“Like you want me to do this.” My heart does a backflip as Travis brings his hands up to the first button of my top, undoing it and revealing a little triangle of skin beneath my collarbone. Then, he opens up the one below it. Soon, his knuckles brush against my breasts and he reveals my bra. I can feel the tension building up in his hands as he reveals more and more of my body. Any second now, and he’s going to snap, tear the rest of my top off, and make me his. The point of no return.
I press my legs together, bite my lip, and wait for it to happen…but before it can, something changes. All of a sudden, I realize what I’m doing. And who I’m doing it with. And what could happen if anyone walked in on us right now. It’s like the mature, responsible me just broke down the door to my brain after getting locked out by the horny, irresponsible me.
And that means that instead of letting Travis undo any more of my buttons, I jump to the other side of the couch and pull my open top over my chest, breathing hard as I try to collect myself.
“Oh my God, Travis…we almost…” I just know my face is an embarrassing shade of pink right now, and I can see the tension in Travis’ body. He was really, really ready to go all the way, and I think he still is. It takes all the energy I can muster not to look down between his legs and see for myself if that’s true.
“You don’t want to?” He asks, eyebrows raised and eyes blazing.
“I…I mean…we can be friends. Really good friends. But we can’t just…”
“Fuck?” Travis whispers, his voice low, deep, and dangerous. As soon as he says it, an intense heat floods through my body, and my grip loosens on my top. “Why not?”
I bite my lip, and my fingers start to fall loose from my chest, but before things go any further, I snap out of it, jump off the couch, and practically sprint towards my room. Once I’m safely inside, I lean against the door, half expecting him to try and come in so he can finish what he started. If he tried, I’m not sure I wouldn’t let him do it.
Oh, God, I can still feel his fingers opening up my shirt. His eyes devouring my chest. Without even thinking about it, my hand moves down between my legs, searching for the relief that I don’t dare get from Travis.
Touching myself to my own stepbrother…does it get any dirtier than that?
If it does, I don’t know how. But what I do know is that after this, this little lapse in appropriate behavior, this can’t happen again. After this, I’m going to stuff these feelings under my bed with that stupid poster, and Travis and I are going to be friends.
Just friends. We’ll be normal stepsiblings, and that’s all.
Because if we become anything else, it could destroy us both.
Chapter 7: Laney
Memories of Travis run down my body like the water coming out of the shower head. The summers we spent living under the same roof, uneasy friends, trying not to acknowledge his secret glances at my body while I tried not to look at his. It had to be that way, after the night he brought that girl over, and then he started undoing the buttons of my shirt…
You know what? Let’s make this a cold shower.
I twist the knob to the right, letting out a long sigh as the water starts to cool down. That’s what I get for repressing my feelings, I guess. Maybe if I’d let him undo a few more of those buttons, I wouldn’t have this ring on my finger now.
Where’d he get this, anyway? It doesn’t belong on my finger, but it’s a nice ring. Did he somehow visit a jewelry store while blackout drunk and buy it? That doesn’t make sense.
I furrow my brow and look into the diamond for answers. I wonder if he bought it off of some married woman on the casino floor…
“Laney!”
I gasp as I see Travis’ huge shadow on the other side of the shower curtain.
“Travis!” I poke my head out from around the curtain, hugging it protectively around the rest of my body. “You can’t just come in while I’m taking a shower!”
“Why? You’re not touching yourself, are you? Totally understandable, after what happened last night.”
“Don’t be disgusting! Get out!”
Travis puts his finger gently up to my lips.
“There’s someone from the casino out there, and they think we’re married.”
“So? Can they take it back?”
“Maybe. But you should probably come out and hear what she has to say.”
I roll my eyes and twist the water off, reaching through the curtain so Travis can hand me a towel.
There’s a heavily made up blonde woman in the bedroom, and she flashes me a knowing smile as I walk in. She looks familiar…I think she was our waitress last night?
