Bastard Stepbrother (Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  Which in a sense, makes her perfect for me. I'm sitting here faking it with her, and she's trying so hard to fake everything, too. A perfect match.

  She's close enough that I can smell her shampoo, sweet and fruity and pleasant. She's got a suit on, which was a mistake, but she wants to be taken seriously more than she wants to be comfortable on the plane. That's her right, whether I think it's wise or not.

  She goes into the scanner and then goes through, and I'm up next. I can't stand this shit, but part of the job is accepting that you have to deal with airport security, so I deal with it.

  Then we're through and I pull my belt back around my pants, slip my things back into my pockets and walk off with my shoes in my hands to find somewhere else to put them back on.

  I can't take my eyes off her as she tries to slip her shoes back onto her feet. It starts as an innocent interest, but there's something oddly feminine about the way she does it, modest and uncertain and very probably the nerves from having the opportunity to go on this trip are getting to her, as well.

  "You got everything?"

  "I think so," she says. She doesn't sound any more sure than she looks, her hands moving across pockets and tapping pockets on her bag.

  "Well, when you're sure."

  She straightens, her lips pressing together into a thin line that plumps back out into the luscious lips that would draw any man's interest all by themselves.

  "I guess I've got everything."

  "Then come on. We've got a little time before they start boarding."

  Airports are strange. Large, open spaces, but somehow it seems like no matter where you go, you're almost going to run into someone, because they happened to walk the same way.

  I feel the fabric of her suit under my fingers as I brush into her stepping out of the way of a man driving a cart down the middle of the aisle. He waves apologetically as he goes by, but I'm not going to be nearly as upset as he seems to think I am.

  She feels good under my hands. Every bit like a woman, soft and comfortable and it's going to get to me if I'm not careful but frankly I don't give a God damn.

  "Sorry about that," I say. I'm not sorry it happened, but I'm sorry if she's upset about it. The flustered expression tells me that she's not.

  "You're fine."

  "I'll buy you the first cup. By way of apology."

  "No, you don't have to—"

  "I thought you'd learned your lesson," I say, my voice only halfway to teasing.

  "Maybe I need to be taught again. I've always been a teacher's pet, you know."

  "Oh yeah?"

  She sees the look in my eyes and raises her eyebrows. "Not like that."

  "Hey, you said it, not me."

  "You know what I meant."

  I step up to the counter of the nearest coffee joint. A kid behind the counter smiles at us from where he's standing, pouring someone else's coffee from a big industrial-looking machine. He's got big holes in his ears and looks exactly like the sort of guy I imagine to work in a coffee shop.

  "You do a lot of flying," I ask off-hand. I'm guessing not.

  "No," she says. "I drove up here from Tallahassee."

  "Long drive."

  "You're telling me."

  "Nervous about planes, or…?"

  "I mean, I don't love them."

  "There's nothing to be nervous about, you know. Safest way to travel."

  "But at least I feel like, you know, something goes wrong in a car, I can control it."

  I smile. "That's where you're mistaken. You're not in control in a car. Not in control anywhere." The guy with the big holes in his ears comes over and stands behind the cash register with a faint grin and a look that says that he's listening for our order. "Two coffees. Cream and sugar."

  "Oh, uh. Cream and sugar are on the table over there."

  "Great. Thanks. Two coffees."

  The kid nods and starts tapping the screen on the register, and numbers start showing on the price display.

  "What was I talking about?"

  "You were saying that I can't control anything."

  "Well, can you?"

  A shade of a frown appears on her face, but she tries to hide it. She doesn't succeed.

  "No, you're right. I—you're right."

  I almost feel bad for her. Then the coffee's here and we're walking away, and the moment's gone. Everyone's got a story, and she's no different. I'm no different, and in our case, the stories touched for a while.

  I got burned, not by her, but that doesn't change the association.

  "You nervous?"

  She finishes pouring her third sugar packet in. "No," she says, but she's lying and she knows I know.

  "Don't be. It's going to be fine."

  "I know it will be. Which is why I'm not nervous."

  "Sure," I tell her.

  It's easy for her to lie to me. Natural as can be. After all, she's learned from the best. She's always been a good student, always been a teacher's pet. But her mother must not have been a good teacher.

  Because I can see it in her face when she lies to me. But I let it go anyways.

  "Come on, let's go find the terminal," I say after a minute, after she's taken a sip of coffee and her face doesn't twist up in disgust.

  I let her go a little ahead, watching her strut, the way her hips move side to side. And, for an instant, I allow myself to imagine a little tryst in the airplane bathroom.

  Then I snap myself out of it and follow along after her. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I repeat it to myself again. She's off limits. She's your sister, man.

  Only, another voice responds… she's not. Not any more. And if she's not going to bring it up, he sure as hell isn't.

  Chapter Seven

  Three days of learning the Lawyer's trade in Phoenix was an education that I would never have gotten in school. Nobody ever would. You're not going to sit down a bunch of twenty-year-olds and tell them 'If you want to make money at this, half or more of your job is reassuring clients who know nothing about the law.'

