Quinn
I felt like the biggest hoe on the planet. I mean, come on. What girl sleeps with her brother-in-law? And then flaunts it like she’s proud of it? Jeez, what was wrong with me?
“You didn’t know he was going to be your brother-in-law when you slept with him.” Hallie reminded me.
Bless her heart, that girl was one of the nicest I’d ever met. We had become fast friends, and I’d actually sort of opened up to her.
“That didn’t make it hurt either of them any less.” I sighed and sat down on the floor with my back up against one of the walls.
As I’d suspected, the house was a wreck. Between the holey stairs, broken windows, and the smell of death that had settled on every inch of the place, it looked about a hundred times worse than the pictures had shown.
“How am I going to live here?” I moaned, lifting my hands to cover my eyes.
Up to that point, I’d been trying to get rid of Cody on my own terms. I had a plan. Sure, parts of the plan were slutty and hoeish, but not hoeish to the extent of sleeping with my brother-in-law. That was just plain disturbing.
“Cody and Tanner will get everything fixed up in the next few days, and we’ll get rid of the foul smell by this afternoon.” Hallie sat down on the floor next to me.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” I lifted my hands to the top of my head. “All I’ve done since I met Cody is try to get rid of him. I’ve been horrible to him.”
“Whether you like it or not, when you became a shifter you became my sister. Cody is a fantastic brother, and of course I care about him, but you’re my sister and sisters stick together.” Hallie said firmly. “I’ll be your sister no matter what happens between you two.”
“I had sex with Logan dozens of times, Hallie. Dozens. The entire planet knew we were dating.” I started to feel queasy. “When people find out that he’s my brother-in-law now…” I moaned and wrapped my arms around my stomach. “My parents are going to lose it.”
I already knew exactly what my dad was going to say, and it wasn’t going to be pretty or nice.
Hallie sighed, but it was a sympathetic sort of sigh that let me know she understood.
“I guess this makes my job pretty easy. If I jump Logan the way I jumped Sebastian last night, Cody will ask me to sign away our relationship.”
“Honey, if you jump Logan the way you jumped Sebastian, Cody will rip Logan’s head off, and then he’ll lock you in a room and eat anyone who tries to touch you.”
She smiled when I groaned.
“Why do you think I got you into the truck so fast? Cody was about to tear after Logan. Tanner couldn’t calm him down with you there, making his wolf all protective.”
“I didn’t think about it.” I admitted. “I was too busy realizing what a slut I was.”
“It’s not slutty to be in a relationship with someone before you know that you’ll end up soulmated to siblings. How could you possibly have predicted that?”
“I don’t know, but my parents will think I should’ve.” I leaned my forehead to my knees. “Cody’s going to hate me.” My words were muffled by my legs. “And even though that’s my goal, the idea is absolutely terrifying.”
“He’s more likely to pin you to a wall and kiss you senseless than hate you.” Hallie put her hand on my arm. “I know what it’s like to have trouble at home. I’m sure mine was different than yours is, but I know that it’s a hard situation to be in. If you need to talk I’m always here.”
She squeezed my arm and then let go.
“Thanks.” I looked up long enough to give her a tight smile. “But Emma’s your sister too, and I can only imagine how much she wants me dead right now.”
“Emma has run into Logan’s old girlfriends and one-night-stands at parties before. This is different, obviously, but she’s used to it. It might take some time and some effort, but the weirdness will fade and we’ll all be close.”
She sounded so confident about that.
“You don’t have any feelings for Logan, right?”
“For Logan Lush? Yeah, right.” I rolled my eyes. “We dated for two months when I was seventeen and had just found out that the Olympic Career I’d spent my whole life working toward was never going to happen.
“My parents wanted to disown me for an accident that wasn’t my fault, and I was drowning myself in vodka and beautiful men. Still am, to be honest. Logan was my friend, and then we were sleeping together, and then we realized we had no emotional chemistry and parted ways. The media made it out to be much more of a relationship than it actually was.”
“Well I think that’s about as good as we could hope for in a situation like this.” How Hallie still sounded calm was beyond me.
“I don’t see how—”
We both turned our heads when the back door, which was only a few feet to our right, flew open and a middle-aged man stepped inside. He noticed us immediately, and gestured out to a few others. Two women and one more man entered the house.
“Who are these people?” I whispered, following Hallie’s lead and standing up slowly.
“They hate us.” She grimaced and looked around the room, and I realized she was looking for a weapon. “You guys don’t want to do this.” Hallie warned. “Tanner, Cody, and Ty are on their way here right now, and none of them are feeling particularly patient right now.”
“We’re willing to risk our lives to protect shifters.” The first man said darkly. “Humans ruined our lives once, and you’ll do it again.”
“You’re joking, right?” I folded my arms.
They stared at me blankly.
“My entire life was destroyed when Cody found me. My parents hate me and are threatening to disown me. I didn’t ask for this, and now you’re telling me that you want me dead to protect shifters when I’m already dead to the humans because of you people?
“Go ahead and kill me, because you already ruined my life.” I held out my arms, offering to let them do what they wanted.