“Hey, you two, how was your first night as husband and wife? I hope I’m not interrupting anything…” She looks at my thrown-on clothes and winks at me.
“No, perfect timing. I was just about to join Laney here for a nice, long shower.”
Travis wraps his arm around me, with his hand resting dangerously low on my side. Waitress or no waitress, if that hand gets any closer to my butt I’m going to punch him hard in the balls.
“Well, I definitely don’t want to keep her waiting, so I’ll make it quick.”
She pulls out two plane tickets. “I’m very happy to announce that you two are one of the ten lucky couples who are going on an all expenses paid honeymoon to the Royal Shores Hotel!”
I gasp as a couple blurry memories of last night come back. That must be why I married Travis! I wanted to win this contest so I could get into the Royal Shores…
“Holy shit, Laney, just like you wanted!”
“Uh…yeah…thanks!”
The waitress hands one ticket to me and one ticket to Travis. Then, she leans in close to me and lowers her voice. “See? I told you nothing’s up to chance here. Now you get to spend two whole weeks with this hottie and get away from work.”
Travis’ hand slides even lower, well into ball-punching territory, and my eyes get huge.
“Thanks!” I squeak, “I can’t wait.”
The waitress looks down at Travis’ hand, and gives me a knowing look. “Well, I’d better leave you to it. Have fun in the shower!”
Travis smirks. I can feel him trying to hold in his laughter as he hugs me to his shirtless body. “Oh, we definitely will.”
And just like that, the waitress is gone.
It’s a good thing, too, because Travis cracks up the second she leaves.
“Okay, I remember what happened now. You were talking about how you needed a scoop to get promoted at work. Then, you saw a brochure for a contest where you could win a trip to Royal Shores and you were like ‘Oh my god, Travis, please marry me! Please make me your wife!”
I squirm out of Travis’ grasp. “That’s not what happened!”
At least, I hope it wasn’t.
“Whatever you say, sis. But look!” Travis holds up his ticket. “We actually fucking won! Now you can find some celebrities hooking up, write an article about it, and move out of Nina’s with the money!”
It’s all getting clearer now. I didn’t marry Travis because I subconsciously want to fuck him, I married him for these tickets. But is it worth it? Sure, a career-making scoop is pretty much guaranteed at Royal Shores, but to get it, I’ll have to spend two weeks with Travis. I’ve spent less than a day with Travis, and he’s already aggressively hit on me about a hundred times, and he told that waitress we were about to fuck in the shower. If we go to Royal Shores, I’ll have to pretend to be in love with him. For two whole weeks.
And if we get caught, well, I don’t even want to think about what would happen. Nina would freak. So would, well, the entire world. Travis Carter marrying his stepsister. It’d probably be on the national news.
And that can’t happen.
I shake my head and take the ticket out of Travis’ hand. “It’s too dangerous, Travis.”
“What? Laney, we got fucking married for this shit.”
“I know, but we were drunk. What am I going to tell my bo
ss about how I got into Royal Shores? She’s a journalist. She’ll check my story, and then I’ll be done for.”
“You’re overreacting. I’ll just schedule some event nearby and you can claim you were tagging along. Come on, it’ll be fun. It’s fucking Hawaii.”
I shake my head. “It’s just too dangerous. We have to get this taken care of as soon as possible, and that means no honeymoon.”
I put the tickets down on the nightstand.
“Fine, but I’m holding onto the tickets in case you change your mind. And I’m pretty sure once we get back to LA and you spend five minutes with Nina, you’re going to be begging to go to Hawaii with me.”
I roll my eyes and head back into the bathroom to finish my shower. He might be right, though. I wanted to scream at that cocktail party, and I have a feeling that it’s only going to get worse.
But why did my lucky break have to come with an arrogant, oversexed stepbrother attached? If I say yes, he’s going to take it as some kind of sign to start hitting on me like he did when we first met, only probably even harder, because he’ll have nothing to distract himself with.