  And that was what what the last three days had been. They wanted to go over the paperwork, go over evidence, go over every little thing.

  Of course, it meant nothing to them. The words might as well have been in Swahili. So then you have to explain it to them in layman's terms. Everything short of swaddling them up in a blanket and giving them a pacifier.

  I don't expect everyone to know the ins and outs of law. It's taken more than a week to put together a deposition, and that's with a good team. Clients hire you because they don't have their own good team, and you're not here to talk to whatever team they have on staff, even if they did.

  You're here to talk to suits who know a bit about persuasion, a lot about business, and have a fairly solid working sense of how many commas are in their bank statement.

  So I don't assume they understand law, but if I'd been a little more optimistic I might have hoped that they would leave those things to people who did know. That would be my hope, of course.

  I don't actually believe someone who's got more money than sense would be capable of staying out of where they're not needed.

  So the trip down to Arizona, in a very real sense, was better on-the-job training than anything else I've done since high school.

  Every kid coming out of law school can do a few things, no problem. They know how to draft up a contract, they can probably put together a deposition and write a brief. They might have a little experience doing mock trials, so they're at least aware of how to speak to a crowd.

  Those things aren't special. Anyone can do them. And more than that, they're not the important part of a job, not really.

  Medical malpractice is a big field of study. I didn't get into it, but I could have, same as anyone, and there's a lot of money changing hands on the subject.

  People don't sue incompetent doctors. They don't know a good con man from a good doctor, after all. It all sounds good to them.

  They sue doctors they don't
like. Happens all the time. You have foot surgery, the surgeon does an untidy job, and now you've got to go in to get more foot surgery. Open-and-shut, Doctor So-and-So screwed up. Just look at the suturing, it's amateur.

  No, says the client, I like Doctor So-and-So. It's that physical therapist. My foot only really started to hurt bad when I did physical therapy. He's got cold hands and he always made me do exercises I didn't like. Outside of P.T. it just hurt a little bit.

  So you sue the physical therapist, because the client is just going to find someone who will. Meanwhile, Doctor So-and-So with the nice bright smile and the shaky hands continues unabated because, in the end, people don't have a problem with screw-ups.

  They have a problem with assholes.

  So your first order of business as a lawyer isn't to figure out the law, as I'm quickly realizing. The law is important, but it's assumed, and if you don't know it well enough, you can get yourself another legal assistant or spend more time on it.

  The first order of business is to polish up your smile and turn on the charm, because you need these guys to like you when it's all said and done. At least the one with more money has to like you.

  The revelation has opened my eyes. Not just to the nature of the legal trade, though the past three days have been illuminating and have utterly derailed my efforts to study for the bar.

  No, there's something else it's opened my eyes to. I got plenty of practice sending the right signals to people. Sending messages with my body language. Reassurance, confidence, coolness. Authority.

  You can't say it, out loud. Nobody is convinced by someone who says, 'trust me, I know what I'm talking about.' They trust someone who acts like they are totally confident in their knowledge.

  I find that when I learn something new, my entire mind is on that subject for a while. I throw myself in head-first, and then I notice a whole world around me I'd never known existed until I knew what to look for.

  And what I'm seeing now is that every single signal that Eric is sending my way is positive. Overtly positive. And, the rare time it's anything but pure positivity—not respect, not adoration, but approval—he's sending me signals that a brother and sister shouldn't be sending each other.

  I can't blame him, because in the whole new world of people sending overt signals to each other, in the world where people use their actions to send messages that they can't or won't send with their words, I have noticed something else, too.

  I've been sending them right back.

  Chapter Eight

  The insides of airports are different every time. I think my favorite is O'Hare in Chicago, but they're all different. Some seem small, cozy. Others seem big and ritzy. There's a range. Same as anything.

  I've been doing this for almost ten years, and I've been in dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. I stopped counting after the first few. There's no point in it. Just a reality of the job. It's always the people who don't take airplanes often that think they're anything sexy or worth remembering.

  Once you take more than a few, it changes. Becomes a hassle. Same thing's true about anything. There's something entertaining, though, about watching Autumn's face. She's tired. I can tell that, right off the bat. She'll have time to sleep on the plane ride home, but I wonder if her nerves will let her.

  I looked down at my watch. The minutes ticked by a second at a time, as they had been for the past hour. Then he looked up at the digital sign behind the counter.

  There were three people standing there. I don't think they need more than one, though they like to switch a lot. So that's reason enough for two at least. On the other hand, three… that means they're either about to start boarding, or there's something going on.

  I can't help noticing that we're supposed to be ten minutes out of boarding, according to the boarding passes.

  Yet, the sign now says that we're not expected to depart for an hour. I suck in a breath and look over at Autumn.

  Looking at an attractive woman has an effect on a man like a shot of espresso. I can feel my eyes open a little wider, my shoulders straighten up. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, though it won't last.

  "I think there's a problem with our flight."

