Read Online Bewitched by Bella's Brother by Amy Lane - Free Book Online Page A

tiptoe to
    kiss his cheek. “Yeah. Give us some time.”
    Sebastian had a sudden feeling of displacement as he
    watched her go. This wasn’t his family. It wasn’t. Something was screaming at him that it was time to walk away. How
    could he be here? He didn’t understand family drama, he
    had no experience dealing with this, he would really be more helpful in his room, with the covers over his head….
    “How much did you hear?” Asa asked, his eyes still
    looking out over the porch to the fall of the hill.
    “Enough,” Sebastian muttered, and then told the truth.
    “All of it. Enough to know why you and I keep running into each other’s heads whenever I open my mouth.”
    Bewitched by Bella’s Brother | Amy Lan e
    60

    “I enjoyed it,” Asa said, and Sebastian almost choked on his own tongue. “I did. Deirdre and I hadn’t touched in so long, and then I saw….” He shuddered. “I saw what I saw.
    And it was pretty awful, and I got very drunk, very fast, and sat down on a couch in the basement rec room, and when I woke up?” A shrug—so very casual for such a big thing.
    “When I woke up, someone was touching me, and they liked it, and I liked it, and I came.”
    “Asa, that wasn’t your fault.”
    “It was all my fault.” Asa nodded, as though trying to
    explain it to himself. “I saw her acting erratically, but I couldn’t put the clues together. She left Jordan at home alone while she went off and got high, and I didn’t listen to him prattling on long enough to figure out what he was
    saying. He used to talk your ear off. But not anymore. She used to hole up in her room for days at a time; by the time the school system got ahold of me at work, it had been going on for a month. He missed weeks of school. It was all my fault.”
    “You trust people,” Sebastian said, aching. “You have to trust people. You have a wife who says she’ll take care of what you both love most… it’s not your fault she forgot what she loved most. You pass out on a friend’s couch, you trust that someone’s not going to come along and drop your pants.
    It’s not your fault.”
    “It’s not my fault I came in a stranger’s mouth?” Asa
    asked bitterly. “It’s just so ugly. All of it. I didn’t want… I didn’t want Bella to know. I didn’t want you to know. I… I didn’t know how to tell you, though. That whatever it was you were thinking, when your mouth went into overdrive,
    that maybe I was thinking it too.”
    Bewitched by Bella’s Brother | Amy Lan e
    61

    Sebastian wasn’t sure what kind of sound he made, but
    whatever it was, Asa risked a look over his shoulder. “I’m not such a catch now, am I?”
    “Not true.” Sebastian almost laughed. “My last serious
    relationship was with a married man who kept promising to leave his wife. You’re a definite step up.”
    Asa struggled with a laugh and scrubbed at his face
    instead. “I should go see how Bella and Jordan are doing.”
    “Don’t leave,” Sebastian said, feeling bad. “Look. We’re out at the pool. You’ve got the afternoon off. I’ll go get you a beer. We can sit and watch the cows over on the other hill.
    We can pretend I never opened my mouth and your ex-wife
    never came over and the world is a pretty place. I’m an art history major—trust me. I’m good at it.”
    Asa nodded. “Okay. I… I don’t have any better ideas.”
    Sebastian nodded, and his stomach—which had turned
    cold as soon as he’d seen Deirdre—started to warm up again.
    Started to feel hopeful. Well, stomachs could lie, he thought, but his stomach wasn’t listening, and as he rustled through the kitchen, he found some chips and pretzels for the beer.
    Bewitched by Bella’s Brother | Amy Lan e
    62

Chapter 4
    SEBASTIAN was good with the casual story—he and Bella
    usually told them together now—but he had a sense for
    when someone needed to be entertained, and he liked to put that knowledge to work.
    With this in mind, he gave Asa his