Charred Tears (#2, Heart of Fire) Read Online Free Page A

family that cared.
    She knelt on the ground and bent to look under the bed. Nothing was there.
    “Hey, house. Can you bring back the scrapbooks?” she asked quietly.
    She waited, staring at the space under the bed. Nothing happened. Disappointed that the house might not be as easy to work with as Chace’s cabin, she sat up.
    The scrapbooks were neatly sitting on a freshly made bed.
    “You are awesome,” she told the magic house. “How about some pizza?”
    We have a pizza date.
    A pang of heartache hit her hard enough to render her breathless. She’d planned on having a pizza date with Chace, who agreed, then took her to a meeting where he betrayed her. She wasn’t able to think of pizza without also recalling him and what he’d done.
    “No pizza,” she whispered. “Ice cream.”
    Not the best start to my morning …
    “No, wait. Pizza. I’m not going to let him stop me from eating my favorite food!” she growled. Pizza and Chace shouldn’t hurt me like this! “Ice cream. Okay, ice cream, house. Final decision.”
    She glanced around expectantly and spotted the large bowl of ice cream on her dresser. With a grin, Skylar hopped up and crossed to it. She took one bite and almost choked, forcing it down.
    “Oh, ugh!” she muttered. “House, you’re cool. But let’s take this completely off the list of future requests. No more pizza-flavored ice cream. Ever. Sorry for the confusion, but no.” She set it down and grimaced.
    Skylar pulled on workout pants and left her room, hoping to catch Gavin before he went to bed for the day. The house was quiet, the door to his room closed.
    Disappointed, she returned to her bedroom. The ice cream on the dresser was chocolate.
    “Thanks. I need the chocolate,” she murmured and took it. She sat down on the bed and began going through the scrapbooks once more. Uncertain what she sought, she relaxed when she saw the smiles from the small family.
    Gradually, the sense of cold despair from her dream left her, replaced by a longing but content feeling. She’d been a happy kid. It was all that mattered.
    When she’d passed a few hours with the scrapbooks, she ordered the house to put them away and got dressed, once again roaming the island. It took one more pass around for her to admit how good of a job her father had done finding a place remote enough that not even planes flew overhead.
    She spent an hour testing the house to see how responsive it was to her, and then parked on the couch, waiting for her father. With more questions than answers, she desperately wanted to give him the chance to enlighten her before ordering the house to take her away.
    He rose just before sunset. With a glance at her, he made himself breakfast wordlessly and took his food outside to the beach.
    Skylar rolled her eyes at his back and trailed, sensing her solitary father wasn’t accustomed to having someone else in his house.
    “You can only fly around at night?” Skylar asked as she dropped beside him on the beach, watching the evening darken the sky.
    “I can fly during day. But I don’t have my full powers. Flying is all I can do during day,” he replied. “And if I shift during daylight, I can’t shift back until nightfall, which makes it hard to hide.”
    “You won’t fit in the magic house as a dragon,” she observed.
    “No.” He glanced at her. “You figured out it’s magic.”
    “By accident. Same way I did Chace’s.”
    Gavin made what sounded like a growl low in his chest at Chace’s name. He set his unfinished breakfast aside.
    “You really don’t like him,” she murmured, eyes on the first few stars that appeared above the horizon. “Because he traded me?”
    “Because he’s not capable of caring for anyone but himself. Not the shifters he should be protecting. Not the protector who is supposed to watch out for him. If he didn’t sell you out to me, he’d have sold you out to someone else. Someone worse than me.”
    Is someone like that possible? She was