My Best Friend's Brother (A Bashir Family Romance Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

outsider and, as Annika explained to me, it would cause a huge stir if “some white girl showed up.”
    I decided to go through my closet and cobble together some outfits for the new school year. Before leaving, Annika stopped in my room. She was wearing a beautiful Indian sari made of turquoise silk, and she was holding what appeared to be another sari in her hands.
    “Oh wow, that’s gorgeous!” I gushed. She had lost her early teen pudginess and was blossoming into a lovely woman. No doubt Stephen Pearsal was still drooling over her.
    “Mom got it from New Delhi last month.” She draped the other sari across my bed. It was light pink and fringed with matching crystals. It was stunning.
    “Here, she has this one made for you…but she’ll tell you she bought it by mistake and can’t return it.”
    I ran my fingers over the delicate silk. The shimmering silver detail was impressive. It would be the nicest piece of clothing I owned.
    “Really? Wow. That’s…so nice. I need to go thank her.”
    “You’ll have to do it later. They’re in the car waiting for me.”
    After Annika left, I carefully held the sari up to my body. In the mirror, I could see that Mrs. Bashir knew what she was doing when she picked this color. The light pink matched the rose in my cheeks, and my pale skin didn’t look washed out all, but dewy and fresh.
    What the hell. I pulled off my jeans and t-shirt and draped the sari over my shoulders. The classic Indian dress couldn’t disguise my ethnicity, but I somehow felt like I belonged in it. I threw my t-shirt and jeans into the laundry basket. Might as well wear this while finishing the laundry. Where else am I going to wear it? Dairy Queen?
     
    Downstairs in the laundry room—which was larger and nicer than any room in my trailer back home—I felt a little overdressed in the silk sari while drizzling fabric softener into the washer, but it felt nice to have the run of the house for a few hours prancing around, feeling like an Indian princess.
    Well, the princess who not invited to the ball anyway .
    I noticed that the weekly maid service hadn’t put away a few stacks of clean laundry, so while waiting for my cycle to finish, I started distributing them around the house. The last stack was dark grey towels—definitely not from inside the house. Mrs. Bashir’s bathrooms were all meticulously decorated in browns, greens and blues.
    Then it dawned on me: these must belong to Dev’s room above the garage. I grabbed them and trudged over. I hadn’t seen that room since it was converted from storage space years ago, and I was curious to take a peek in the Dark Master’s Lair.
     
    I climbed the stairs to his door and knocked, just in case, but I knew he was with his family and they wouldn’t be back for a while. When no one answered, I gathered my courage and entered half expecting to find animal sacrifices or Satanic pentagrams painted on the walls.
    Instead I was hit was faint traces of his cologne reminding me that he was probably naked in there just hours before. I silently reprimanded myself for lingering on that thought for too long and then clicked on the lights. I knew then that dark grey towels definitely belonged to him; everything inside was various shades of grey, black and cold steel…well-suited to his personality.
    The room was meticulously clean and sparsely decorated. A desk with his laptop sat on one side of the room and a bookshelf filled the other wall, the top shelf displaying his awards and accomplishments from high school: captain of the debate team, honors society, first place in track and field. A guitar leaned against the side of his bed.
    I didn’t know he played...
    And then I walked over to his bed and saw something odd on his bedside table. It was a Texas Monthly magazine…and opened to my article.
    He was reading it? How strange. I didn’t know what to make of it.
    I set down the towels on his bed and then noticed that next to the magazine was an