  She looks at me like I've been speaking gibberish, and then I can see her play it back in her mind.

  "You think?"

  "We're going to want to find someplace to stay tonight."

  "Are you sure, though?"

  "You see our plane out there?"

  "No."

  The windows were big. If the plane were at the end of the terminal, you'd be able to see it. All around the multi-spoked hub, planes sit at the terminal—but not ours.

  "Well?"

  "I see what you mean," she finally says.

  "You mind making the calls?"

  "No, sir," she says.

  Autumn reaches into her jacket pocket and gets up from the less-than-comfortable airline seat. I watch her walk. It's a bad habit I've gotten into, but like all bad habits, I don't dare kick it. Her hips slip from side to side.

  For an instant I wonder if she knows I'm watching. She definitely knows. I think, though I wouldn't say it to her face for fear of a lawsuit, that she likes it. The way she adds just a little pop to her step when she's walking away. Like a model on the runway.

  I find myself mesmerized. Is it the fact that I've barely slept four hours a night, and even that was restless?

  It must be. Women are an incredible wonder to behold, but they don't have that kind of power over me. It's that simple. Sorry, that's just how it is.

  That, and I've got better control over myself than that. I know how her mother was. That was my first experience with women, and how they can get. That taught me just about everything I thought I needed to know.

  Keep your nose clean. Don't go looking for trouble. Above all else, don't get too invested in them. Because you'll want to, and you'll regret it when you do.

  I can already feel the regret looming as she walks back, slipping her phone into her pocket. She settles down into a seat beside me, leans in close, and is promptly cut off by the woman on the speakers.

  "Delta 1272, bound for New York, has been delayed indefinitely. Again, Delta 1272, Phoenix to New York, has been canceled, after a medical emergency forced the inbound flight down mid-flight. See the customer service desk for new tickets, we apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused."

  I watch Autumn's eyes flick back from the boarding desk to my face. "There you go, I guess."

  "What did I tell you?"

  "I got us two rooms at the Best Western."

  "What, you didn't want to cuddle up with me?"

  She rolls her eyes. If she's offended, she's hiding it well. "Sorry, not tonight. I wanted to get some sleep."

  "What else would we do?"

  She looks at me and blinks, and then blushes. "I, uh. Didn't mean—"

  "No?"

  "I wasn't thinking."

  "That's the best way," I tell her, standing up.

  I heft my bag in my hand and wait for her to get up and join me. I think everyone in the terminal had been hoping to get on the flight and get to their destinations. The fact that they hadn't managed that was more than a little frustrating, and it was going to mean an even longer wait until he could sleep.

  A little flirting couldn't hurt anything, but at the very least, it might keep him awake long enough to make it to a bed.

  Chapter Nine

  Had he said what I think he said? Had he meant what—well, that's a silly question. He obviously meant what it sounded like he meant. There's no other way to take it.

  I've been around the block. Once or twice. Well, okay. I slept with a guy once. It wasn't a great experience and I wasn't looking to repeat it. Two minutes of fumbling that had left me about as dry as a bone, except for the unpleasant stickiness on my stomach that stuck with me the rest of the evening.

  Long story short, not something I was looking to repeat, and the guy—I can't remember his name, just that he
had longish hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses—had been startlingly unable to measure up to anyone I could think of to compare him to.

  That list was shorter than other girls' lists, though. Most women might have a dozen names. Celebrities, mostly. Hot guys they knew from school. Guy friends who never quite ended up turning into anything.

  My list was one name long, and I just accidentally offered to stay up all night with him. He'd laughed it off. It might have stung if I had realized at the time what I'd been saying. But I hadn't—not that the idea hasn't been in my head since we got here.

  Three nights, we've been in the same hotel. He'd slept in a bed just across the hall. But then—was I even allowed to think it?

  Better not to. After all, he was my brother, once, and he's my boss, and he's a big powerful lawyer—none of them things that I'm remotely interested in getting on the wrong end of.

  I lean into him, my body too tired to stay upright in the bus seats. It feels good to be so close to him. Too good. That cologne of his, that reminds me so much of him, is powerful in my nose, filling my head, setting me on the edge of a reaction that I definitely shouldn't be having.

  If he was anyone else, it wouldn't have been such a struggle. If he was anyone else, it wouldn't have been such a temptation. Why couldn't I have just—done something different. Anything.

  Why couldn't he have stayed, so I'd have had time to grow apart from him? To learn that he's not all he's cracked up to be?

  Why couldn't he have been someone else, not my stupid brother?

  Why couldn't he have stayed gone?

  Too many questions, and all of them were just to avoid one simple reality. I wanted him. It was hard not to feel like he wants me, too. The little signs, the flirting, the signals… I must be misinterpreting. He's not interested in me, and there's no reason for him to be.

  But it's impossible not to feel as if I'm picking up on signals that he's laying down.

  "Eric?" My voice sounds dreamy.

  "What's up?"

  "I don't want to—" I can't finish the sentence. My words catch in my throat.