Was I being overdramatic? Yes, but that was the point. If I made them feel guilty, chances were that they’d walk away and wouldn’t come back. If they had the chance to actually kill me, the likelihood of them doing it was very slim.
They all looked at each other, the shock on their faces evident.
“That’s right, you heard me. I don’t want to be a shifter any more than you want me to be one, so just back the heck off before Cody and Tanner show up and dominate you or whatever.”
To Hallie’s surprise, they actually left. I wasn’t surprised because I had two lawyers for parents, which meant I knew the value of a good argument paired with a guilt-trip.
As Hallie turned to say something to me, our soulmates walked in. They looked around the room, like they were expecting us to be in danger.
“What happened?” Tanner checked, walking straight to Hallie. He put his hands on her face, and then arms, and then her waist, like he was checking to make sure she was okay.
Cody made his way over to me too, though he did so cautiously. I could tell it was killing him not to run to me and check me for wounds the same way Tanner was checking Hallie, but after everything, he wasn’t really sure where we stood. That was my fault, but it also meant I was doing what I had to do.
“The racists showed up here. Quinn told them off, and they just left.” Hallie said, sounding like she could still hardly believe it even after seeing it with her own eyes.
“I didn’t tell them off, I guilt-tripped them. No one knows the power of a good guilt-trip as well as me.” I gave her a tight smile, pointedly avoiding Cody’s gaze. He didn’t need to know that I’d been guilt-tripped into doing things for the sake of earning my parents’ love since I was a little girl.
“Thank you.” Tanner smiled at me, and it wasn’t the watered-down, you’re-a-hoe smile that I expected from someone who knew his sister-in-law had slept with his brother-in-law. It was just a regular old smile.
I appreciated that more than I realized I would.
“Well, I think you two had better go grab your tools and make a run to the hardware store, because this place is downright dangerous. Me and Quinn will stop by Ty and Leah’s for some rags and cleaning spray, so we can start making this house smell like a home.” Hallie took charge.
I hadn’t expected her to be a take-charge kind of girl. While she seemed confident, she was so quiet. Then again, she was the Alpha’s mate. Not the Luna, according to Emma, so what was she? I decided I’d ask in the car.
“That sounds great.” Cody agreed. “We’ll meet you out there.”
He didn’t give Tanner and Hallie room to disagree. Though they eyed us as they went, they left us alone together.
Cody covered the distance between us, stopping a few inches away from me. He was close enough to touch me if he wanted to, but not so close that we would brush up against each other as we moved.
“We need to talk about what happened earlier.” He met my gaze. Though his wolf was nowhere to be found, I knew that based on the situation, things could get really wolfy really fast.
“Or we could just make out.” I shrugged, like I was nonchalant about the whole thing.
“Or we could just get it over with by talking about it.” Cody wasn’t willing to budge on that.
I sighed.
“It’s ancient history. Logan and I dated a little, had sex a lot, and then parted ways. It was a mutual breakup, no broken hearts or hard feelings. That was four years ago, and I’ve never once wished I could go back and change anything.”
As I described the nature of my relationship with Logan, his eyes started to yellow.
The only way I thought I might be able to stop it was to touch him, so I took the two steps that brought my body to his.
I wanted to say something sweet, along the lines of, “the only person I have feelings for is you”, but I couldn’t do that. As much as it hurt, I had to make him despise me.
“Physical relationships have never been meaningful to me. The kissing, the sex, it’s just a distraction from life. Nothing more.”
I was a terrible human being, and straight-up lying on top of it. Nothing about my physical relationship with Cody had been meaningless.
Though at first I saw the hurt in his eyes, I watched it change into determination.
“You want me to believe that when I kiss you, all you feel is a little excitement because it’s fun?” he leaned forward and brushed his lips against mine. The kiss was so gentle, just the tiniest touch, and it left me breathless.
“Not even excitement.” I forced the words out. “It just takes away the boredom.”
“So when I run my hand up your side, like this,” He placed one hand on the curve of my hip and used the other to run up and down the side of my hourglass-body. “All you feel is not bored?”
“Exactly.” My throat was dry, too dry, but there was nothing I could do. If I reacted now, I’d be proving that I was lying.
“What about when I touch your skin, like this?” he slipped his hand underneath the hem of the large t-shirt I’d stolen from his closet and trailed his fingers on the bare skin at my hip.
I fought the urge to close my eyes and arch my body into him and beg him to keep going.
“Nothing.” The words came out as a squeak, and I cursed myself for being such a pile of goo in those big, warm hands.
His eyes flashed when I made the noise and he splayed his fingers out across the skin on my stomach. My eyes shut, and I fought to keep myself in control, to stop myself from reacting to him the way he wanted me to.
“You can pretend not to want me, but your body tells the truth.” He said, in a voice more husky and gravelly than usual. “Maybe your physical relationship with everyone else wasn’t important to you, but with me, it always will be. We’re wolves, and being together physically is equally as important as being together emotionally.”
When he pulled his hand off of my skin, I barely managed to stop myself from grabbing him and kissing him the way I had already done half a dozen times in the two and a half days we’d known each other.
One thing was starting to become very clear to me. If I did manage to break Cody Burgandeau’s heart, I was going to leave just as broken as him.