Read Kyland (Sign of Love #7) for Free Online

three or four months we made do with canned. And then when the spring came, Marlo and I watched the ground with something close to glee as the first shoots unfurled.
    You had to appreciate the small things in life when the big things made you want to curl up in the corner in the fetal position and give up.
    "Hey, Dusty," I greeted her when I was ready to check out.
    She didn't acknowledge me and still didn't look up, blindly grabbing at my items until she felt something, glanced at it, and typed the price into the cash register.
    "So how's life?" I asked, leaning my hip on the counter.
    Dusty finally looked up at me, a blank expression on her plain face. "Life sucks," she said.
    I nodded to the magazine in her hand. "Not for those Kardashians."
    She narrowed her eyes, smacking the gum in her mouth before glancing quickly at the magazine and then back at me. "Khloe and Kourtney are taking over the Hamptons," she offered.
    I nodded slowly, running my tongue over my front teeth. "Must be nice."
    "Yeah," she said. "Must be real nice." Then she grinned, showing me a mouthful of rot—commonly referred to in these parts as “Mountain Dew Mouth.” Then, as if to make my point, she picked up a half-full bottle of Mountain Dew and took a big swig. I struggled not to flinch. She finished ringing up my items, I paid, took my bags, bid her farewell, and walked to the door. As I was walking through, Dusty called my name and I turned around and looked at her questioningly.
    "Rusty is a rat-faced motherfucker," she said.
    I blinked at her and tilted my head. "Yeah," I agreed. "He really is."
    She gifted me another brown and yellow grin, stuck her hand up and gave me a thumbs-up sign, and then plastered the magazine back up to her face. I left the store.
    I started walking back toward home, lost in my own world, trying to decide what I'd do today. Marlo was working and then she had plans with some guy she'd met at Al's. I really wished she wouldn't have anything to do with the guys she met there—most of them were far from worthy of her. I thought Marlo and I had good reason for distrusting men, but while I had sworn them off, Marlo had decided that dating lots of guys she didn't care about meant she was the one in control.
    Marlo had opened her heart once, and things hadn't gone well.
    A few years before, she had met Donald , a young, handsome executive in town for some big corporate meeting at the mine. He'd come into Al's every night for a week just to sit in my sister's section and watch her work, talking about fate and destiny, which swept her right off her feet just like he was her prince charming come to rescue her from her dreary existence. As if any prince was ever named Donald —that should have been her first clue right there.
    She kissed him up against his shiny, red BMW and he made all sorts of promises to her about moving her out to his condo in Chicago. Then three minutes after she'd given him her virginity, he drove her to the base of our mountain and dropped her off at the side of the road. When she asked him what happened to the condo in Chicago, he laughed at her and told her he'd never bring an ugly, bucktoothed hick home with him. And then he'd sped off, splashing mud up on her new, white sweater, the one we'd walked six miles into the Evansly Wal-Mart to buy, the one I could tell made her feel pretty. At least up until then. After that, Marlo never seemed to feel pretty, and she'd started laughing with her hand over her mouth to hide her teeth. Truth be told, they were sort of bucked, but not in a way that was ugly, in a way that showed off those full movie star lips of hers, in a way that was sweet and endearing. In a way that was Marlo.
    Whenever I thought back to the day we excitedly walked through the aisles of Wal-Mart, talking about how her night would go, squirting testers of perfume on our wrists, and spending the last of our money on a sweater for her date, it made me so angry. Angry that we'd allowed