Bewitched by Bella's Brother Read Online Free PDF Page B

them wistfully. “Alas, I can’t go,” she
    murmured. “Too many kids, too little time. But look at
    something for me, wouldya? You know, some sort of large-
    sized Goth-mom thing.” Julie was pleasantly round. “Don’t buy it, you know, because I can’t afford it—but look at it and say, ‘Yeah—that weird old woman from work would like that!’
    It’ll be just like I was in high school again.” Sebastian and Bella had been holding off on a laugh as she spoke, but by the time she was done—with a pitch-perfect and straight-faced delivery—they were giggling helplessly, holding onto each other in support.
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    “We’ll do that,” Sebastian told her, looping an arm
    around her shoulders. She was barely five-foot-two, and she grinned up at him from eyes that were young, even if her face looked comfortably middle-aged.
    “Oh my god—honey, if I’d known you in my theater
    days, I would have been so helplessly in love with you!”
    Sebastian cocked his head, bemused. “I bet you say that
    to all the gay men,” he said, hoping she hadn’t thought the T-shirt was just a joke.
    She hadn’t. “Oh yeah—you name a gay theater major, I
    had a crush. Worst. Gaydar. Ever. That’s okay, though,” she said, grinning. “When you’re that bad at figuring out who’s gay and who’s not, you pretty much have to be liberal, or you’re going to offend a whole lot of people.”
    Needless to say, Sebastian and Bella were completely in
    love with Miss Julie-middle-aged-mom-with-a-philosophy-
    doctorate well before they’d finished their salads. She was acerbic, funny, and obviously in love with her three children and their equally middle-aged father. She was also Mike
    Greavy’s most helpless victim.
    “Here, watch,” she said grimly as they walked back
    inside the store. “He’ll have changed my schedule just to dick with me, because he knows he can’t do it to you.”
    She was right, of course, but the good news was that
    she worked Wednesday night now instead of Wednesday
    morning. They totally tabled the shopping trip and asked Julie if she wanted to bring her kids to Asa’s to swim.
    It wasn’t until they’d clocked out and were driving
    toward Asa’s work site that it hit Sebastian that he and Bella had just changed their plans twice in one day in order to help make Jordan’s summer a little less lonely.
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    “And ours too,” Bella pointed out gently. “It’s not like we hung out a lot with the people down at the Davis store.”
    Sebastian shrugged. “Yeah, well, you and me are
    usually pretty self-sufficient.”
    Sebastian was driving this time; since he knew the
    roads now, he didn’t have any excuses to let Bella take the wheel. That didn’t keep him from catching the enigmatic look Bella sent him.
    “What?”
    “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing. I….”
    She looked out the window. “I don’t think self-sufficient is what my family needs right now, that’s all.”
    Sebastian took his hand off the gearshift and used it to stroke her hair back from her face. “Are you ever going to tell me what happened?” he asked. “You love your brother very-much-a-lot; even a selfish bitch like me can see it. Why haven’t you talked to him in so long?”
    He had to shift into second again as they neared a
    curve, so he moved his hand, but he saw Bella lean into the touch as it left her. She was not usually so needy.
    “Not now,” she sighed, moving away to rest her forehead
    against the window. “I’m sure you’ll hear it before the end of the summer, and then it will seem like I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but not now.”
    They got to the construction site not long after that, and as Sebastian set the parking brake with a loud scritch , he caught sight of Asa and made a similar sound in his throat.
    Gods.
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    The man was