Moon Glamour by Aimee Easterling (books to read to be successful TXT) 📕

a fun tussle. It was deadly serious. The eruption of smoldering resentments from alpha males forced to spend too long in close proximity. No way would it end easily or well.

The thought alone pulled fur out of my human skin. I needed to protect Tank....

No, I needed to protect Harper. Swallowing down my wolf with every ounce of willpower I could muster, I peered out into the night with simple human eyes.

Tank and Ryder were too fast and it was too dark to tell who was winning. But I smelled blood. This fight was nearing its climax....

Time, which had slowed to the speed of molasses, sped back up. The final seconds between attack and dismemberment had run out.

Then Lupe was on her porch. I felt her rather than saw her. Like a weighted blanket dropping over my head, bearing me to the ground.

Her words struck a millisecond later. “Stand down.” The command was simple, yet I found myself unable to breathe. The air in my lungs had turned to ice.

“Athena!” Flip-flops slapped against the ground as my sister raced toward me. Of course she’d run to help when she saw me collapsing. She’d never before been privy to the dark side of werewolves. She wouldn’t understand how dangerous it was for a mere human to step into this mess....

I struggled against Lupe’s invisible compulsion, the gesture doing absolutely nothing. Then my ears popped and the thousand-pound weight lifted off me.

I gasped an inhale. Waved an arm at Harper as I struggled upright. “I’m fine,” I whispered, knowing she couldn’t hear from forty feet distant.

Lupe was closer. “Take care of your sister.”

Not an order. A reprieve.

And even though my inner wolf growled in fury, I took it. Didn’t glance back to make sure Tank was okay as I speedwalked across the campground to meet Harper. Ignored the empty hole in my stomach that said I needed to tend to his wounds, needed to make sure his temporary alpha understood Ryder had been the instigator.

Because I was a lone wolf with a human family. No matter what my inner beast told me, Tank wasn’t my problem.

Harper was.

MY SISTER’S EYES DARTED wildly. Just like when she’d been little and had woken as I brought her father home from yet another bar, his legs unsteady, mine nearly folding beneath his weight. If we were lucky, Nick would be sedated enough that the two of us could roll him into bed. If we weren’t lucky, he would be verbally abusive, yelling after Harper as I shoved her out of the room.

Now, as then, her voice quavered. “What’s going on?”

Then, as now, I lied to protect her tender heart. “It’s no big deal. The guys were wrestling.”

Because Tank, Ryder, and Butch had been flung back into humanity by Lupe’s order. I’d seen that much during the fleeting glance I’d allowed myself before returning to my true priority.

“They were wolves,” Harper countered. “They were fighting. Are they going to be alright?”

I turned her around and started her back toward the cabin where another human slept. One who’d never even heard of werewolves. One who, I hoped, had never dealt with a drunk father either.

“This was a bad idea.” The words tripped off my tongue before I had time to consider them. Although, bringing Harper and Clara here was a bad idea. The question became—where else could my sister spend her break?

Definitely not with Nick.

“Don’t make us leave.” Harper’s feet were no longer moving. She’d stopped stock still, within easy eyeshot of the wolf-tussle aftermath that I had a sinking suspicion was going to get worse before it got better. “Clara and Kira are having fun.”

“And you? Are you having fun?” I hated the fact that Harper wasn’t able to relax into this camp experience for her own sake. Hated the fact that I’d dragged her into yet another mess when all she’d wanted was a little simple human fun.

“Of course I am.”

The scent of my sister’s lie gutted me. But her continuation held the aroma of truth.

“Well, I was having fun. The marshmallows. The pillow fight.”

Harper peered at me out of the corner of her eye. As if I cared whether her bedding maintained its structural integrity. Her shoulders, I noted, were straighter than usual. When she stood up for herself a second time, her voice was firm.

“Please let us stay.”

I expected her to bargain with me. But she didn’t...and I liked that. I liked the hints of backbone I saw growing in her after less than a day spent in Kira and Tank’s company. I liked thinking of my sister enjoying herself.

So I nodded, deciding on the hard route, the route that would require more doing. “Then you’ll stay here for the rest of break,” I promised.

For my sister, I would make difficult work.

“A MOMENT, ATHENA.”

Lupe’s voice caught me as I stepped back out into the darkness after tucking Harper in. Well, not literally tucking her in. After all, my sister was sixteen. Way too old for that.

But she’d let me straighten her comforter. Had smiled when I told her I had a sewing kit and would show her how to mend the tear in one side of her pillow tomorrow. She’d almost looked like a normal kid when she asked whether she and her friends could take the canoe out onto the lake the next afternoon.

I’d said yes. I always said yes if Harper’s request wasn’t a safety risk. Whether I had to mortgage more of my soul to gain access to the canoe would be a problem to be dealt with at a later date.

Not tonight. Because, right now, Lupe was too grim to be asked about canoe borrowing. Her anger curled around me before I’d taken two steps off Harper’s porch. Like an unfriendly python, it slithered cold and scaly against my skin.

“I’d planned this for next week,” Lupe continued, speaking at a normal human tone even though I was still forty feet away. “But apparently we’ll be moving