Hard: A Step-Brother Romance

by Sosie Frost

  “The least you can do is hear me out.”

  “Oh, now you want to talk?” I poked at his chest. “Where was that initiative two weeks ago? We needed to have a very important conversation before you decided to fuck your sister.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you’re my step-sister.”

  “You’re only after what doesn’t belong to you. And not just me. This house. The money.”

  He had the audacity to get irritated. “The house and money are legally mine.”

  “Not for long. Once you’re gone, I’ll be glad to get your ass-print off my furniture.”

  I left him with his dishes. He yelled after me.

  “So you’re giving me the silent treatment?”

  That was the plan.

  “It won’t work, Shay.”

  Watch me. I didn’t answer. He didn’t deserve it.

  He chuckled from the kitchen, setting the plates back in the sink.

  Unwashed.

  “This is going to be a fun game, Shay. Just you wait. You’ll break before I do.”

  Like hell. Nothing else was going to break around here. Not my resolve. Not my anger.

  And not my heart…even if a tiny fragment already cracked.

  Used and hurt.

  Sex dreams didn’t count as incest…right?

  I mean, people couldn’t control what they dreamed about. What flashed in my head wouldn’t damn me forever as a perverted, reprehensible sex-fiend. It just meant that the heart-pounding, muscle-rending, core-clenching visions were the result of my subconscious—a part of my mind that was much more deviant than I realized.

  I tried to avoid Zach, but three days of radio silence was hardly a punishment. We still lived in the same space, and the mansion somehow shrunk to the size of a walk-in closet. We bumped on the stairs. Brushed hands in the garage. Accidentally blessed each other when we sneezed in the hall.

  Zach grinned whenever he saw me, and I fell for the dimples every time.

  I stayed away from him during the day. But at night?

  My dream had us meeting in the garden, embracing under the roses, and committing delicious sins right there in the dirt. It was where we belonged. We were sex-crazed, immoral menaces, and it nearly ruined our lives.

  Zach thought our indiscretions were harmless. After all, our parents weren’t married that long. It was easy for us to rationalize, but if our friends or families found out? That was a shame I couldn’t confront yet.

  Hell, I couldn’t even approach Zach after having the sexiest dream of my life. I hid in my room all day just to steer clear of him. I longed to busy myself with lesson plans, but nothing for my classes or student teaching gig had been assigned yet. I checked the calendar. Four months until I graduated from college, one semester early, all thanks to Dad. He bought me a couple extra credits my freshman and sophomore year because I planned to get out into the real world as soon as possible.

  Everyone—even my family and friends—assumed I wanted to inherit my trust early.

  They thought I was in it for the money, and I hated having that reputation. I wasn’t a money-hungry, trust-fund baby, step-brother humper. That was not the legacy I wanted to leave on this world.

  Fortunately, I could get rid of the step-brother easy enough. As soon as I got my trust, I’d buy his stake in the mansion, and he’d be out of my life quicker than I could say skeleton in the closet.

  But first, I had to live with the man-whore. Except who was I to judge him? I slept with him, a complete stranger, just to have a quick, one-night stand. It was the greatest sex of my life, but it didn’t make me a pillar of morality.

  Still, there was a big difference between me and Zach. He was an unrepentant playboy who propositioned me, was rejected, and then immediately leapt into bed with the first bimbo he could find.

  A woman he brought into my house.

  It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.

  I abandoned my laptop and ducked into a cold shower. It didn’t dull the fire in my belly or the dreamy, forbidden fantasy that swirled in my mind. He wasn’t worth my anger. Hell, he hardly deserved the passing glance I gave him when we headed to bed last night.

  I just needed to clear my head. I spent entirely too much time thinking about that ass.

  Literally.

  I was supposed to be enjoying myself. I had two weeks until my student teaching job began, and I deserved a vacation from the insanity that was weddings, funerals, inheritances, and incest.

  My stomach grumbled. Momma always said she could tell a proper lady in two ways—how graceful she acted in the face of adversity, and the quality of her shrimp and grits.

