OUTLAW'S BABY

by Amy Brent

  She heard Ben come back into the bedroom. He’d set a tray down on her bed, a tray carrying an omelet and two mugs of coffee, and he’d also bought strawberries and arranged them on the plate. She stepped out of the bathroom naked except for the towel around her hair, and grinned when she saw his eyes grow wide. “Please don’t dress,” he said, as she reached for her robe. “I want to see how beautiful you are, all morning. I want to show you off to the world—”

  “I’m not one for public nudity,” she said, but she climbed into the bed naked again, arching her back slightly so that her breasts were level with his face.

  “That’s a shame,” he said, kissing her nipples, running his tongue around them, coaxing them to hardness. “It oughta be a crime to keep something so beautiful out of sight. I could sit here and kiss you all day.

  “And I could sit here and—”

  She heard the sound of the key in her door. What the—she sat up, too angry to worry about modesty: Miles and Jaxon had copies of the key to her apartment, just as she had a key to their places, as a precaution against getting locked out. But coming in without being asked—that was a step too far.

  “Cerise—” Jaxon said, coming into the bedroom just as she was getting up to put on her robe. His eyes took in the breakfast on the bed, Ben sitting in the bed, his arm entwined around her waist, her nakedness—and he realized what he’d walked into.

  And then Miles came in behind him, saying, “Cerise—look, we’re—”

  It was silent for what seemed like forever, as the four of them stared at each other—mostly at Cerise, and she was too petrified with shame to move. Ben spoke first, “Well,” he said, his voice sounding oddly strangled. “I’d better get going.”

  Jaxon and Miles moved away to let him out. She could hear him gathering his things, and then the door slammed shut. Still, the silence hung in the air, but it seemed that, with Ben gone, her modesty recovered itself and she wrapped the robe around her body. “What the hell are you two doing here?” she demanded.

  “What the hell are you doing with a man like Ben?” Miles asked. “Don’t you know—”

  “He apologized to me, which is more than either of you have done,” she snapped.

  “We’ve been trying to reach you—”

  “Not hard enough,” she retorted, folding her arms and scowling.

  Miles and Jaxon both grimaced. What can I say, she thought. I have standards for the guys in my life. “I told you we should’ve gone to see her,” Jaxon murmured to Miles out of the corner of his mouth.

  “She wouldn’t have let us in,” Miles said, but he was staring at Cerise as he said it.

  “Sayin’ ‘sorry’ isn’t something that has to be done here,” she said.

  Miles didn’t have a comeback for that. Finally he gulped and said, “Look, Cerise, we need you, ‘kay? Guy is all right for the weekdays, but he don’t get ‘em the way you do. We’re sorry. Truly, deeply, from-the-bottom-of-my soul sorry, about what happened to you. We’ve been going back through footage of the night—we think Ben drugged you.”

  “Get out,” she snarled. Bad enough that they’d let her do a striptease on top of the bar, now they were trying to pin it on the one guy who’d actually had the balls to apologize?

  “I told you she wouldn’t believe you,” Jaxon said.

  Miles sighed and set down a USB stick on her dresser. “At least think about it,” he said. “It happens at ten before midnight. Please, just please come back to us. We need you for the weekends, at least. I’ll keep a water bottle under the bar for you, and Jaxon will watch your drinks while you’re pouring.”

  It sounded like a reasonable plan and they’d clearly thought through ways to keep it from happening again, but there was one thing that Cerise wanted to hear that she still hadn’t heard yet. She waited, keeping her face a blank slate, even though their visible discomfort made her want to smirk and pump her fist in victory. Finally, Jaxon said, “And we’ll watch out for you and not take advantage of you.”

  “There,” she said, coldly. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Miles and Jaxon glanced at each other, wondering what else she expected of them. Finally, Miles said, “Look, Cerise—the reason we didn’t want to come over—”

  “Yeah?” she said, escorting them out of her bedroom. “You tryin’ to make excuses again?”

