Page 8 of Cost of Courting

It’s funny, but I don’t think he means that last sentence. It’s almost like he can’t wait to get away from me.

I go back to leaning on the bridge rail, staring down at the rushing water.

“Boyfriend?”

I smirk. “What if I say yes? What if I tell you I have an entire pack?”

“There’s a good chance we’d kill them, but then you knew that. Nothing but the best for our little sister.”

“We are not related,” I say in a low, forbidding voice. “We grew up on the same street. That does not make us siblings.” How dare he even suggest such a thing to me?

“You wound me.”

“Not yet, but I will,” I promise.

“Kingston and Mael are upset with you.”

“But you aren’t?” I glance at him and take in the bruise that’s forming on his cheekbone. “Maybe you should be.”

“It served me right. I should have remembered how temperamental you are.”

I want to scream and turn and hit him again. How dare he!

“We came all this way, and we were all hoping to catch up, to go back-”

“To how it used to be?” I spit out a bitter laugh. “Are you serious right now, Edric? You all left, and I grew up. There is nothing to go back to. Your families are gone, my dad’s dead, and we’re,” I pause, feeling the agony of it all over again, “and we’re just strangers who live across the street.”

Edric doesn’t argue with me or follow me when I walk away. I don’t know if I’m relieved or sad about it, but at least it gets me away from him.

I take a long walk around the neighborhood, and then I go home. When I go to bed in the wee hours of the morning, I stare at the water-marked ceiling for far too long, straining to hear any sound from their house. Anything at all.

And hating myself that I can’t seem to stop.

Chapter three

Edric

I sit back onthe couch, crane my head back, and glare up at the ceiling. It’s the same ceiling I stared at so often as a kid, my stomach grumbling with hunger. Selene would wait until late and sneak in the window we’d left unlatched. We all used to come to Kingston’s house and camp out in the lounge. His mother worked two jobs, so we mostly had the place to ourselves.

“She won’t talk to us,” I growl in frustration.

“She did say that she wouldn’t.” Kingston oh, so helpfully points out. “Selene always follows through.”

“She was hysterical when she was screaming at us that day, I doubt she even remembers everything she said.”

But I do, and I have never, ever regretted anything as much as I did when we chose not to listen and drive away from her that day.

Mael frowns as he scrapes his food into the bin and starts doing the dishes. Domestication suits him almost as well as beating the living shit out of people. He was bred for violence and pack life.

“Who was the guy?” Mael asks in a flat voice, pausing with a plate of soap suds held precariously over the floor, unnoticed as he stares at Kingston. “Have you found him yet?”

Kingston glances at us and looks down at his phone, shifting uneasily. “Bailey Raines. He’s a hot mess. An ex-member of the Despair MC,” Kingston says and waggles hiseyebrows.

Mael and I both react the same way, shock and interest tossed with a dressing of oh, crap. No, that’s not true, Mael manages to drop the plate he’s holding. We all stare at the broken plate for a minute.

“Bailey Raines is connected to Selene?” Mael almost chokes out. “Fucking hell, can this get any more convoluted?”

“How do you become an ex-member of an outlaw motorcycle club and still live to tell the tale?” I ask curiously. “Do you have to kill a club member who was a bad guy? Fuck the wrong person? Fraud? What did he do that was so bad that the Prez kicked him out?”

---