Page 80 of Pack Kasen: Part 2

“And you just…” I surprise myself with a good long list of curses. “And I hate your hair. It’s too long.”

I don’t, but it feels like an easy thing to hate.

He doesn’t crack a smile. “I could do with a haircut.”

I’m still in his face and his hand is fisting my hair when we lunge at each other. Teeth clashing, his fingers delving into my back, gripping my ass and hauling me into his chest, slanting his mouth to deepen our violent kiss.

And his kiss…

That kiss is everything I needed a kiss to be.

He growls, wrapping his arms so tight around me as if he never intends to let me go.

I’m falling and I want to keep falling forever.

We’re on the ground, fighting with our clothes when my hip bumps against something hard.

My book.

My economics book, a tangible reminder of my future.

I grip it and slam it into the side of his neck.

He breaks the kiss with a growl, and I kick out. Both feet planted on his rock-hard abs. He slams into the ground feet away, and I’m up on my feet a split second later.

“Kat…”

Like the coward I know I’m not, I run away from a man I can’t kill, no matter how much I wish I could, as I scrub my hand across my mouth to wipe all traces of that kiss away.

I run from my feelings.

But those stupid, idiotic things he awakened in me follow.

“You can’t run from what we have, Kitty cat!” he yells after me.

22

KAT

Iused to think I was intelligent.

I pulled myself up from foster care.

I was Trash Girl, splashed across the national papers. The girl found living like a wild animal on the streets, digging through trash to survive.

But I made something of myself.

I didn’t let foster care break me.

I refused to let Blaine’s betrayal crush me.

I graduated from high school as the top of my class.

Then I stopped being Rylie Cooper so I could be someone else. Someone who didn’t have a past I was ashamed of.

I became Kat Meadow, a name I plucked—I thought at the time—out of thin air, but it’s a name that bears a striking resemblance to Kataleya Prairie, the girl I was before I became Rylie Cooper. Because the people who raised me were not my real parents. I know that now.

The mom I grieved for and the dad I hated for what he did to me were not my parents at all.

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