Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

A profiler, an emotion reader, and a lie detector went to a party.…

“If we’d had normal childhoods, we wouldn’t be Naturals.”

You’re the one who really feels things. Michael, Lia, Dean—they learned very early in life to shut down their emotions like that.

“I’m not a victim,” Sterling said, following my line of thought so closely it was eerie. “I’m a survivor, and Dean is the reason that I survived.”

You look at Redding and see all the ways the two of you are the same. I look at him, and I see someone who’s so angry and so terrified of that anger that there’s not room for anything else. Or anyone else.”

He wasn’t happy about coming here, but at least he’d escaped living with a ticking time bomb. And then he’d arrived to find Dean, who had every reason in the world to be angry and was fighting that rage every step of the way.

He never looked at me the way most guys look at me. He was watching out for me, not watching me.”

Someday, I was fairly certain that Lia would write a book entitled Making an Awkward Situation Worse.

“Okay, I’m calling it,” Michael announced when the quiet got to be too much. “I’m turning on the radio. There will be singing. I would not be opposed to car-dancing. But the next person whose facial expression approaches ‘brood’ is getting punched in the nose. Unless it’s Cassie. If it’s Cassie, I punch Dean in the nose.”

“Touch her again,” Michael told Christopher conversationally, “and Dean will be the one trying to pull me off of you.”

la mejor escena OH POR DIOS

“That’s the problem, Colorado,” Michael replied, leaning toward me. “You want me to tell you what you feel. I want you to know.”

It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It’s the good ones.

“I know that you care about him. I know that you’re attracted to him. I know that when he hurts, it hurts you. I know that he never looks at you the way he looks at Lia, that you’re not a sister to him. I know that he wants you. He’s in over his head with you. But I also know that half the time, he hates that he wants you.”

“That’s the difference between the two of us,” Michael told me. “I don’t just want you.” Now both of his hands were on my face. “I want to want you.”

Dean pulled me gently toward him. His lips brushed lightly over mine. The action was hesitant, uncertain. My hands settled on the back of his neck, pulling him closer.

al fin

I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep living my life on maybes if I wanted to live.

If I’d chosen Michael, Dean would have understood.

“If it had been me in the woods, if I’d been the one to go with Briggs, if I’d been the one you saw at the exact second…”

SWITCHING SIDES 👋 no longer team michael cause wtf

They weren’t shutting us out. They were letting us in. Instead of taking away my purpose, they’d given it new life. This was a whole new world.