Page 21 of Breaking the Alpha
He stretched over and turned the water off after a minute.“They did pretty damn good, considering Grey was nine and I was a total delinquent.”Pausing, he considered how much more to say.“Some shit went down with Birch when I was almost nineteen and he ended up going away for three years, too.”
With that, one amber eye opened.“What happened to Grey?”
“He had to accept me as his lord and master.”
A small smile graced her face and she sunk down a little farther, keeping the mass of hair piled high on her head a fraction above the water.
“So yeah, I took care of Grey until Birch got out.When he came back, he gave me a wad of cash and basically booted my ass to California that same week.”Thinking back to the day he left, he exhaled.“It was probably the hardest thing I ever did, leaving Birch here to deal with the gossip and bullshit while I escaped to LA.”He cleared his throat, but it did little to erase the guilt he still carried.“Shortly after that, he and that Drayson asshole opened Serpent’s Tongue Ink.Now Grey’s acing his engineering courses at the university and Birch has a girlfriend who not only tolerates him but seems to like him enough to move in with him.”
The water sloshed as Angelina sat up and pulled the plug out.River tugged a large pink towel off the hanger beside him, holding it out to her.
“How did you get into piercing?”she prodded, wrapping herself up without giving him a single peek.
“I trained in LA and was actually working at a shop there when I was scouted for the whole modeling thing,” he replied, mesmerized by her movements as she eased one hair pin at a time out of her hair.
She opened the door and steam billowed into the hall.“How many piercings do you have?I don’t remember seeing any.”
Grabbing the chair, he waited outside her bedroom while she dressed, then set it back in the corner of her room once she was done.“None.”
“How does a piercer have no piercings?”she asked with a smile, her pink cotton pants riding low on her hips and her tight black tee accenting the fact that she was definitely braless.
“I have enough holes and scars.I sure as hell don’t need any more.”
She frowned, but the expression was short-lived as though she were filing that tidbit away for another time as she led him downstairs.“Now, we eat and bead.”
“We what?”
“I’ll let you pick the movie since I won’t be paying it much attention,” she continued, as she pulled a box from under the sofa and set it on the coffee table.“Grab the remote and get comfortable.We’ll be sitting here for a few hours.”
She sat cross-legged on the floor of her living room, opened the box, and picked up an incomplete, delicately woven bracelet.As she concentrated on the fine threads she was attaching to a small metal loom, River sat behind her and fiddled with the remote until he found a movie.
“Grey and I used to do this a lot,” he shared as he got comfortable.“He was kind of a skittish kid—for good reason—so we moved one of the TVs into my room when Birch left.We went down to the thrift shop and picked up an old VCR and a few dozen video tapes, then watched the hell out of them every night.”
“Best big brother ever,” she replied as she scooted back so she was resting against his legs.“Grey was lucky to have you.”
He envied her peacefulness as she focused on weaving glass beads among the threads.She seemed so calm, and he wanted to be a part of it in any way he could.Deciding to indulge in something he’d been dying to do for the past two hours, he gently combed his fingers through her hair.When her response was nothing more than a contented sigh, he started twirling the strands one by one, examining the way the colors changed with the angle of the light.
“Now that I’ve spilled my guts, what are the chances I’ll learn anything about you?”he finally ventured when she’d finished one bracelet and prepared another.
She took a deep breath and exhaled.“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
The silence stretched out so long he began to worry he’d broken her somehow.Her movements were less fluid and more robotic as she wrapped and wove new threads together.There was a new tension in her shoulders, and her spine was rigid until she gave her head a little shake and then cleared her throat.
“Well, my mother was an addict, my father is one of eleven men she went through in the year before I was born, and I spent most of my childhood bouncing between foster homes and group homes.Some were okay, a few were living nightmares.”Her shoulders relaxed a fraction.“No brothers, no sisters, all my grandparents have been dead for decades.I guess there isn’t a whole lot to tell.It’s been me, myself, and I, since I was four.I’ve been working since I was fourteen, bought my first car at nineteen, spent the last decade moving around Wisconsin and North Dakota, and now I’m here.”She picked up a pair of scissors and snipped a thread.“Your older brothers have no idea how much they did for you and Grey by keeping you out of the system.”
He blinked, speechless.
He’d expected her to tell him about her middle-class upbringing with loving parents, two siblings, and a dog.He had all his follow-up questions ready based on the assumption that she was like so many of the people he grew up envying, the kids who always had new bikes and whose moms baked them muffins and cookies.But this?This he didn’t know how to handle.She’d lived the life Birch and Winter had saved him and Grey from, and he had no idea what to say.
She leaned against his legs and arched her neck to look back at him.“TMI?”
“No,” he stammered, snapping out of his stupor.“Not at all.I just—”
“Just expected a more white-picket-fence kind of upbringing?”
He knew his face gave away the truth in her statement so he didn’t deny it.“Was it as bad as everyone says it can be?Foster care?”