He’d be all over me…and he might even try to get me back into his bed. And this time, it’d be for real.
I shake my head and twist the shower knob all the way to the right. My shower’s going to have to be a lot colder to get my mind off of that.
Chapter 8: Laney
I take a deep breath outside of Anna’s office, holding her coffee in both hands so I don’t spill it. She likes it filled all the way up to the top, so it’s easier said than done.
When I enter her office, she’s sitting at her desk, shaking her head. “Oh my God, these are the worst fingernail implants I’ve ever seen.”
Anna looks over at me, and then swivels her computer monitor around so I can see.
“I mean, look at this.”
There’s a blurry, zoomed-in close-up of somebody’s hand on the screen.
“Wow, uh…weird.”
“Seriously. Who does she think she’s fooling?”
Anna Wolfe may strike fear into the hearts of everyone in Hollywood, but whenever I talk to her, I just feel like I’m talking to a mean, gossipy high school girl. As far as I can tell, that’s what she was, and instead of growing out of it, she turned it into a career. She’s good at it, too: she’s like a bloodhound when it comes to gossip, and her ability to sniff out celebrities’ embarrassing secrets is why she’s the boss around here.
“Nina keeps telling me I should get them…but I keep telling her that I don’t want to end up like that.”
“Good call. Hers are real, though, right?”
I nod, and Anna shakes her head.
“So how was your weekend?”
What? A question about my personal life? Usually Anna just thanks me for the coffee and goes back to what she’s doing.
It’s too bad I can’t tell her anything about my weekend.
“Uh…pretty good. Kind of boring.”
Anna’s cold, brown eyes lock onto mine and her lips curl into a smirk. “Kind of boring, huh? I don’t think so. I know about you and Travis.”
My stomach drops through the floor. I keep my composure, but I have no idea how. My hands start to shake, and I can feel the coffee slosh back and forth, rising dangerously close to the edge of the cup.
“Oh, yeah, I should have mentioned that. I did hang out with Travis.”
“You didn’t just hang out with him.” A drop of coffee escapes the mug, running down my side of the cup. I wipe it off with my thumb, as Anna swivels her monitor back towards me, revealing a picture of Travis and I walking into the casino.
“You were gambling with him.”
Yeah. Just gambling. Let’s go with that.
“Oh, uh…yeah. A little bit. Is that the sort of thing you want to know about, though? It seemed like it was too boring to tell you about.”
“Well, did he spend a lot of money? Did he hook up with anybody? Even boring news about Travis blows up our front page.”
“I mean, we were dragged to this cocktail party we didn’t want to go to, so we got drunk and played blackjack.”
Anna gives me a look that says “not helpful.” She looks down at her coffee, and I hand it off to her. Then, her eyes are glued to her computer screen, and she looks like she’s waiting for me to leave.
But I don’t leave. This might be the only alone time I have with Anna all week, and if I wanted to make a change so bad that I got married to Travis for it, I need to stand up for myself.
“You know, now that I think about it, something interesting did happen this weekend?”
“Oh, yeah?” Anna doesn’t take her eyes off the computer screen.
“Yeah. Travis asked if I wanted to come with him to Royal Shores this weekend.”
Coffee shoots across Anna’s desk as she turns to face me. “He did?”
“Yeah, he’s going to Hawaii to do some…promotional stuff…and that’s where he’s staying. I could go and keep an eye out for celebrity gossip.”
I kind of thought Anna would be happy at this news, but instead, she just looks really suspicious. “What kind of promotional stuff?”
“Well…I think he’s doing an event there. I don’t remember the name, though.”
Anna looks at me for a couple seconds, then turns to her computer, fingers dancing across the keys.
“Is he doing the Coconut Classic?” she asks.
Yeah, let’s go with that. “Yeah, that’s what it is, I remember now. The Coconut Classic.”
