KANE (Slater Brothers, #3) by L. A. Casey
I had a headache.
A pounding headache.
My stomach was queasy and I felt a little dizzy.
I felt like shite.
I felt like this because I was scared.
I was so damn scared... and all because of a damn plastic stick!
I tried not to look at the stick that would decide my fate as I sat in the main bathroom of the Slater brothers’ house. I focused on the tiled floor and the grout that cemented them in place just to avoid looking up. I counted the tiles and each time I only got to ten or eleven before my head automatically turned to look at the counter.
No.
I hissed at myself and stilled my movements before I could take a peek. I didn’t want to know what the stupid stick said, but I had to know. It was eating away at me and had been for the last hour and a half. I looked up at the ceiling and blinked.
I wish you were here, Ma.
I needed my mother. I needed to vent to somebody about the fucked-up day I’d had. I swallowed and pictured my mother in front of me, and I mentally unloaded everything to her. I told her everything.
Today was a pretty eventful day to say the least.
It was moving day for Keela and Alec. They moved out of their box-sized apartment into a beautiful house, directly across from the brothers’ place in Upton. As a leading member of the fucked-up friendship group we upheld, we were all drafted to help pack up boxes in the old apartment and then unpack them in the new house.
Everyone had some fun packing up, but we also had arguments... and a lot of other bullshit to deal with. Keela had more bullshit than anyone to deal with.
My girl was stressed, and I put it down to moving because that was stressful, but she revealed to me that she wasn’t doing good and it wasn’t just because she was moving to a new house. She was having nightmares about an incident that happened with her uncle and the brothers thirteen months ago. Keela never liked to talk about what happened. I knew the gist of what went down, but not everything. I didn’t know what caused Keela to be so scared... scared enough to still be having night terrors so many months later.
Her nightmares weren’t her only problem though. She wasn’t comfortable with how fast Alec was moving with their relationship. She wanted to enjoy him in the dating game, but he wanted to get married and have babies right away.
The kicker?
Alec knew none of this. Nothing about her nightmares and diddly-squat about her hesitation with what she wanted out of their relationship. This all came out of course... during a surprise housewarming party that Alec arranged. Keela wasn’t impressed at all. She had a bit of a meltdown, and if things weren’t bad enough already, her uncle, cousin Micah and Micah’s wankstain of a husband, Jason, showed up.
You know, the uncle who was really a gangster, the cousin who put the B in Bitch, and her husband who was the biggest dickhead ever? Yeah, those bastards. They showed up, and they caused arguments and physical fights. They had found out about the party thanks to my bastard little brother, Gavin. He was somehow close to Brandon and Jason now, however that situation was too fresh for me to think about right now. I needed time before I even thought about the little fucker that I helped raise.
The whole situation was bad, but what really put the cherry on top of our fucked-up-day-cake was the stupid thing myself, Branna, Bronagh, and Alannah did in Keela’s bathroom for fun.
Before shit hit the fan, we had some drinks to unwind from a long day of packing and unpacking and we thought it would be funny to take pregnancy tests. And it was funny... until Keela showed up and knocked the pregnancy tests into the sink and mixed them up. That wouldn’t normally be a problem, but guess what one of the test results turned out to be?
You guessed it.
One of us was fucking pregnant, and we had no clue who it was.
We had Keela to thank for that.
It got scarier when Alannah ruled herself out of the line-up because she swore there was no tick in her clock for at least six months. So that left Bronagh, Branna, or myself to have the pleasure of being with child.
Ha! Pleasure my arse.
I prayed it was either Bronagh or Branna who was pregnant, simply because those two were in committed relationships, while I wasn’t. The closest I ever got to being in a relationship was the hate/hate thing I had going on with Storm—and he was a dog. And he hated me.
We were going to see who the unlucky lady was, but Keela ran out of pregnancy tests, which, of course, was just fucking typical. She was on her way to go get some more tests when the bastards I mentioned before showed up and things got put on the back burner for an hour or two.