Read Girl In Pieces for Free Online Page A

just Kat being Kat. Isn’t she adorable? No one forces her to act like an adult. No one but me and when I do, I’m the bad guy. I’m the villain.”
    There was a vibration in Brian voice, a hint of malevolence towards her unrestrained delight. I recognized that need for control over something that refused to be restrained. I’d heard it sometimes in the voices of Doms who played for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t because they felt strongly about getting their way, it was that they wanted to punish someone for refusing to give them the power they thought they deserved. And it always, always ended badly.
    While I’d spent the last three weeks brooding and antisocial, I’d missed the fact this anxiety was now infecting Brian’s mannerisms. He certainly looked better on the outside, but everything he did was high-strung and aggressive. He ground his teeth as he spoke. He twitched and shifted and fussed with his fists, calloused and clenched.
    Under no circumstances could I let Brian anywhere near his sister.
    “Are you ok?” I asked him carefully. “You seem really on edge.”
    Brian ignored my question and stared at his phone instead, silent and taunting. He picked it up and turned it over, back and forth, as if it were the most interesting thing in the room.
    We both jumped when it rang and he damn near dropped the thing.
    “I gotta take this. Give me a second?” Brian nodded at his door in a not so subtle way of saying Get the fuck out .
    I suppressed my annoyance and stood up. “Fine, but hurry up. We have a problem.”
    He flipped the phone open, already turning away from me in his chair. “Don’t we always.”
    This time when Brian said, Hey , it wasn’t in his terse, desperate voice he’d been pacing around his office with before I’d walked in on him. This one was softer, like he was talking to a baby animal. There was a little bit of begging in his voice and for a moment I wondered if he was talking to Kat, but that seemed doubtful. It wasn’t their mother either, who was half-suburbanite, half-pterodactyl. If Brian had cooed at her, she’d have slapped him across the face. I’d known ex-Navy Doms who were less alpha than Mrs. Koile.
    A woman, maybe. For his sake I hoped so.
    An impatient glance over his shoulder kept me from overhearing any more of the conversation. He didn’t say anything else until I’d left the room.
    When I pulled the office door closed to give him some privacy, I discovered that he was definitely not talking to Kat.
    Because Kat was standing at the bar.
    I stopped short and watched her run her palm across the polished bar top, pausing her fingertips at the gouges made by someone years ago with the tip of a knife and a love of someone named Susan. She traced the letters, nearly smooth from years of hands and elbows and shot glasses. Kat kept herself turned away from me, eyes darting from the dance floor to the front door as if she couldn’t decide whether to run or throw herself into the middle of the room and never let go. She crossed her right arm over the small of her back, alarmingly reminiscent of the position I’d tied her up in. I could almost feel the restraint keeping her from spinning out onto the dance floor, music or no.
    This girl.
    Three weeks without her and it took all my strength not to lift her off her feet and slide her onto the bar top so I could look at her and touch her and keep her from running away. God, even from across the room I could almost smell the vanilla scent of her shampoo.
    “Kat?” I rubbed the back of my neck and grimaced at the sound of her name. Her body tensed then swiveled towards me using the bar for balance. Her eyes widened and I was momentarily caught by them before I realized with a shock that she didn’t look like the Kat I’d lost three weeks ago.
    She wore black slacks and a robin’s egg blue shirt that traced her hourglass figure and settled over the flare of her hips. She wore flats and tights under her pants instead