Free Bewitched by Bella's Brother by Amy Lane Page A

Mr. Pickles, the monkey who was never neutered in spite of what Chad’s worst fears had been, had Asa laughing all over again.
    Together, they made it through the day, and by the time
    they put Jordan to bed that night, the boy didn’t mention his mother at all.
    “He’ll think about her,” Bella predicted. “He may even
    ask about her. And that’s never going to go away. But as long as she doesn’t come back to mess with him, I think he should be all right for now—but I’d invest in a shrink, Asa, that was pretty brutal.”
    Asa grunted and changed the channel. They were all
    downstairs, watching television. Sebastian hadn’t even
    attempted to get his computer out; he knew for a fact that Bella would need him as her own personal pillow this night, and she didn’t prove him wrong. He sat in the corner of the couch with one leg up and the other on the ground, and she lay on top of him, like a lover—or a sister—and rested her head on his chest.
    “I just wish we could go back to the place where I could pretend none of it happened,” Asa growled, and Bella slanted a look at Sebastian full of questions and slyness.
    “We all have our damage, Asa,” was what she said. “You
    just need to stop beating yourself up for yours.”
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    Asa darted her a disgruntled look. “I could say the same to you, Isabella, you know that, right?”
    “Conversation over,” Bella snapped, and Sebastian
    looked down at her and grinned.
    “What?” she demanded.
    Sebastian lifted a shoulder. “It’s just funny to see him get the better of you, that’s all. It doesn’t happen often.”
    She stuck an elbow in his ribs and said, “Hey—do you
    want me to get up?”
    “No, no no…,” Sebastian said hastily—the back door
    and all of the windows were open, and it was actually a little bit chilly in the room, after the oppressive heat of the foothills during the day. She was keeping him warm, and he was softening her fall. It’s what they did for each other.
    Sebastian looked at Asa sprawled out in his chair and
    watching Burn Notice with the concentration of a fanatic. His slightly crossed blue eyes were scowling over that fine
    Roman nose, and his lean mouth was compressed with his
    attention to the television. His long body, chiseled on
    construction sites and honed by the runs Sebastian knew he took most mornings, was balanced somewhere between
    intellectual attention and physical at-ease, and that shower of brown-gold hair was up in a heavy queue on the crown of his head. Sebastian had seen Bella do that when she wanted her own hair off her neck, and Sebastian’s fingers just itched to pull the band out and feel the coarse, smooth lot of it ribbon across his hands.
    Bella whimpered, needing comfort, and Sebastian’s
    arms went around her shoulders a little tighter. Of course, sometimes, you took what you could get.
    Apparently Asa was made of sterner stuff than that—or
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    his philosophy was a little sterner, anyway, because
    Sebastian had just finished his shower and was lying in the lush, rich bed that he’d been treated to for the past week, when he heard Asa knocking on Bella’s bedroom door.
    The walls weren’t particularly thin—a thing Sebastian
    never thought he’d miss. (He and Bella used to lie awake at night and roll their eyes at each other from across the space between their twin beds every time Sammy had Chad over to have sex. Chad was pretty good at keeping quiet, but Sammy had a rather predictable repertoire of sex talk, and he tended to shout it in order. On the nights he was particularly vocal, they’d see who could lip sync the best when Sammy had his
    “people four apartments down can hear you” orgasm.)
    It didn’t matter; he might not have been able to hear the exact words, but he could definitely hear the stretched-thin quality of Bella’s voice, and he knew when Asa gave up for the evening