Heavy Metal (A Goddesses Rising Novel) (Entangled Select) Read Online Free PDF

money from the insurance policies to finish school. Sold the house, found a job in marketing.” She paused. “I know I look like a vagabond.” She gestured at her rumpled clothing. “But I had that job for three years. Somehow,” she muttered.
    “Somehow?”
    She sighed and set her fork down, though she’d barely eaten anything. “About a year after my family died, something started happening. Something weird.” She hesitated. Sam had seen what she could do, and he obviously believed in it. But a lifetime of skepticism, of listening to her family’s disgust, was difficult to set aside. So was three years of feeling like a freak.
    He waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he gave her a nudge. “Stuff like moving things around? Making things disappear or burn up?”
    “Yeah. Essentially.”
    “You sound like it was a surprise, though. Your mother never told you that you were a goddess? Never showed you her abilities?”
    “She didn’t have any.”
    “You’re sure?” When she nodded, he said, “Huh,” and set his elbow on the table, hand covering his mouth and chin, to study her. “So you knew nothing before your abilities emerged?”
    She shifted to prop her heels on the rungs of her chair, pulling her knees up and tightening her arms around herself. “Not really. It’s complicated.”
    “Are you adopted?”
    She shook her head. “Definitely not.”
    Sam set his fork on his already empty plate and leaned back, bracing his hands behind his head. Riley barely noticed the muscles rippling beneath his snug T-shirt. Okay, she definitely noticed. But she didn’t dwell.
    “So you lived your life not knowing you were a goddess. Your parents died before you turned twenty-one, when a goddess comes into her power. Your source is metal, obviously.” He waited for her to nod. “So you probably found out accidentally.”
    She cringed at the memory. “It was silly, at first. I was walking down the street with a friend and kept bumping into parked cars. She laughed that it was like I was drunk, only it was eight in the morning and I hadn’t had alcohol in days. But I wasn’t off balance or anything—it was like the cars were pulling me toward them.”
    “Hmmmm.” He looked thoughtful. “Every car?”
    “No. Older models mostly. You know, big-car-old-people-club kinds.”
    Sam laughed, the sound vibrating deliciously. “What? Big car old people club?”
    “Yeah, you know.” She sketched a wide space with her hands. “Big boats that only old people drive. It’s like they’re a club.”
    He shook his head, still chuckling. “Okay. So, the ones that are made of steel instead of fiberglass.”
    “Right.”
    “Does it still pull you like that?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know why.”
    He sat up, his voice taking on the educational tone from the video. “Goddesses have no sense of their source or how their abilities will manifest until they turn twenty-one. It can come on suddenly or subtly, and it changes as you adjust and adapt. What else happened?”
    “I bent my pen. One of those Cross ones, the refillables? While I was writing with it, it got all misshapen. Then in a staff meeting, my boss said something nasty to me, I don’t even remember what, except it embarrassed me and made me mad, and next thing I knew, his chair had dumped him on his ass.”
    “And that’s when you knew you were making this stuff happen, that it wasn’t just happening around you.”
    “Right.” Riley was surprised at how easy it was to talk to Sam. He acted as if this was all normal stuff that happened to normal people. But when she thought about all the things she’d done since that day, the idea of describing them wore her out.
    He read her mind. “Let’s skip ahead. I bet you experimented and found that it was the metal itself that gave you power.”
    Riley hated that word. Power . She’d read comic books, enjoyed superhero movies as much as the next person. She knew what “power” meant, but