Read Online Wrath - 4 by Robin Wasserman - Free Book Online

felt until Reed had greeted her with a kiss, ful y unaware that he was getting used goods, and her victory began to feel unsettlingly hol ow.
    “You miss it? Home?” Reed asked, nibbling on a piece of crust.
    Kaia opened her mouth to give Reed her wel -rehearsed speech on the wonders of Manhattan, from the sample sales and the gal eries to the way the skyscrapers sliced into the sky on a clear winter morning, from sneaking into club openings and showing up on “Page Six,” to meeting up at dawn for a goat cheese omelet and bread fresh from the farmers’
    market before sneaking home to bed. But she stopped before she said anything.
    “I don’t know,” she admitted—and it was the first time she’d let herself think it, much less speak it aloud. “Sometimes I miss it—I hate it here. But … I hated it there, too.” Another guy might have seized the moment to put on the fake sympathy, giving her a “comforting” pat on the thigh and maybe letting his hand rest there a bit too long.
    Reed simply asked, “Why?”
    “I don’t know.” And, with another guy, she would have taken this as her cue to heave a calculated sigh, designed to elicit pity or to highlight her ample, heaving chest. Instead, a smal , light shiver of air escaped her as her body sagged with the energy of wondering: What was wrong with her life? “There was my mother. Total bitch. And my—I guess you’d cal them my friends.” She laughed harshly at the thought. “But that wasn’t it. I just …”
    Reed took her hand—and she knew it wasn’t in sympathy or empathy, but out of a desperate need to touch her, because she felt it too.
    “I didn’t fit there. Not that I fit here,” she added, laughing bitterly.
    “Know what you mean,” Reed said quietly, shaking his head. “But what can you do?”

    Kaia didn’t say anything, just pressed his hand tightly to her lips. She could never say it out loud, but she knew that, bizarrely, she did fit somewhere. Here, with him. And at least there was some comfort in that.
    “Are we having a good time yet?” Harper asked snidely, wrinkling her nose after sipping a whiskey sour that tasted more like fermented lemonade. Kane had promised her a night to remember at an exclusive underground after-hours lounge at the outskirts of town. He’d failed to mention that by “exclusive” he meant “restricted to those qualified for membership in the AARP”; “after hours,” on the other hand, apparently meant “after the early bird special.”
    “How was I supposed to know that tonight was bingo night?” he protested.
    Harper stifled a laugh and glanced around. True, no one was actual y playing bingo—but with half the population of Grace’s senior citizens clinking glasses of stale Scotch and swapping sob stories about hip replacements and burst bunions, it seemed only a matter of time. Apparently, once a month the owner let his father use the lounge for his lodge meetings. Harper and Kane had had to sweet-talk their way in, just for the privilege of listening to the Elks, or Buffalo, or whatever they were, reminisce about the war and complain about how their children never came to visit.
    It wasn’t quite the pick-me-up they’d had in mind.
    “So, let’s hear it, Grace—what can I do to turn that frown upside down?” Kane downed his drink in one shot and rested his chin on his hands, as if overwhelmingly eager to hear her response.
    “As if you could help,” Harper said, but without bitterness. They’d known each other too long for her to put up a brave front—or to think that confiding in Kane would yield anything but apathy with a side of scorn. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “Don’t want to talk about him, you mean,” Kane said, with a knowing smirk. “Fine, then. What about her?”
    “Her who?”
    “The Siamese twin from whom you seem to have had a miracle separation? Miranda—who else? Ten years, the two of you are joined at the hip, and then suddenly, in your