“Why would he do this? I’ve never heard of this in my life. But you’re telling me you can go with him and get into Royal Shores without a background check?”
“Uh…yeah. That’s what Travis said.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you tell me the second you heard?”
She’s got a point. I told her I had a boring weekend, and we both know that getting into Royal Shores is anything but boring. I’m about to play dumb and claim I didn’t know how huge that was, but I get a better idea instead.
“I was shopping it to other magazines as an exclusive, published story. The inside view from Royal Shores.”
Anna looks furious, so I cut her off before she can say anything. “But I decided not to sell directly to them because none of them would guarantee publication. They were scared of getting sued. But since you’re not…why don’t we make a deal? I give you dirt for the website, and in return, you guarantee my article gets published somewhere.”
Anna still looks a little angry, but she’s cooling off fast. I’m pretty sure this is how she does business.
“Alright,” she says, “But I’m only going to do that if the dirt is good. Story of the year good. And I think I know just the thing.”
After a few seconds of searching, Anna turns her monitor around again. “Guess who’s in Hawaii?”
On the screen, there’s a picture of two skinny legs sitting on a towel, facing a beautiful beach. I don’t recognize the legs, so I squint at the username next to them.
“Jason Hayward?”
“Bingo,” Anna says, “And look at the logo on the corner of the towel. He’s staying at Royal Shores.”
Yeah, I’d say there’s story of the year potential there. Jason Hayward is a boy band superstar with a swooshy haircut and a million fans that obsess over every little thing he does. Tori’s pretty much in love with him, but he’s not really my type…
“We both know why people like Jason go to Royal Shores…to hide from the paparazzi while they do something no one wants them to see. If you can find out what that is, or get me another story that’s at least this good, I’ll get your article published. Otherwise…it’s not happening.”
“Deal. And don’t worry, I’ll find something good. It’s Royal Shores.”
“I know. That’s the only reason I’m even offering.” Anna motions to her coffee-covered desk. “By the way, on your way out, could you send another intern to clean this up?”
> Chapter 9: Travis
“Would you like anything to drink?”
I look up at the flight attendant. “Got any whiskey?”
She smiles and pours some whiskey into my glass.
“And for you, ma’am?”
Laney looks away from the window for probably the first time since we hit the ocean. “Uh…I’ll have a water.”
I never thought water could look expensive until I see the fancy fucking glass bottle that the flight attendant pulls out to pour Laney some water. But this is first class on a luxury airline. Probably the nicest way to fly to Hawaii there is, courtesy of Royal Shores. And that means even the water’s going to be luxurious.
Laney looks down at her glass. “Thanks.” And now she’s back at the window. I wonder what’s so interesting out there.
Maybe this is her way of showing me she’s still mad at me for getting her off work. All week she’s been telling me how reckless that was, and how she’s not going to be able to enjoy herself at the hotel because it’ll be too dangerous there.
But I don’t buy that for one second. Not after I caught her looking at pictures of Hawaiian beaches on her laptop. Not after she packed that big-ass suitcase full of swimsuits, cocktail dresses, and suntan lotion. Five minutes after we get our shit unpacked, she’s going to forget all about how “dangerous” this is and start having fun.
Or at least, she’d better. Because if she pulls this glued to the window act for too much longer, I’m going to have to make it my personal mission to put a smile on that cute little face.
God, that face. Every time I see this girl, she looks better and better. Long, wavy black hair, olive colored skin that’s fucking begging to be touched, and the curviest body I’ve ever seen. I must have really pissed off the man upstairs to get a girl like this as my stepsister. I still fucking remember the day Nina took me over to her old house. No warning. Just, hey, just so you know, this ridiculously fucking cute girl is going to be living with us, and she’s going to constantly be checking you out when she thinks you’re not looking, but she’s totally off-limits. Don’t even think about trying to fuck her.
Hitched: A Stepbrother Honeymoon Romance Page 4
