Page 1 of Their Best Friends' Bratty Little Sister

Chapter One

Sienna Gallagher stared straight ahead, glaring holes into everything in front of her, including the stewardesses, who were hardly to blame for her current situation.

She was so mad, her blood simmered. And she was forced to take sips of water, using her free hand, to ease the aridness in her throat after her yelling episode, which yielded zero results, by the way, while her other wrist was handcuffed to the armrest of the seat in her brothers’ private jet.

She yanked angrily at it once more, but she had long since lost her initial spunk to be free. It was too late now. She had been flying for well over an hour already, possibly two, maybe even three. She had no idea.

And it was all her brothers' doing.

They had bundled her up as she was, threw her onto their jet, handcuffed her to the seat, then sent her flying off to who the fuck knew where. They didn’t feel she needed to know that bit of information.

Okay, yes, she had pranked them out of a tiny sum of money, with the help of her best friend, Alyson Edwards, but she didn’t think this kind of punishment fit the crime.

First, because if they hadn’t removed her trust fund privileges and stripped her of all her cash and cards, she wouldn’t have had to resort to such measures.

Second, they could have at least told her where they were sending her off to. That was just plain rude on their part.

Usually, it was Eric, the sternest of them all, who meted out her punishment, but she had made both Blake, who was usually easygoing, and Grayson, who understood her better than anyone else, equally mad at her.

Pockets of guilt littered her conscience. She was just not getting it right recently, not since that one phone call that had changed everything yet again and sent her spiraling. She was tired and didn’t know how to feel normal anymore.

Years and years of therapy had helped a bit, but recently her demons had started to sing a different tune. She began to spend more wildly, made the worst investment calls, almost purposefully. Had put herself into vulnerable positions and now the world would probably be seeing her naked soon if she didn’t fix that problem soon.

At the end of it all, what she needed most was repentance. And maybe that one call was the answer she needed. She got to save a life after she had ruined one.

Yes, she was going about it the wrong way, but the end result would be the same. This way she would get to restore some balance for a mistake she had made when she was fourteen years old. This act was all the therapy she needed to put an end to what had been quietly consuming her the last few years. An end to the relentless thunderstorm it had morphed into, overnight above her head now.

She was a mess.

She understood that. But she had it all figured out. She knew exactly what to do to put the universe back in its rightful place. She would at least get to remove a good portion of the guilt now raining down upon her after ten years of trying to keep it at bay.

She would never be free of it completely, that she knew, not for what she had done.

One decision, where she thought she was being kind to someone with lesser means than her, had gone wrong and who knew she would be paying for that supposed kindness for the rest of her life. But doing this would alleviate her burdensome load a little at least.

Then her brothers had foiled everything.

Oh God.

She had left Alyson behind to face her beastly brothers by herself. Sienna had repeatedly told them Alyson had nothing to do with any of it. Everything was her idea, and she had dragged her friend into it, but they were too mad at her to listen.

She knew it wasn’t about the money she had taken from them. It was about her leaving without telling them where she was going. Sure, they could have found her in a heartbeat, but she wasn’t so blinded by her own sorrows to realize that in the space of that heartbeat, they would be wracked with worry about her.They loved her with an uncompromising fierceness.

She knew Alyson could take care of herself, though, and take care of the Gallagher brothers, but there was something about the way her brothers had reacted when they discovered it had been Alyson dressed three different ways, duping them out of three hundred thousand dollars, collectively.

Alyson’s involvement seemed to put them on edge for some weird reason. She had never seen her brothers "affected" before.

But it had been a perfect plan, too, before it went to hell.

The Gallaghers refused to listen to reason, took zero pity on her pleas, and didn’t tell her where they were jetting her to. They just cuffed her to the armrest, like she was some common criminal, gave the pilot instructions she wasn’t privy to, and then left.

And if that wasn’t the worst thing they could do to her, Blake pocketed the key to unlock the cuffs right in front of her before he filed out of the plane with the rest of her brothers.

Her cries about what to do if she needed the bathroom were met with a smart-ass, “Don’t plan to need the bathroom, then.”

She didn’t even try cajoling the pilots or the stewardesses. It was clear that they didn’t have a spare key, and even if they did, not one of them would go against her brothers’ wishes. They were the kind of men who demanded respect.

At first, Sienna had no idea how many hours they were in the air. Without her watch or a cell phone, it felt like forever, but according to the stewardess, it was only about four hours or so.

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