  Miles gulped and said, “No ma’am. But it’s—”

  And then Jaxon grabbed her arm and pressed a kiss to her lips. “I’m sorry,” he grunted. “I’m sorry it took us so long to apologize to you. I’m sorry that it took what happened last week for us to get the balls to do this—”

  He’d said, “Us.” But it couldn’t happen. Not even if she wanted to.

  Did she want to? And Miles was touching her, now, too, tugging the robe away. “Jaxon—” We have to stop. We can’t.

  He kissed her again, with a fierceness that surprised her—her first response was to freeze out of surprise, but then he did something with his lips that sent a bolt of pure pleasure straight through the very core of her being, and her body, still a mess of jangling nerves from the night before, responded by returning the kiss before her thoughts could catch up. He’s your stepbrother—

  But then she felt Miles reaching around her from behind, his lips against her throat, his fingers on her breasts, a slow grinding rhythm working its way between them, their bodies swaying in sync against hers, the gentle pulse of one hip against another, the hypnotic swaying that lulled the part of her that was panicking about them being her stepbrothers to sleep.

  And then Jaxon dropped to his knees and began kissing her feet, working his way slowly but surely upwards, gently pressing her knees apart when he got there. Miles had shifted to her side, now—he took her leg and held it up against his body, opening her for his brother—the barest touch of his finger on her clit and her thigh glistened with the wetness, the heat perfuming the air with the scent of her—salty, with that trace of muskiness that made Jaxon lose his patience entirely and all of sudden he was lapping away at her pussy and suckling at her clit, sending wave after wave of crazy through her body—a mix of joy and lust and desire, making her want more and more and more even though her body couldn’t take it anymore, and a cry rose up through her at the injustice of it all.

  She felt Miles pressing himself against her, his cock twitching anxiously against the fabric of his pants, and for a moment his hand fell away from her breast to free himself. Without him, she fell to her knees in front of Jaxon, who’d also managed to disentangle himself from his pants at some point when he was making her go crazy.

  He was big, and she was till tender and raw from the night before, so everything was magnified a thousand-fold, it seemed. Every twinge from taking him inside her became an exquisite, joyous agony, every time he thrust into that spot deep inside her, her body seized around him, clenching him for more, even as she knew she couldn’t take it.

  She wanted them to go on forever—she wanted them to stop—the twin desires left her incapable of speaking as Miles shoved himself, groaning and moaning, up her ass. There were no words to describe the feeling of heaviness in her as they both began rocking and thrusting together, gently at first, and then harder, stoking a kind of pleasure that she felt in her bones. On some level she was vaguely aware that she had a body, and that they were doing things to it—Jaxon was nipping at her nipples, sending little squirts of pain to pull her back down to earth—but she was riding a wave of ecstasy higher and higher, and it was too much—one mind couldn’t handle this—

  But it can.

  She woke up in her bed again, naked again, unsure of whether the threesome with her twin stepbrothers had really happened. God, she thought, as remorse overwhelmed her. I’m such a slut. She’d slept with Ben, and then her stepbrothers—but that couldn’t have been real, could it? They were her stepbrothers, after all—it couldn’t have happened like that.

  She took another shower, still just as confused and bewildered by wh
at she’d done. On the one hand, it wasn’t technically criminal—and it wasn’t even really incest—they were her stepbrothers, after all. But they were her stepbrothers, which somehow made it different—

  —and oddly enough, special, in its own way. As she washed away their cum, she realized that she hadn’t felt this calm in a long time. Her body felt more like her own, no longer the jangling mess of confused and twinging nerves that she’d been earlier in the day. She felt as if her movements were more sure, and as she put on makeup and a plain light blue button-down and slacks, she understood what had changed: Ben was just for fun—she would’ve been fine if he’d actually stayed for coffee and then left. They might have been best friends in another life but they’d never be anything more than that. But what had happened between her and Jaxon and Miles had been special—confirmation of what they’d known since the day they’d met, at some level—that they were meant to be. That was the only explanation for why, even though she knew it was wrong, it still felt so right. You can only be yourself if you’re true to who you are. The quote popped up, unbidden, in her head, though as she grabbed her keys she couldn’t think of anybody who’d actually said it.

