Page 38 of Brenna, Brat

He stared at me. “Carrington didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Ok, fine. Get in.” My voice was extremely loud and caught a little.

He kept staring at me. “Thank you for waiting,” he said. I nodded at him, and he did get in. We exited the dealership and I had no idea where I was or where I was going, so Campbell took over with directions and I drove kind of blindly, rubbing my eyes a lot. The smoke must have really bothered them, I guessed. The stench of it had filled my car, emanating from my hair, clothes, and skin. It was in every part of me.

“Brenna?”

I looked over. “Was I supposed to turn there? I didn’t hear you say it.”

“No, we’re going the right way. Do you want to come in for a minute? Will it bother you if the news truck is still parked in the street outside?”

“I don’t care,” I said. I put on the big sunglasses, but then realized that they didn’t belong to me. “Oh, I should give these back to you.”

“No, you can keep them. Let’s go into my house and take a breath,” he said, and I nodded.

It turned out that the news people weren’t there after all, so they must not have been clued in on the latest disaster in his life. I was able to pull into his garage, where there was space since his car was in the shop. But when we went into his living room, I didn’t want to sit down when he offered me the couch or any of the chairs.

“I smell like smoke,” I explained.

“Yeah, you keep sniffing your clothes and your hair.”

I moved my sleeve away from my face, because I had been doing that again. “I should go home and take a shower.”

“You could do that here. I probably have some clothes you could wear,” he suggested.

“I’m not going to put on what some other woman left by mistake after your night together,” I said immediately, and his eyes widened.

“I meant stuff that my sister has forgotten over the years,” he said. “I’ll go look.”

He had leggings and he gave me a shirt and socks which definitely belonged to him; I figured I could go without underwear. I had the same body type as my sister Juliet, pretty slim, except she had a great set of breasts and that feature was something I absolutely did not enjoy. So no, a bra wasn’t necessary unless I was going to run, and I was only doing that if he turned into a saber-toothed cat.

“Thank you,” I told him, and I followed him to his guest room, which was both larger and lighter than my apartment. I enjoyed the shower a lot, because the water was consistently warm, the products were great, and there was a working fan to remove the steam…of course, the clear, mistless mirror gave me an excellent view of my bare, pallid face. At least my eyelashes and eyebrows were dark and not red like my dad’s, for which I could thank my mother. I was indebted to him for my blue eyes, though. They weren’t turquoise like Juliet’s and Patrick’s but they weren’t bad, I guessed. I could also thank Mom for my nose, which was straight, and my lips, which were full. She was beautiful, pretty much perfect, but it didn’t all come together the same way on my face. As someone who was able to notice flaws more clearly than others seemed to see them, my own were very apparent to me.

That was why I didn’t ever bother to look into any mirror for too long. Especially not now, since I didn’t have any makeup to bring color to my abnormally white skin—like, even for me, I was really pale. My eyes looked crazy, too, round and wide and with oversized pupils.

“It’s due to shock,” Nicola answered briskly when I sent a picture of that issue to her. “I can’t believe how you stormed out of here.”

“I can’t believe that you married such a spineless slug,” I retorted.

“Slugs never have spines, despite what your insult seems to imply. And Jude isn’t spinless or a slug anyway,” she told me. “Brat!”

I gave up on my sister and on improving my appearance and I went downstairs, finger-combing my hair as I descended. Something smelled very good, and it turned out to be a pizza that Campbell had delivered.

“It’s dinnertime,” he noted as I walked in. “We can show off our cooking skills another night.”

“Ok,” I said. I noticed that he must have showered, too, because his hair was wet, darker with the water and slicked back. It was hard to believe that he could have been any more handsome but this new look was very nice. “Thank you. I do feel better now.” I sniffed, though, because I was pretty sure that I still smelled—

“Let me try that,” he said, and picked up a lock of my hair and inhaled through his nose. “No smoke. It smells like mint.”

“That’s your expensive conditioner,” I explained.

He was still holding my hair, kind of wrapping it around his index finger. “I thought it was straight,” he commented. “Your sister Grace has those spirals and your sister Juliet has none of that.”

Of course he had noticed. “And Nicola is right in the middle of them, perfect waves like she’s a hair model, and I have this,” I said, indicating the half-waves and almost-curls that were on my own head. “I always blow it out.” I didn’t have to battle it into submission like my sister Addie did with hers, but my hair and I were not really friends.

“When we went skating, you got little curls at the nape of your neck,” he said, and I looked at him, wondering how he’d seen that. After all, he’d been facing me in order to pull my weak, untalented butt around the ice.

“They were right here,” he continued, and used his other fingers to gently brush the skin behind my ear. I was suddenly aware that we were standing very close, and I took a sharp breath.

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