Immortal Need Read Online Free

from her face with a kind hand and then forcing her to look up. “He always hated someone being late. I imagine he’ll kill himself when he feels death is near just to beat the Reaper.”
    Ayah laughed despite herself. Her father’s best friend, and lawyer, was an exceptionally punctual man. He’d be reading her father’s will today, something that Ayah didn’t quite understand. Her father had never been rich, and all that would be left was the house the children had grown up in.
    Why all the fuss? It had been agreed upon some time ago that Ayah would keep the house. Aidan, her eldest brother, was a chiropractor and his wife a chef. George was a traveling choreographer who had danced with some big-name stars. Of all the children, only Ayah had made her home with her father. It was not to say she didn’t have the same ambition running through her blood that the others had. She was just, inherently, a family-oriented homebody.
    Taylor had the looks of a model, all darkness and light wrapped around a curvy package. Even Aidan and George were gasp-worthy when women saw them. Ayah was the plain Jane in the family, and the one who took after their father. Her hair reached her shoulders in a straight fall, her nose a little too upturned, her green eyes almost too big for her bronzed face. Where Taylor was toned and fit, with a silhouette that would make a man’s mouth water, Ayah had learned to look at herself as a woman who was pleasantly fleshy.
    As the youngest child, she had always taken care of the others, and her father, after her mother had passed away in a car crash when Ayah was thirteen. That thought firmly in mind, she mopped the tears from her face. She still had one final thing to do, one last step that would help her let go of her father. They had buried him just the day prior, and now she had to make it through the reading of the will.
    “Come on,” she said then, coming out of her sister’s arms to stand. “Let’s get downstairs.”
    “Are you sure you’re okay? We never should have left this all to you, Ayah, and for that I’m sorry. I guess…I guess we’re all just used to you being the one to rely on,” Taylor said, standing.
    “I’m fine, really. I just miss him.”
    “We all do, baby. We all do.”
    The old colonial that she and her siblings had grown up in held loving memories with each step. She could remember her father playing hide-and-seek with them in the upstairs room when they were smaller, and she could remember holding her sister in her bedroom when she had her heart broken the first time. At the top of the stairs, her father had argued with George that dancing was no way to make a living. Then at the bottom of the stairs, she could see so clearly when her father had hugged George to his chest, three years later, when he landed a place in a dance company, and told him how proud of him he was and that he had been wrong. Pictures of birthdays, holidays, and the ever-expanding line of grandchildren covered the walls of the home. Memories, there were so many memories here, and now she would have to keep it going on her own. Would she ever be able to look at the mantel loaded with pictures of family weddings, starting with her parents’ photo, the same way? Or the settee her father had read to her on? She wasn’t sure, but tried not to dwell on it as she passed the warmly furnished family room and stepped into the great room.
    Seven heads swung her way, their gazes showing varying shades of pity. She picked out the dark heads of her brothers first. Aidan’s gray eyes held unshed tears, and George’s brown ones were slightly red. They stood and came to her, leaving their wives at their seats.
    “Hey you,” Aidan said, pulling her into a bear hug. He towered over her five-foot-six frame by six or so inches. His cologne smelled woodsy.
    “If you hug me any tighter, I may have to make an appointment with you,” she teased, trying to hold herself together. Aidan laughed quietly, and