Bad Boy Brody(9)

I couldn’t get that out of my head, and I couldn’t get her out of my head either.

It was as if she stuck her hand inside, took hold of my organs, and crawled in beside them. I still felt her.

That was who he was asking about.

“No.” I shook my head. “I didn’t see the stallion.”

He was still watching me closely.

I added, “They were running so fast that it was done within a few seconds.”

At that, his shoulders fell back, smoothing out. “Ah. Yes. I do hope to section off the lands where we’ll be shooting for the movie, so hopefully you won’t see the herd again.” He nodded past the barn. “You can’t see it now, but they typically run on the other mountain over there. If you see ’em again, it’ll be far in the distance.”

The image of that girl flashed in my head again.

Her dark eyes. Her dark golden hair. I only got a glimpse, but she was stunning, and I found myself saying, “I hope not.”

I wanted to see her again.

And I ignored the sharp look Kellerman threw my direction.





Morgan



It was four in the morning.

The last of the strangers finally went to bed, and I heard their snoring as I tiptoed through the building. I hadn’t wanted to come back, but I needed clothes. It was getting colder at night, and though Shiloh and Shoal broke the night wind if I stayed with the herd, they couldn’t completely ward off the chill. I was used to the extremes with the weather. My body adjusted long ago, but I still got cold. I stayed in the house nights during the bad weather and in the winter. On those nights, I’d usually slip into the second floor of the barn. The house was mine, but I always felt like it was theirs: my stepsiblings, my mom, and him. The apartment felt more like home to me. It’d been renovated so it looked like a normal apartment, but that wasn’t where I’d gone.

I wanted to see them.

I was standing above where Abby was sleeping. Her face was turned toward me, her arm was thrown up on the pillow, and her body was twisted the other way. She’d have a kink in her neck when she woke, but she looked happy.

I knelt, looking closer.

There were no bags under her eyes, but the laughing lines still around her mouth made me smile. Yes. She looked happy. She wasn’t the frail, thin girl I last saw when I signed for the movie. That was years ago, and I’d been worried about her. I didn’t know what was going on with her then. I was glad it had worked out, whatever it was.

Tiptoeing out, I checked on Finn next. I didn’t go all the way in. His covers were pulled down so I could see the bare skin of his thigh. He was sleeping naked. Same Finn. He groaned about wearing boxers around the house when we were kids. He hadn’t changed.

That made me smile.

Matthew would’ve been using the main room, and I was coming down the hallway when I heard the neigh in the distance. That was Shiloh calling for me, so I bypassed the stairs. I was going past the kitchen table when I looked down and stopped. The script was there.

Unbroke.

That was the name of the movie, a term used about a horse that wasn’t trained.

I frowned slightly, feeling a tug in my stomach, and reached for the script.

The movie was about my mother, but why would they use that term? She’d been broken.

“So you do come to the house every now and then?”

I whipped around, seeing Matthew in the threshold of the open patio door. He wore the suit he had worn for the party, but his shirt collar was open, the top few buttons were undone. He’d pulled the shirt out from his pants, too, and unlike Abby, the bags under his eyes fell halfway down toward his mouth.

My hand snapped back to my side. Ducking my head a little, I went toward him. If he woke the others, there’d be conversations I didn’t want to have. And I heard Shiloh’s neigh again. She was worried about me.

Matthew heard her, too, looking back over the fields. “That Shoal?”

He stepped back, and I moved past him, shutting the patio doors behind me. “Shiloh.”

“Shiloh?”

“Shoal’s daughter. She’s a little darker gray than Shoal.”

“Ah.” His nostrils flared. I felt a wave of anger from him. “That makes sense. It’s like you have a new sister.”

I watched him warily, moving to the edge of the patio. I murmured, “You look well.”

His nostrils flared again. Heat pooled in his eyes. “You don’t.”

I flinched, looking away.

He cursed under his breath. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Your hair is more blonde than I remembered. You’re still so thin. And I want to hug you, but I’m scared if I try, you’ll take off like a damned deer.”

I looked back up, and there was a yearning in his eyes that had me swallowing over a knot. He moved to take a step forward but stopped, and in a low voice, he asked, “Can I hug you, Morgan? Can I hug my sister?”

“I’m not your sister.” I paused a beat. “Or your stepsister.”

Not anymore, but once we had been. We’d been a family.

That was a long time ago, and years passed.

He took them from me when I remained at the house. Peter Kellerman used my inheritance to pay for my homeschooling, but that was it. And a part of me always wondered if that’d been at Matthew’s insistence. When my mom was murdered, my stepfather wanted nothing to do with me. Staff moved into the house, acting like my keepers.