Page 47 of Wife Number One

I felt bad for making them get up after only a few hours of rest, but we just couldn’t afford to linger.

I headed up the stairs to the room I knew was Rebel’s from when I’d stayed with her years ago. I knocked quietly on the closed door. “Alice? It’s getting late. Time to get up.”

There was no sound from the bedroom beyond.

I tried again. “Rebel is making Pop-Tarts for breakfast. I don’t know if you remember those from back before…” Before Josiah had come into our lives and changed everything. I remembered Pop-Tarts from when I was a kid, but Alice was younger than I was. Not even twenty-one yet. Would she even remember the foods we’d had back then?

I twisted the door handle and pushed it open.

Rumpled sheets were twisted on the bed, but there was no dark-haired sister curled up beneath them.

I frowned and moved farther into the room, knocking on the door to the adjoining bathroom carefully because I knew it connected to Kian’s room on the other side also.

Nobody answered, and I took a chance, sliding open the pocket door.

The sink top was littered with Rebel and Kian’s toiletries—deodorant, toothbrushes and paste, an electric razor.

But no younger sister.

“Alice!” I called out loud as I hurried back out of the room and down the hallway to the stairs. “Alice!” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice so I didn’t scare the kids eating in the kitchen.

Fang stuck his head out of the door of his room. He had a phone pressed to his ear, but he murmured, “Hang on a second, Hawk,” into the phone.

I was too busy stressing about my sister’s disappearing act to crinkle my nose at the mention of Fang’s MC friend. I’d met that man before and I didn’t care to repeat the process.

“You okay?” Fang asked me.

“Alice isn’t up here.”

But Rebel poked her head out of the kitchen on the ground floor and stared up at me on the second-floor landing. “Did you try the bathroom?”

I nodded, picking up the pace and running down the stairs with Fang behind me. “She must be out in the pool house with Kyle. I’m going to kill her.”

Rebel caught my arm as I ran past. “Hey. She’s young and stupid. If you find her naked in his bed—”

I stared at her with huge, horrified eyes.

Rebel’s mouth opened into an O-shape. “Oh, I mean, I’m sure they’re not. I’m sure she just went down there early for coffee…”

Fang rubbed a hand over his face and grimaced.

He still had the phone pressed to his ear, so I wasn’t sure if the face was about whatever Hawk was saying on the other end, or if it was about Rebel assuming my sister and Kyle were having sex the moment we got away from the commune.

But hadn’t that been exactly what I’d done when I’d left?

It had ended so badly that was the last thing I wanted for Alice.

I rushed out the back doors and skirted the sparkling blue pool. The small cottage-style house beyond it had the shades all pulled down, everything quiet on the inside.

I didn’t bother knocking. I was too intent on stopping my sister from ruining her life by sleeping with some man she barely knew.

“Alice!”

But another empty room met me.

Rebel jogged in a second later and took in the same empty room. “They’re not here,” she said, stating the obvious.

I spun around and stared at her, the idea of my sister having sex with some guy suddenly the least of my worries. I almost wished I had walked in and found them naked, him pumping into her body while she moaned.

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