Dare You To (Pushing the Limits #2)(16)

Scott. That is, if he’s awake. It may be better if he went to bed. That way I can slip out without the fight.

Maybe I’ll score some food before I call Isaiah. With a room like this, I bet he buys brand-name cereal.

The house has that newly built, fresh sawdust smell. Outside the bedroom is a foyer instead of a hallway. A large staircase, the type I thought existed only in movies, winds to the second floor. An actual chandelier hangs from the ceiling. Guess baseball pays well.

“No…” A woman’s voice carries from the back of the house. I can tell she’s still talking, but she’s lowered her tone. Did he marry or does he keep a f**k on hand like he did when I was a kid? Gotta be a f**k. I overheard Scott tell Dad once that he’d never marry.

I follow the low voices to the brink of a large open room and pause. The entire back of the house—excuse me, mansion—is one enormous wall of windows. The living room flows right into the eat-in kitchen.

“Scott.” Exasperation eats at the woman’s tone. “This is not what I signed up for.”

“Last month you were on board with this,” says Scott. Part of me feels vindicated. He’s lost that annoyingly smooth calm from yesterday.

“Yes, when you told me you wanted to reconnect with your niece. There is a difference between reconnecting and invading our life.”

“You were fine with it when I called last month from Louisville and said I wanted her to live with us.”

The woman snaps, “That was after you said she ran away. I didn’t actually think you would find her. When you described the hellhole she lived in, I figured she was long gone. She’s a criminal. You expect me to feel safe with her in my home?”

Her words slice me open. I’m not that bad.

No, I’m not kittens and bunnies, but I’m not that bad. I glance down at my outfit. Jeans.

Tank top. My black hair falls in front of my face. It doesn’t matter. She made her decision before she met me. I bury the hurt, step into the room, and welcome the anger. Screw her. “You might want to listen to her. I’m a f**king menace.”

The shocked expression on their faces is almost worth being here. Almost. I press my lips together to keep from laughing at Scott. He wears a pair of chinos and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It’s a far cry from the outfits he used to wear when I was a kid: gangsta jeans that showed his underwear.

The woman is nothing like the girls Scott dated when he was eighteen. Her hair is a natural blond instead of bleached. She’s thin, but not alcohol-diet thin, and she looks kind of smart. Smart as in she probably finished high school.

She sits at a massive island in the center of the kitchen. Scott leans on the counter across from her. He glances at her, then talks to me.

“It’s late, Elisabeth. Why don’t you go back to bed and we’ll talk in the morning.”

My stomach cramps, and a light wave of dizziness fogs my brain. “Do you have food?”

He straightens. “Yes. What do you want? I can fix some eggs.”

Scott used to make me scrambled eggs every morning. Eggs—the WIC-approved food. The reminder hurts and creates warm fuzzies at the same time. “I hate eggs.”

“Oh.”

Oh. The man’s a conversational genius. “Do you have cereal?”

“Sure.” He enters a pantry and I plop onto a stool at the island as far from Scott’s girl as possible. She stares at a spot right in front of me. Huh. Funny. I’m in arm’s reach of a butcher block full of knives. I can imagine the thoughts running through her single-celled brain.

Scott places boxes of Cheerios, Branflakes, and Shredded Wheat in front of me.

“You have got to be f**king kidding.”

Where the hell are the Lucky Charms?

“Nice language,” the woman says.

“Thanks,” I respond.

“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“Do I look like I f**king care?”

Scott slides a bowl and spoon to me, then goes to the refrigerator for milk. “Let’s tone it down.”

I choose the Cheerios and keep pouring until a few toasty circles trickle onto the counter.

Scott sits in the chair next to mine and the two of them watch me in silence. Well, sort of silence. My crunching is louder than a nuclear bomb blast.

“Scott told me you had blond hair,” says the woman.

I swallow, but it’s hard to do when my throat tightens. The little girl I used to be, the one with blond hair, died years ago and I hate thinking about her. She was nice. She was happy. She was…not someone I want to remember.

“Why is your hair black?” The lawn ornament at the other end of the island has officially become annoying.

“What are you exactly?” I ask.

“This is my wife, Allison.”

The Cheerios catch in my throat and I choke, coughing into my hand. “You’re married?”

“Two years,” says Scott. Ugh. He does that googly-eye thing Noah does with Echo.

I slide another spoonful of Cheerios into my mouth. “When I’m done—” crunch, crunch, crunch “—I’m going home.”

“This is your home now.” Scott has that calm tone again.

“The hell it is.”

Allison’s eyes dart between me and the knives. Yeah, lady, a couple of hours in jail and I’ve moved from destruction of property to sociopath.