Page 605 of Lodestar

“It’s kind of funny,” I teased, knocking into her with my elbow.

“It isn’t,” she argued. “It’s in bad taste.”

I smirked at theHarry Pottermeme. “You need to lighten up.”

“Today’s a somber occasion,” she argued.

“Didn’t stop you from wearing pink.”

She huffed. “A pink scarf. Everything else is black.”

I tried not to think about whatelsecould be black.

Or, fuck,pink.

I didn’t need to be getting a boner in front of a crowd of millions.

Especially not because of my cousin.

God, that sounded so bad.

But she wasn’t really my cousin.

What the fuck was it with me?

Did I get a kick out of the taboo or something?

First Victoria, now Katina.

Never mind Aunt Inessa.

I’d worry I was sick if my shrink hadn’t told me it was perfectly normal. The trouble was, it didn’t feel perfectly normal.

Not the way she made me smile.

Not the way she made me happy.

Not the way her obsession with pink always made me snort.

Not the way I wanted to hold her and to kiss her brow, to help her when she had one of her darker days.

I sometimes thought that was what made us so perfect for each other—we knew what real evil was. We could be each other’s soft place to land. We both had shrinks, we both had goals, and we both wanted to accomplish more than what our parents had achieved.

The only trouble?

She saw me as a friend.

A fucking friend.

I released a breath as she stepped out of the car, trying not to stare at her ass and how her skirt pulled taut around her hips.

“If she catches you looking, she’ll kill you.”

I smirked at Kat’s brother, Niall, the only one in the family who seemed to recognize my less-than-friendly feelings for Kat. “She won’t catch me.”

“You make itsoobvious,” he retorted. “Girls are gross anyway. Kat’s grosser than them all. Pink sucks.”

“You’ll change your mind about girls when you’re my age,” I promised him. “You ready for this?”

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