Free Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) by Samantha Snow Page A

that phone call.  It was ringing through his head the way a headache would, if he still got those.  He could hear the disappointment in her voice when she prodded him for depth of character he simply didn’t have.  He could hear her calling him a brat all over again.  Her voice with that word echoed throughout his brain like a lonely call bouncing off of the walls of an empty cave. 
     
    Still, he turned as she had asked, turned to greet his sister.  Caroline Wells, not a sister by birth but a sister of second birth, a blood sister.  She had been made before him, several years before, and because of that she thought of herself as a big sister, a sister who had the right to give him as much unsolicited advice as she wished.  Sometimes it was advice he heeded and sometimes it was advice he would just as soon ignore, but the advice kept rolling in all the same, just as it had for a century. 
     
    “What’s the matter, Philip?  Not happy to see me?”
     
    “Is it that obvious?”
     
    “Well, that’s no way to treat family.  I would have expected something more polite from such a cultured boy as yourself.”
     
    She spoke in the playful poutiness that always drove him nuts and he found that he was grinding his back teeth together, chewing on the insides of his cheek in the same spots he had chewed since he was a little boy (there were even permanent little swollen parts to serve as evidence).  He was doing anything he could to keep himself from reacting to her presence.
     
    He didn’t want to be goaded into a fight and although his tactics for avoiding them had rarely proved successful, he was willing to give it a shot.  This had started off as such a nice evening, turned into a fucking fantastic evening, and he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Caroline sweeping in and ruining it all.
     
    Although, by the looks of it, that was exactly what she intended to do.  Caroline was stubborn like a pit bull and once she got it into her head to accomplish a thing, it was pretty tough to get her off of it.  At the moment, for better or worse (and as far as he was concerned it was going to be for the worse), the thing she had in her head was him; his life and the way he was leading it.  He studied her face, wondering how long she would wait before diving into the matter, and she raised her eyebrows at him, giving him a little wink for good measure.
     
    “What do you think, little brother?  How do I look?”
     
    She did a full spin, a delicate little pirouette in the middle of his office floor, and then came to a perfectly timed stop.  Philip rolled his eyes again.  That was not a question he was about to answer.  The thing was, she was beautiful.  No, she was more than that.  She had been beautiful before she had been turned.  The turning had made her otherworldly.  She had long platinum blonde hair and icy blue eyes, a lean body that reminded Philip of one of the sleek big cats caged up in the zoo.  She was lovely, formidable, even. 
     
    The only woman Philip had ever seen who was as beautiful as Caroline was Megan, which was made all the more rare by the fact that Megan was only a human.  Just thinking about her, about the way her skin had given way beneath his cold fingertips, the way her hot breath had felt against his ear, made him shiver.  She was the kind of girl who could easily consume a man’s thoughts.  She was the kind of girl who could easily consume everything around her.  
     
    “Well?  What’s the matter, Brother?  Cat got your tongue?”
     
    “You look fine, Caroline.”
     
    “Fine?” That simulated poutiness again. “Is that all?  Not the best kind of compliment.”
     
    “Gorgeous, OK?  Is that what you want to hear?  You don’t need me to tell you.  You know you look good.  You’ve been told more times than you could possibly count.”
     
    Caroline laughed, delighted by his easy irritability, and slunk across the room, plopping herself into a chair and