  Well, I already humiliated myself with my current adversary, including indulging in activities in the bedroom I wasn’t sure had real names. The least I could do was have a home-cooked meal.

  I showered, dressed, and spent too much time and money at the grocery store. Zach and I had a new agreement.

  What was mine was mine.

  What was his could rot in the sun for all I cared.

  I bought my own food, claimed my own rooms, and smacked his hand when he stole one of my chocolate chip cookies. We shared the house, and that was it. I’d be damned if I let him near any of my desserts.

  Including me.

  My car’s trunk filled with groceries. I thought hauling the bags in from the curb to my old apartment was difficult. No wonder people hired help in estates this big. I was out of breath by the time I hit the hall and struggled just to lift the plastic bags onto the island. I grunted and went back for the bottled water.

  Zach watched it all in amusement. He munched on an apple over the sink, but he didn’t offer to help—the silent treatment went both ways.

  He set a box of spaghetti, a giant pack of ground meat and sausage, and a can of marinara sauce on the counter. I watched as he filled a pot too small for noodles with water. He warmed a skillet for his meat and claimed the entire cutting board for his mess.

  What an ass. It was no accident that he started cooking the instant I got home. He just wanted to get in my way and under my skin while I made my dinner.

  The mature, responsible thing to do would have been to surrender the stove until he was done. Screw it. I wasn’t letting that bastard chase me out of my own damn kitchen.

  Shrimp and grits were on the line. Wars fought for less.

  I dropped the fresh shrimp on the counter—whole and raw like Momma and Gran preferred—but the sink filled with his dishes. Two glasses were rimmed with his chalky protein powder supplements. A plate smeared with mustard. The colander for his spaghetti haphazardly angled to the side so he wouldn’t have to load the dishwasher.

  I scowled and piled his mess before rinsing my shrimp. He laughed, still crunching on the apple.

  The serpent in the garden had more tact that him.

  But I wasn’t going to scold him. He wanted that. Expected it. If he couldn’t get me to talk, he’d try to rile me up. And usually it worked.

  Not this time.

  No way.

  If he was that bored, he could call little Miss Tasty-Cake for a romp.

  I ignored him as I cleaned the shrimp, but I needed the stove to get my bacon rendering and the grits on to boil. Zach paid no attention to the chunk of meat he burned in the skillet. I turned, nearly dropping the bowl of deveined shrimp.

  The gas burner cranked all the way up. His ground meat smoked and charred on the bottom while the top quivered, pink and cold.

  I wasn’t about to help him fix his mess, but he’d burn the damn house down!

  I cleared my throat with all the subtlety of a cough with laryngitis. Zach grinned, pitched his apple core away, and flipped the meat. Half of the charred gunk stuck to the pan.

  Then he dumped the noodles into the pot.

  Lord have mercy, the water wasn’t even boiling.

  Did he have any idea how to cook? No wonder he ordered out, brought in pizza, chicken, and hoagies. He wasn’t bulking—he was barely survivin
g on his own. The boy was lucky he managed to cut a bologna sandwich in half.

  Not. My. Problem. I let him do his thing.

  I searched the lower cabinet for a pot to cook the grits and a skillet for the shrimp. My father had excellent foresight in ordering three crystal gravy boats for special occasions but only one suitable skillet.

  Fine. Shrimp and grits. From a wok. We’d call it fusion and I could sell it at a sixty percent markup in a restaurant.

  I grabbed the dish. Zach moved behind me to stir his pasta. I rose, but my butt bumped his legs.

  Not his legs.

  Oh, God.

  I bent over, head in the damn cabinet, booty on display, and I knocked into his hips. A rush of heat that should have gone to my cheeks decided to bolt straight down to the troublemaker between my legs.

  I had deliberately ignored her this morning, a punishment for the dream about Zach.

  Well, that was a mistake.

  I couldn’t blame my reaction on the sexy dream. This particular bout of shame and weakness was brought to me by the letter F—as in Fuck, I should not be grinding against my step-brother’s legs. Terrible, sensual thoughts popped into my head. I imagined his hands holding my hips. Fierce strokes of his namesake that hit everywhere unholy inside me.