  She was getting ready to leave—a night out at the Salty Dog or some other bar was as good a way as any of spending Saturday night, and she could text Ben when she settled on the right place to tell him it wasn’t going to work out—when Miles’s USB stick caught her eye, and his accusation about what Ben had done came back to her.

  In the heat of the moment she’d chalked it up to jealousy but now, calmer, she wasn’t quite so sure about that it had been an empty accusation. Miles wouldn’t have given her the USB stick otherwise.

  Do you really want to know?

  Just a little peek.

  She couldn’t see it: Ben, drugging a girl’s drink in a bar that was known to have security cameras—

  And then she recalled that they hadn’t had time to put up the “Smile! You’re being watched by the most sophisticated video surveillance system in the world!” signs before they’d opened. “Well,” Jaxon had said, “it’s not as if we’re going to get robbed before we have any money.” The cameras were well-hidden, too, concealed in the shafts in the ceiling that carried the wires criss-crossing the entire club, linking the sound systems and lights. Nobody who was looking for a camera would see them.

  She felt a chill in her gut as she plugged the USB stick into her laptop. There were six feeds, one above each bathroom door, one over the bar, one watching the parking lot, and three covering the rest of the club. It wasn’t too hard to figure out which feed to fast-forward through. For ten minutes, then, she watched herself serving drinks to the crowd around the bar. Her glass was sitting behind the bar—where it should have been safe.

  It was so fast she’d have missed it if Miles hadn’t told her when to look: Ben leaned behind the bar, looking like he was reaching for a napkin—and then his hand drifted over her glass and that was it. That was all it took. Five minutes later she watched herself take another sip from the glass—and at fifteen minutes past midnight, she was dancing on the bar.

  She ran into the bathroom and threw up.

  When she came out of the bathroom she was so furious she was shaking. That man had made her do those things—that man whom she thought she liked so much—that man had slipped something into her drink. A part of her knew that the right thing to do would have been to call the police, but the part of her that screamed for revenge wouldn’t let up. She drove to the Azure Code, trying to think of (legal) things she could do to Ben to get back at him, but her anger made it impossible to think straight. She wanted to drug him, to hurt him—maybe flay him and have him walk down the streets stark-naked. That might be justice. Or maybe walk him out to the overpass above I-95 and make him balance across it—if he lived, she’d forgive him. If he fell off…well.

  The darker angels of her soul were still having a field day with what she wanted to do to Ben when she arrived at the Azure Code. She put those thoughts out of her head for a moment: first there was the matter of admitting that Miles had been right—a task that was, for some strange reason, always harder than it should have been, given that he was literally a rocket scientist. Or rather he had been, until he bought and turned Azure Code into something that made it rain buckets of money.

  “You saw it,” Miles said, when she walked in. It wasn’t a question. He was wiping down the bar, while Jaxon was mopping up the floors.

  “What are we going to do about it?” she asked, taking a seat at the bar.

  “Oh, it’s ‘we’ now, is it?” Jaxon asked, grinning.

  She swallowed her pride. It was hard to do, but after a moment’s silence she finally said, “I’m sorry I blamed you for everything. I should’ve listened to you.”

  Miles shrugged. “It’s like I told you when I first started this thing,” he said. “All for one, one for all.”

  Jaxon came over to her, bouncing with glee: “You have no idea what we’ve got planned for Ben if he ever comes back again.”

  Jaxon wasn’t the kind of guy who harbored grudges or killed other people, but then again, neither was he the kind of guy who put much thought into the consequences of his actions, and Cerise felt a little twinge of apprehension as she asked, “Do I want to know?”

