The Ms. Tubbs incident?

Twins?

“Twins?” I repeated, out loud this time for everyone’s benefit.

Scout cocked her head to the right, sending a wave of hair over her shoulder. The florescent lights shone across it, making it look like it was made of glass. “Jase is my brother.”

“No, he’s not.” Of this I was absolutely certain.

“Oh, we just call them twins,” Joi said. “Jase’s mom married Scout’s dad when they were babies. They don’t look anything alike,” no kidding, “and Jase is technically a couple months older,” and a Shifter, “but they act like twins.”

“Five weeks to the day,” Scout said, correcting Joi’s math.

Liam’s random insistence on staying away from the Hagans finally made sense. Jase was the Shifter he ran into the other day, and Scout was “the strange girl”. Something that felt exactly like jealousy stabbed me in the gut. Liam had already seen Scout. Met her. Talked to her. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. My hand immediately went to worry a piece of paper I always kept tucked into my pocket.

“Do you have any siblings, Alex?”

I had zoned out and missed the last bits of conversation, but the sound of Meg saying my name brought me back.

“Yeah, I’ve got a brother.” A brother who got to know Scout in the real world first.

“Older or younger?” Meg quizzed.

Scout was listening intently. Was it because she wanted to know more about me, or because we were talking about Liam?

No. I wasn’t going to think like that. I was going to do exactly what I said I was going to do. I was going to let her get to know me, and use every single ounce of charm I possessed to make her like me. I could do that.

It’s destiny, my mother’s voice whispered through my head, and my hand once again went to the worn letter in my pocket.

“He’s two years, ten months, and four days older.” I spoke directly to Scout, and because I was trying my hardest, I threw in a wink. Judging by the splash of pink across her cheeks, it worked.

“And your parents?” Meg asked. “Do you live with both of them? A single parent? A parent and a step-parent?”

“None of the above. They’re dead.” If you say it real fast you run a smaller risk of tripping over the words or, worst case scenario, getting all choked up like some soft-hearted girl. “Liam is my guardian.”

I worried that Meg, who I was going to rename The Pit Bull for her ferocious focus, would continue down that same line of questioning, but instead she asked, “Where did you live before coming to Timber? That isn’t a Kentucky accent.”

“What do y’all mean, it ain’t no Kentucky accent?” I was laying it on thick, which garnered a smile from Joi and a predictable glare from Scout. “I reckon I picked up a nice one living up in Libby, Montana.” Who knows. I might have if I’d ever actually visited Libby, Montana.

“Libby, Montana?” Meg’s face pinched up. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a little north of here.”

From what I could gather, most of the people in this class had worked on the school paper before, and therefore the teacher saw no need for actual instruction. Or it could be that she forgot her Alzheimer’s medicine and didn’t know she was supposed to be teaching something. Whatever the case, we did nothing but sit and talk for the entire period, which was exactly the miracle from heaven I needed. Without yet another boring lecture on academic responsibility and grading scales, Scout was forced to converse with me. It took me all of five minutes to realize she was just as smart and funny as I always knew she would be. If I hadn’t been in love with her before, I would have fallen the moment she gave an in-depth and item-by-item description of everything she kept in her zombie survival kit. How could I help it? The girl not only knew what a Kukri Machete was, but she owned one and knew how to use it. Female perfection.

She tried to dodge me once class was out, but I wasn’t having it. I was going to have to go eighteen hours without being near her. I needed every second I could get to have an ample amount of material to obsess over until then. Not only that, but I wanted to properly meet her brother now that I knew he wasn’t trying to hook up with her. It was obvious the two of them were close, and with any luck I could kill two birds with one friendship. He could help me get close to Scout, and I could get his pack to cooperate with Liam. It was pretty much a win-win situation, which Liam would realize once he finished yelling at me for not following his orders.

I normally wouldn’t put much faith in anything a scorned wannabe girlfriend says about a guy, but as we closed the distance between us, I thought Ashley’s assessment of Jase’s character might have been pretty accurate. He had a girl pressed up against a car, his tongue more than halfway down her throat while his hands massaged her flat butt. I’m all for getting up close and personal with someone you’re into, but not in a parking lot filled with curious on-lookers.

Either he was too distracted by hormones or his sense of smell was really weak because we were only a few cars away before he tensed and stopped trying to eat off the poor girl’s face. At least he didn’t have to look around to find me. His eyes instantly narrowed in our direction, moving quickly from me to his sister and back again.

“What are you doing here?” he growled.

Awwww… Look. The little coyote thinks he’s a big, bad wolf.

No, I couldn’t think that way if this was going to work. Jase wasn’t just another less dominant Shifter. He was Scout’s brother.

“Well, I was walking to my car,” I said, purposefully misinterpreting his meaning. I hoped to have a normal, human conversation, especially since the entire school seemed to be milling idly around our section of the parking lot, but he wasn’t having it.

“I meant here at this school, in this town.”

Like every other question I couldn’t fully answer, I gave him as much truth as I could. “We thought it would be a nice place to settle down.” It had lots of woods to run in and was just far enough away from the Pack to have some privacy. Or so we thought. Of course, we also thought this would be just another recruiting stop. I looked at Scout and something in my chest swelled to the point I thought I might choke on it. “I had no idea it would be this nice,” I said, somewhat embarrassed to hear all those swelling emotions evident in my voice.