arm.

Silver laughed as she placed her hand on her arm.

Aella glared hard at her sister.

“Y’all want to get dinner?”Silver asked.

Aella turned to me.“You want food?”

I never turned down food.

Plus, I wanted to know everything there was to know about this sister of hers, seeing as I wasn’t planning on letting Aella go.

“Always.”

Twenty-One

Sometimes she just needs to be bent over the couch and asked ‘what’s the attitude about?’

—Secrets to a happy relationship

AELLA

My sister had just thrown me under the proverbial bus.

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