  I remembered him in both reality and the dream, everything from his dusty scent to the monster between his legs.

  Hard.

  My senses came back to me…and they were pissed off.

  Zach was hard.

  I launched forward, crashing into the cabinet. The dishes and glasses above rattled around, but the only thing broken was the spell that sleezeball put me under.

  I grunted and untangled myself from the pots and pans, but Zach already turned his attention, chiseling at the crispy flecks of meat in the skillet I needed.

  He whistled a little tune.

  Like nothing had happened. Like nothing passed between us. Like nothing about me bending over even affected him.

  And why would it? The man-whore probably humped everything from here to Washington D.C. while he was on leave—storing it up for the long winter of his deployment like a perverted little squirrel. Money and girls. All the same to him.

  So why did I let him bother me?

  I gritted my teeth and slammed my wok against the stove. He turned off the burner. His sausage was still pink but the ground meat was Cajun blackened. I grimaced as he stirred the paste-like gloop that became of his noodles. The fool couldn’t even feed himself. He needed a personal chef more than a mansion.

  Didn’t his parents teach him anything about the kitchen? He didn’t seem the home-maker type, and, from the bits I heard about Emily, his mother wasn’t either. She was the perpetual cleansing dieter—the one who ate a piece of ginger after every five raspberries to catch the free radicals. Her wedding menu demanded free-ranged chicken, cage-free eggs, deep-massaged beef, and non-GMO, pesticide-free, herbicide-free, taste-free salads, so fresh you could see where the caterpillars had munched.

  It must have been her idea. My father used to eat McDonalds cheeseburgers he accidentally dropped on the ground.

  I washed a knife and readied my ingredients, but curiosity burned me. I knew nothing about Zach’s family or his mother. I hadn’t even asked.

  But nope.

  I wasn’t getting involved. I didn’t care what Zach did. My only concern was that he didn’t imprint the taste of his insult to Italy into our best skillet.

  I added water to my pot and opened the bag of white, stone-ground grits. My stomach rumbled in anticipation, but it sunk when I opened the fridge. I wanted to keep our food separate, but getting the label maker was probably a little overkill. I shifted the containers, moved the drinks, and searched behind Tupperware’d leftovers. Then I uttered an uncouth word and groaned.

  No butter.

  Thank God Gran wasn’t alive to witness this travesty. Only two sins existed in the world for her—taking the Lord’s name in vain and substituting anything for butter. Both margarine and profanity offended the baby Jesus.

  I didn’t need Zach to sneak up behind me, summoned by my groan and the frustrated shoving of his Gatorade from my shelf. He reached over my head, aiming for a can of fake cheese that would be the best part of his meal. His arm brushed mine.

  My heart stopped.

  No, it leapt into my throat, which was good because it prevented me from speaking to him. In the drawer with his parmesan—butter. Four glorious sticks.

  The only thing more humiliating than arriving home to greet his booty-call was the temptation to break my vow of silence and ask to borrow some butter.

  But the brush of his body devastated my defenses, destroyed my self-made promises, and betrayed me to the rush of shivers over every sensitive part of me.

  He radiated a perfect heat. His scent promised a sexy tease. And his low hum? That rumbling cadence of his murmured song sent me reeling.

  He hovered. He loomed. He invaded my space.

  And all I wanted was one broken, foolish moment where our bodies would touch and I could sink into his impossible strength. My head buzzed with the hope of earning another caress from his award-worthy fingers.

  Zach radiated trouble. He was the alcohol in a mixed drink of mistakes. The patient zero of a love-sick epidemic. The catalyst of a reaction that centered only on me.

  It was wrong and idiotic. I knew he was as much a fiend as he was a liar.

  Except, during that perfect night we spent together, he didn’t seem like any of those things. He was just…Zach. Testosterone. Sex. Passion.

