so hard, I forced a smile for them and continued to eat my weight in junk food. Angie finally decided on a movie on the satellite’s pay-per-view channel before settling back and reaching for the pack of gummy bears I hadn’t noticed earlier. When I saw the opening credits, I snorted Diet Coke out my nose.
“What?” Angie asked innocently as she produced a napkin so I could clean myself and the comforter up.
Caleb sighed at his sister before wrapping his huge arms around me and pulling my head down onto his hard shoulder. “You have a weird fetish for Jonah Hill, Ang. It isn’t right. Maybe you should start seeing your shrink again.”
With my nose stinging from the Diet Coke now instead of the need to ugly-cry, a small laugh escaped me—the first one in weeks. Rolling my eyes as my stepsiblings continued to bicker at each other, I cuddled against Caleb a little more and soaked up their love for me while I still could.
Chapter 2
Kin
The sun was glaring through my window, forcing a grumpy groan from my throat. Reaching for my extra pillow, I pulled it over my face to block out the light, wishing I could block out the rest of the world in the process.
I couldn’t. I knew that I couldn’t. Didn’t mean I couldn’t wish.
The sound of the alarm on my phone, the alarm on the clock beside my bed, and the pounding on my bedroom door weren’t going to let me block anything out this morning. Grunting, I reached for my phone, silencing it with the swipe of my finger. The alarm on the clock beside my bed was a little more difficult seeing as I didn’t know much about the stupid thing that my step-monster had placed in my room when she had decorated the monstrosity of a room for me. So I reached for it blindly, jerked until the cord came free from the wall and the room was blissfully silent.
The pounding on my door continued, however. “Go away!” I yelled after lifting the pillow enough to free my mouth.
Apparently ‘go away’ meant ‘please enter at your leisure’ in this freaking house. The door opened and in walked my step-monster. I knew it was her, not because I’d lifted the pillow from my eyes, but from the suddenly overpowering scent of expensive perfume. The same perfume that had filled my lungs just the night before when Jillian had air-kissed each of my cheeks when she had met my father and me at the airport.
Of course there had been about ten cameras flashing as she had greeted me. Cameras that my step-monster had played it up for by greeting her husband with a kiss that had embarrassed me as well as made me want to vomit.
Gross.
“You’re going to be late for your first day of school, McKinley,” Jillian informed me in her cool tone. Honestly, after the warm greeting I’d received in front of the paparazzi the night before, it was a wonder if I didn’t get frostbite from the woman now. Of course, there were no cameras for her to play ‘happy family’ in front of today.
The pillow was suddenly pulled off my face and I glared up at Jillian as she pulled the covers off my bed and then turned and went to turn on my shower. A glance at the clock on my phone told me that I had a good hour before I had to be at school, which was only a ten-minute drive from my father’s Malibu house. Unlike Angie, I didn’t need an hour in the bathroom to get ready to go outside. A quick shower, a change of clothes, and I was set.
Jillian didn’t seem to care when I told her I didn’t need more than fifteen minutes to get ready. So instead of arguing, I crawled out of bed and trudged into the bathroom that was already steaming up from the shower. As I pulled my sleep shirt over my head, I ignored Jillian who was already setting out Dior makeup and some swanky salon’s hair products.
It took me five minutes to shower, most of that time spent on washing my long burnished red hair. When I turned off the water, Jillian gave me an odd look before turning back to what she was doing. A flat iron was already plugged in along with the hairdryer. Raising my brows at them, I dried off and then pulled my hair into a messy knot on top