The Monster (Boston Belles #3) - L.J. Shen Page 0,112

awake, her eyelashes fluttering before swinging her long, lean legs over the bed and walking over toward her door.

For the third time, I banged on the window, exasperated. Pretty sure Romeo didn’t have to deal with a woman who had the hearing of a fucking air fryer.

She jumped in surprise, turning around, her eyes meeting mine from across the room. When the sight of me registered, she ran toward the window.

Atta girl.

Nix was coming back to the arms of her favorite monster.

She unlatched the window open, and in one swift movement put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me with all her power, sending me flying back down. Quick on my feet, I grabbed onto the gutter, hanging onto it for dear fucking life, my legs swinging in the air.

“Merry Christmas to you, too. I see you decided to gift me a crazy bitch this year. I’ll take it.”

“You expected a gift?” she spat out from somewhere above my head, sounding … well, not half as glad as I thought she’d be to see me. “What on earth are you doing here, Brennan?”

Luckily, I put a lot of effort into ensuring my upper body was strong and did suspension exercises and pull-ups with Mitchell four times a week, so I knew that as long as the gutter wasn’t going to split in two, I could hang on it for a while.

Of course, I might lose my fingers in the process because of fucking frostbite.

“Well, I thought it would be a good time to talk now, after you’ve processed everything that’s happened.”

I was fucking obsessed with her. It made no sense at all. You were not supposed to crave what was offered to you in abundance.

“You mean you backstabbing my family and me, making my life a living hell, causing the very near wreckage of my parents’ marriage, and bringing destruction upon us that would take decades to emotionally reconstruct?”

When she put it that way …

“Grow the fuck up, Nix. I played with your daddy a little. It had nothing to do with you.”

“It had everything to do with me! You hurt the people I love and care about the most, knowing how many issues I had with my mother and about her mental state, and you kept it from me.”

“I had a good reason,” I grunted, pulling myself up and settling on the roof outside her window like a goddamn dog since she wouldn’t let me in. Aisling crossed her arms, arching an eyebrow. She wore horrible flannel pajamas with ferrets on them. I knew she used to have a ferret—Shelly—and wondered how the fuck I ended up being consumed by a woman who, despite her declarations of love for me, never tried to change her quirky weirdness to fit the mold and please me.

“Aw, you had a reason.” She clapped sarcastically. “This should be good. Let’s hear it.”

“Your father had an affair with my biological mother.”

“So did the rest of Boston. Allegedly,” she drawled. “Didn’t she work in the most ancient profession in the world?”

Ignoring her snark, I trudged through with the story that was frankly beginning to bore even me to death.

“Earlier this year, in November, the day I bailed on you—”

“Another prime example for why I shouldn’t give you the time of the day,” she added, “or night.”

I ground my teeth together, trying to keep my cool.

“I didn’t show up because Catalina had died, and I needed to fly to Atlanta to sort through her shit. I found some letters she wrote to your father. Letters in which she accused him of impregnating her then causing her to miscarry through beating her up. She claimed he was the one who forced her into leaving me behind when she left.”

That stopped her from unleashing another unhelpful remark my way. Aisling’s already milky skin paled further. She stepped back, biting her lip to prevent her mouth from falling in shock. I raised a hand, shaking my head.

“Are we…” she cleared her throat “…related?”

I was very close to falling from her roof and breaking my spine.

“What? Aw, fuck no, sweetheart. I’d be puking buckets into next year if that were the case. No offense. Their affair happened way after I was born. Point is, I discussed it with your father. Most of it wasn’t true, but some of it was. At any rate, that was why I wanted to torture him.”

“You could have told me,” she said finally.

“No, I couldn’t,” I groaned. “What would I have said? ‘Oh, by