  He was a cocky bastard who had no problem sexing up his step-sister and stealing an inheritance from a will with ink that wasn’t even dry. So why did I still had that tickling, foolish hope that he was different? I didn’t want him to be a bad guy. I wanted to someday forgive him.

  But I wasn’t that naive.

  Besides, a pot of hot, creamy, cheesy grits was the next best thing to sex. I didn’t need his hands on my body, lips on my neck, or weight crushing me into the bed.

  I just needed butter.

  I didn’t even have to ask.

  Zach leaned over me, pressing his hips against mine as though he planned to take me then, there, and in danger of breaking the eggs. He reached, and the irresponsible vixen in me hoped it was to loop his arm around my waist and have his way with me on the floor.

  Instead, he rooted through his supplies and handed me a stick of butter. How it didn’t melt instantly in my hands was a modern day miracle.

  I swallowed. He pulled away before I could thank him without actually speaking.

  I was just lucky I hadn’t sunk to my knees and showed him how grateful I felt.

  Zach whistled as he stirred the charred mess of his pasta. He added a generic can of sauce over the chaos and tossed a lid on the horror. It simmered as I started the grits and cooked my shrimp in the rendered bacon fat, onion, garlic, and enough cayenne to put hair on your chest, as Gran used to tell Grandaddy. It only took about twenty minutes to come together—enough time for Zach to burn his first batch of garlic bread and douse our toaster with brunt garlic powder caked onto the slots.

  We sat down at the same time—my shrimp and grits, steaming hot and delicious, and his gloop covered in half a can of parmesan cheese and patted on top of garlic bread.

  He raised a fork to his lips. The clumping sauce oozed over an uncooked chunk of sausage.

  Oh, Lord. My family prided ourselves on one thing. Southern hospitality. My own moral code included not sitting idly by while someone got food poisoning.

  I smacked his hand and took his fork. Zach grunted, but I removed his plate and replaced it with a ladle of grits. I loaded it with shrimp and cheese. He grinned as I shoved it under his nose.

  I sat down and tried to avoid his sea-green eyes.

  And I immediately failed, but I didn’t mind. His impish green teased over me.

  God, he was handsome.

  He sampled his dinner, his smirk
evolving into a grin as he took a big spoonful and sucked the juices from the shrimp’s tail. His dimples were genuine. A wonderful complement for a home-cooked meal.

  We ate in silence, and Zach finished every bite on his plate. He didn’t go for seconds, though I probably would have allowed it. He dumped his horrid spaghetti and moved his dishes to the dishwasher while I watched him with my best attempt at cool indifference.

  He nodded to the container on the counter and winked.

  “Dessert’s on me.”

  Dessert?

  I abandoned my dinner and peeked under the lid of the gold cake platter.

  A perfectly baked, 100% authentic, pecan pie rested beneath, waiting to be cut.

  Homemade.

  By Zach.

  I thudded the lid against the platter with a crash.

  “You prick!”

  That son of a bitch played me.

  Again!

  He wasn’t some inexperienced child wandering the kitchen and tossing whatever sounded Italian enough into the pot. He knew what he was doing. And worse, he knew how badly he was ruining it!

  And I fell for his tricks again. Only this time I did something worse than sleep with him. I let him sample my secret family recipe. I shared my dinner like he was a sad, hungry puppy, wagging his tail under the table.

  For three days, I had stewed in silence. In thirty minutes, he made me crack.

  His laugh carried from the parlor.

  That pecan pie was about to get shoved down his throat.

  …Right after I tried a piece.

  Shay fucking tormented me with that piece of string she called a bikini.

  She wore a tiny, pink tease that hid everything good, perfect, and holy in this godforsaken world. I remembered what it concealed, but that memory needed a refresher.

  Goddamn.

  How was it legal for a woman that fucking beautiful to wear a bikini like that? Especially near a pool! Christ, everyone warned about not running near the water. How about no wet-dream inspired bikinis? A man didn’t need a head injury to drown. One glance at her curves strategically hidden under the pink scrap of material and he’d forget to breathe on land.

  She did it to fuck with me.