  He shook his head, suddenly much calmer. “I’m just playin’ with you,” he said. “Ain’t nothing to do. Everything fun is illegal, everything legal ain’t fun.”

  “Not everything,” said Miles.

  “Are we going to kill him?” asked Jaxon.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then it is everything.”

  “No,” said Miles. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Cerise, you text Ben, tell him that you’re filling in for this one night. You make yourself two drinks, keep one hidden behind the bar, and leave your drink out there, in the same place as last time, and Jaxon will be watching Ben like a hawk from the moment he walks in. As soon as Jaxon sees Ben doing something funny, he’ll text you.

  “Now, here’s the hard part: Cerise, you’re going to have to switch the tainted drink for the one that you made earlier. You’re going to have to be seen drinking from the untainted one—and then carry one with business as usual. If you can, keep at least one drink under the bar, out of sight.”

  “What’s the play?” asked Jaxon.

  Cerise nodded, understanding now: “Ben is going to flip at some point when he thinks I’ve been drinking his shit all night, and when he does, we’ll have video cameras watching his every move.”

  Jaxon whistled. “Damn bro,” he said. “That’s one hell of a good plan.”

  Miles grinned. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s finish this fucker once and for all.”

  Cerise had to smile as she donned the apron and began setting down the coasters as the first customers walked in. This was where she belonged—with her stepbrothers, through thick and thin. And, she had to admit, making Ben Harmon see red was going to be fun, as well. They could do anything, as long as they did it together.

  And not everything that felt so wrong was actually wrong – their together now seemed so right! They were going to be like that forever – together forever – “All for one, one for all.”

  DOUBLE DARE

  CHAPTER 1

  I sat in the chair and let the makeup artist work her magic as I listened to the activity around me. I remembered asking my agent if I really needed to do this fashion show since I was an established plus sized model here in New York, but she assured me that it was a charity of sorts by a well-known architecture company and for a great cause, helping the local hospital in the interest of sick children. I would be walking the runway in fashions by an up and coming designer who’d recently graduated from Parsons at the top of her class.

  I think her name was Valerie something. I wasn’t interested in work that didn’t pay cash, but Monica assured me that this would be fantastic

  exposure, and my agent hadn’t steered me wro
ng. I’d forgiven her for the calls that were for skimpy barely there lingerie a few years ago since they presented themselves as a legitimate clothing store.

  I was a bigger model at size eighteen, but my curves were firm and sexy. My favorite look that I had was the highlighted loose curls that I’d given in to when I was young, highlighted in a soft honey shade, completely natural and wild. My sister shared my hair and taught me how to treat it and what products to use, and so far, it had done well for my modeling career. I also had some green eyes that while dark, could lighten depending on my mood. I wasn’t good at hiding my feelings about too much, and they’d flash as my voice started rising when I was irritated.

  “Your skin is amazing. You look about nineteen!” The cute blue-haired artist told me as she brushed something over my broad cheekbones. I was twenty-six, so I liked that. “I barely need any foundation with this gorgeous caramel tone and I never say that.”

  “Thanks,” I told her as my eyes darted to the mirror to make sure I didn’t look awful. I’d been zoning out since I got here, tired from staying out late with my roommate at a club opening the night before. We had stayed a bit later than necessary and enjoyed the free drinks more than I normally did.

  I looked good, and she’d added some highlighter on my skin that popped out in an alluring way. It would look great with the slinky red dress that I was wearing tonight, and she’d done a great job darkening my eyes with smoky colors and great blending. “Ah, thanks. I like this. Can you do my face on a regular basis?” A lot of them took away from my skin color, and I would have to have them fix their errors.

  “I’d love to. What do you think about a glossy red on these full lips? I hear you’re wearing a red dress tonight?” She asked, and I nodded as I raised an eyebrow. She giggled. “They tell me this stuff before the models come in.”

  “I thought you were psychic,” I replied with a smile as she shook her head and grinned. “I like that idea.”