Page 1 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
Chapter One
THERE'S A RIGHT WAYto end a fourteen-hour double, and I'm currently living the other one.
The right way has a bus in it. A couch. And the sad triumphant half of a sandwich I've been thinking about since noon.
The wrong way has two men in it, an alley, and the dawning understanding that the twenty dollars in my pocket is about to become their twenty dollars.
"Hand it over, sweetheart."
A smart girl would know how to pick her battles, but since this smart girl (meaning me, duh) is also broke...
"So, here's the thing—" My shoulder blades find brick. "I'd genuinely love to. But this twenty and I've just been through a lot together, emotionally—"
"Now."
A smarter girl would start screaming here. Then again, a smarter girl wouldn't have taken the wrong way in the first place. She would have known that the shortcut behind the noodle place turns into a shortcut to death after dark. But...whatever.
I can't turn back time, but I can scream.
And so I open my mouth...and only get exactly one syllable out.
Aaaah!
And then one of them is just...gone.
Not gone-gone.
Gone as in a hand closes over the back of his jacket and lifts him out of my personal space the way you'd pick a stray hair off a sweater. The second guy lasts a little longer. But not much.
When it's over, there's a man standing between me and the street, and he's not even out of breath. Whoa.
Two grown men, gone, and my rescuer hasn't even fixed his cuffs, and he's...um...how do I put this?
It's not my first time to see a handsome guy, but this man...is unlike anyone I've seen. He's tall and broad, his suit fits him better than anything has a right to, and his face is the kind that makes me forget that I was almost robbed—
"You're hurt."
—until he says that.
I'm hurt. Or so he says. I should probably focus on that, but my brain isn't working at the moment, with his voice going straight to the backs of my knees, low and even and expensive, the kind of voice that's never once had to ask for anything twice and knows it.
And here's the truly unfair part. It isn't just the face, or the shoulders, or the suit. What makes my heart beat dangerously fast is his calmness. It's not Zen-like, but more like mafia-boss-cool, and no, I'm not in favor of syndicated crime, but you get what I'm saying, right?Right?
So anyway, this rescuer of mine...
He's that kind of cool, with how he took two men apart without mussing his hair, and now he's watching me like violence is something he keeps in a drawer and only takes out when it would be rude not to.
I have met exactly zero men who could do that, and maybe that's why my borrowed heart chooses this exact moment to remind me it's in there.
Slow down, heart!
I need to calm down. It's not good for me to be excited like this. I need a distraction like...oh, right, he did say I was hurt earlier, didn't he?
I check my elbow, and...oh. I see it now. A scrape. But honestly? I've had worse from a spatula.
"I'm fine," I tell him. "This is nothing. You should see the other twenty." I'm not expecting him to laugh at anything, but he doesn't even crack a smile, and his too-handsome face remains stoic. He really should lighten up. Instead of looking at me like I'm a math problem he didn't agree to solve, he should...
"Have dinner with me."
