Modern Wicked Fairy Tales: Complete Collection by Selena Kitt Read Free Book Online Page A

of his guys would show up, but after a while
that anxiety had faded.
    Now they both practiced a very zen life
together, living in the moment, not talking about the past or the
future. At first she was full of questions, but she found him less
than forthcoming about his life, especially about his brother—not
that she blamed him. Carlos wasn’t a happy subject for her either.
Silas had clearly chosen a different life and didn’t want his
family to know he existed. Whatever his reasons, they were his own,
and who was she to question or argue with him about it?
    She poured bubble bath into the water,
watching the suds rise, delighted. Sponge baths were tolerable and
got the job done, but this was pure luxury. She could feel layers
of grime washing off her skin and she sank down into the tub, her
hair spreading around her like a dark fan.
    The thought of Silas doing all of this, the
work it must have been, actually brought tears to her eyes. She’d
never meet a sweeter, gentler soul, and she couldn’t help comparing
him to his brother, the two of them so opposite they could have
been from different planets. Where Carlos was cruel, Silas was
kind. Where Carlos was selfish, Silas was noble. She saw the
similarities, too—their eyes, dark and deep, the curve of their
mouths, that bright smile, their humor and charm. That was the
thing Carlos had used to seduce her in the beginning, when she was
just a young girl.
    I’m not so old now, she reminded herself.
Just twenty-six, hardly an old maid. But she’d been practically a
baby when her father died, just turned nineteen, when Carlos had
taken her under his wing and guided her life down a pathway to
merge with his own. She’d been ready to take a scholarship to an
out-of-state college, something her father had been so proud of,
even if she had used her looks to obtain it—Jolee had entered and
won Miss Teen USA, the prize a full ride to Boston University, that
year’s sponsor. Her father had insisted she go, had even packed her
bags for her, even though she’d never been out of Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula in her whole entire life—and then the accident had
happened.
    It wasn’t an accident. Of course, she
hadn’t known that then. She’d been a lost, grief-stricken child and
Carlos had been waiting to swoop in and comfort her, convincing her
to marry him and give up that scholarship so far away from anything
familiar she’d ever known. She still couldn’t believe her naiveté,
how she had believed Carlos’s lies through the years, listened to
his excuses. And then, even when faced with the proof of her
father’s murder, she had allowed him to explain it away. She held
the paper in her hand—findings suppressed at the hearing that the
brakes on the logging truck had been fine after all—and had still
denied it as truth.
    She remembered it clearly enough. Her father
had kissed her goodbye that morning, grabbing a thermos of coffee,
stopping only to take a bite of the eggs she’d made for him. He’d
been on his way to talk to one of the union reps and Daryl had
pulled the chain outside on the big logging rig, informing the
whole neighborhood that he was there to pick her father up.
    Later Daryl tearfully told the cameras that
the brakes had failed.
    “I told the old man to bail!” he swore in
his testimony. “He couldn’t get his belt off. I tried to help him
but I had to get out of the truck. What could I do?”
    Watch her father sail off a ledge into a
ravine, apparently. Daryl broke his arm in the fall, but he was
alive. Her father had been trapped in the truck by his own
seatbelt, and all those years she thought it had been a mechanical
failure.
    They said the brakes failed, but the brakes
were fine. According to the report, they were just fine, and the
handwritten note— Your father was murdered- there was nothing I
could do about it - he was a friend and a good man—your husband
wanted him dead —pointed the finger clearly enough. But Carlos
had