Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 68913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
But the thing was, I had tried and things had gotten…weird.
My parents had been killed in a car wreck just five days after Delilah’s twenty-second birthday. Their brakes failed, though I don’t know how that could have been possible—Dad was always such a stickler for car maintenance. They were going seventy-five on the interstate when they smashed into a concrete divider. At least it was instant—the coroner said he doubted either one of them felt a thing.
I was royally fucked up about it—couldn’t eat or sleep for days. But Delilah took it even harder. I guess I could see why—it was the second set of parents she’d lost violently and unexpectedly. That kind of trauma will fuck with your head.
I went to my parents’ house a day after the funeral and found her just sitting on the couch, staring into space. She was wearing the same black dress she’d worn to the service and the same black pumps—they still had dirt from the gravesite on their soles. It looked like she’d come in and sat down and hadn’t moved for the past eighteen hours.
“Lilah? Baby?” I murmured, sitting down beside her and putting an arm around her shoulders.
At first it was like touching wood—she was absolutely rigid. But then she flowed to me, just as she had when she was a little girl. Feeling her in my arms again, I was flooded with tenderness…and memories.
After that first night as my little sister, she used to always come running to me when she cut her knee or got stung by a bee or anything like that. My friends tried to tease me about it, but I refused to be embarrassed about protecting and comforting Delilah. I usually stopped whatever I was doing to take care of her—to put a Band-Aid on the hurt knee or some baking soda on the bee sting. Whatever it was, I wanted to fix it for her—and I wanted to fix it now.
Only there was no fixing this.
“They’re gone, Cole!” she sobbed in my arms. “Gone!”
“Yeah, baby—I know. I know.” I pulled her into my lap and let her cry. I cried with her, too—the first tears I’d been able to shed since the highway patrolman showed up at my door with the awful news.
“They left me! Everyone I love leaves!” She pressed closer to me, burying her face in my neck, her body shaking against mine. She was so soft in my arms and she smelled like the ghost of perfume she must have put on the day before—faintly sweet and devastatingly feminine.
“I know, baby. I know it seems like that.”
I held her like that for a long time, both of us wrapped up in each other, sharing our grief. I had moved out on my own years ago, but Delilah had still been living at home. She got a visit from the highway patrol too and had screamed so loud the Alpha guards at the front door had come running into the house, thinking she was being attacked.
After a long time, it seems like she cried herself out. She drew back from me a little and I saw that she had forgotten to wear the blue contact lens that usually covered her golden eye. Either that or it had gotten washed away with all the crying.
“It hurts, Cole,” she said simply, looking at me. “I know it hurts you too. They were your parents, more than mine.”
“Don’t say that,” I said roughly. “You were their little girl. They loved you every bit as much.” I cupped her cheek and swiped at her tears with my thumb.
Her mismatched eyes were red and her cheeks were flushed from crying, but it occurred to me for some reason that my little sister had somehow turned into a beauty. She’d grown up—and out—in all the right places.
She was no longer the skinny little stick she’d been when she first came to our house at the age of eleven. Somehow while I wasn’t looking she’d gotten a woman’s full curves with large, round breasts and a lush ass, wide hips and deliciously thick thighs. Her hair, though, was still a mass of flyaway strawberry blonde curls and the freckles across the bridge of her little nose made her cute rather than sultry.
I pushed the thoughts away guiltily. What the fuck was wrong with me, noticing my own little sister that way? It didn’t matter that we weren’t actually blood related—by the Laws of the Pack, we were closer than blood. Besides, how fucked up was it that I would see her in a whole new light at a time like this, when our parents had just died?
I started to push her off my lap, but Delilah clung to me.
“Wait, Cole—where are you going?” she demanded.
I mumbled something about Pack business. I hadn’t been expecting to have to take over as Packmaster quite so soon—my dad had still been in great shape in his late fifties. But it was a hereditary position, passed from Alpha father to Alpha son so I had to step up—with the backing of the Provisional Council, that was.