You Make Me Read Free

feeling the blush race across my cheeks. It was real. Ethan had just proposed and I had the hefty weight of a rock on my finger to prove it. Aubrey was jumping up and down and grinning.
    Ethan grabbed me in a bear hug and kissed me, hard. “God, you make me so happy.”
    I laughed and let him squeeze me tight. It was perfect. Ethan was perfect. And we would have a perfect life.
    But then over his shoulder I spotted a guy standing at the top of the stairs, in the shadows.
    I stopped laughing.
    My stomach clenched and my breath caught.
    Ethan jostled me and I fought to focus on what I was seeing.
    It couldn’t be…
    But it was. The dark head that had seemed familiar earlier was familiar.
    Because it was my first love. My soulmate.
    Heath.
    Watching me.

Chapter Two
    I blinked, sure I was wrong. But I wasn’t. It was him, with shorter hair and broader shoulders.
    “Heath!” I yelled out, overcome with shock and joy that he was there. Alive. Not dead in a ditch or in prison. “Oh, my God!”
    Stepping away from Ethan, I squeezed his forearms to indicate it was okay. Then without thought for the fact that everyone was still staring at me or that I had just gotten engaged sixty seconds earlier, I ran in my high heels the ten feet to Heath hovering in the shadows and threw myself at him.
    “Hey, Cat,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me tight against his chest. His lips buried into my hair.
    I sank against him, breathing in deeply. He smelled the same, earthy and masculine. He felt different, bigger, more muscular, but his hands were just as I remembered, strong and tender, and his voice was low, casual. A thousand memories assaulted me all at once, running along the coast, going out on the water in a stolen boat, laughing, talking. Kissing.
    “Oh, God,” I whispered, pulling back to study his face, to cup his cheeks and outline his bottom lip with my thumb. I couldn’t believe it was real. He was real. “You’re alive. You’re here.”
    The corner of his mouth turned up. “I am.”
    “Caitlyn, who is this?” Ethan had come up behind me and his hand landed on the small of my back.
    I suddenly realized how close I was to Heath and I jerked back, cheeks flushing with heat. My hands shook and my voice sounded high-pitched and breathless. “Ethan! This is Heath, my…
    There was no way I could explain who Heath really was to me. How much he had meant. How I thought I wouldn’t survive when he left. What it meant to have him punch a hole in my perfect world now and walk back into it.
    “My brother,” I finished.
    As Ethan’s eye’s bulged, Heath gave a soft snort of derision beside me.
    “You have a brother?” Ethan asked, sounding completely astonished, as he should. “I didn’t know you have a brother.”
    I did. A biological one that I no longer spoke to and who I didn’t acknowledge, but Ethan didn’t know that, and I never wanted him to.
    “Is that what I am?” Heath asked, sounding both amused and annoyed. “A brother from another mother, Cat?”
    “He’s my foster brother,” I added. “My family always took in foster kids and some stayed longer than others. Heath stayed long enough that we got close.” In a manner of speaking.
    “I didn’t know that. You never mentioned foster siblings.”
    Shit. Ethan was looking at me like he didn’t know me. But he did. He knew the me I wanted to be, the me I could be. I didn’t want to drag him through my past. But here was Heath. My past. And who I had once considered my present and my future.
    Speaking of…
    “Where the hell have you been?” I asked Heath, my initial excitement turning to frustration as I realized that he had just appeared out of nowhere and hadn’t even bothered to speak to me first. Let alone any sort of text or other contact.
    He shrugged. “Around.”
    Seriously? I went straight into pissed off. Four fucking years. Four years and not a word. “That’s not an answer. I thought you were dead!”
    “Not