Free PRIDE: A Bad Boy and Amish Girl Romance (The Brody Bunch#1) by Sienna Valentine Page A

was a metallic screech that rang through every spoke of the wheel and made our car shudder to a halt at the very top.
    Instinctively, I seized Reid’s arm. He laughed and looked over at me, his grin lopsided, but warm. “Easy, easy. Just some technical difficulties, I’m sure. That’s all.”
    “I don’t know what that means,” I breathed, remembering quite urgently that I’d been holding my breath. My face felt much too warm, especially at this height with the cool breeze stinging my cheeks. “But you don’t seem worried, so I suppose I shouldn’t be.”
    “Don’t look down there,” Reid told me, reaching over with his free hand to tilt my chin up. I let him. His hand was so warm. “Look up. At the stars.”
    Though my chest was tightening and I was only just beating back the panicked tide rising inside me, I obeyed Reid’s command and turned my gaze upward. The night was so black above us, like an unfathomably large ink stain that never began and never ended. There were a few wispy stretches of clouds lazily rolling by, tinged a bluish-purple, but they did nothing to conceal the vibrancy of the stars. They shone like crystals and seemed much larger and brighter than I’d ever seen them before. Then again, none of the oak trees back home were quite this high.
    The pressure in my chest faded. The tension in my shoulders abated too, and I let out a little sigh. Beside me, I heard Reid chuckle. “Boy, you Amish girls really don’t take any risks, do you?”
    It felt like an insult, but I couldn’t be sure. Reid often spoke in a semi-mocking tone, though everything that came out of his mouth that had to do with my people seemed derogatory, at best. Pursing my lips, I told him, “We just don’t see the value in senselessly exposing ourselves to danger. That’s all.”
    As usual, I’d failed to strike a nerve in Reid the way he did with me. He just laughed. “What, you mean like this?”
    Before I could realize what he was doing, Reid had lifted the lap bar and was standing on top of his seat, very carefully balancing with his arms out to his sides. A pit opened in my stomach and I gaped at him, eyes wide as he bent his knees and began rocking the car.
    “Reid! Stop!”
    “Stop?” He gave me an incredulous stare, then threw his arms open even wider. “But I’m king of the world!”
    I wanted to grab him, but what if it knocked him off balance? What if Reid plunged to his death because I was so frantic to stop him from doing just that? He wasn’t listening to my pleas, though, so words wouldn’t do. I put my hands over my face instead. If I couldn’t see him, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. “Lord God, you are going to get us killed…”
    “Hasn’t happened yet,” Reid replied, and I hugged my knees to my chest. As soon as I did, I felt him stop and slowly, cautiously sit back down. A moment later, the lap bar was encroaching on my space and I sat up straight, letting him lower it back into place before me. “Hey, come on, Sarah. I was just…”
    “Fooling around. I know.” I looked away from him, admiring the city’s skyline. Bright Falls was modest, as far as cities go—or so I’d heard tell from Hannah—but I had no real basis for comparison, so it all looked huge and sprawling to me. We must have been overlooking downtown, because the buildings were high—higher than us, even!—and towered over their surrounding small businesses and homes. Office buildings, surely, where people dressed in sharp suits so they could sit at a desk all day, banging away at a machine. Just thinking of it made me sad and claustrophobic. People weren’t meant to spend all their time indoors. How did they ever find time to bask in the sunshine, in the warm rays of God’s love?
    “I don’t understand this place,” I said after a moment, so softly I wasn’t certain, at first, if I’d said it at all. “Or the people in it. Everything here is so… foreign to me. It seems like ages since my life was