Bastard Stepbrother (Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  He looks down at me. He's got such a nice jaw. He keeps it tight and it makes him look like some kind of action movie hero.

  "Something wrong?"

  I should leave it there. I know it as he asks the question. It was a moment of weakness that made me start the sentence. And yet, as he asks, I can feel that weakness washing over me again. I shouldn't. But I do.

  "I don't want to be alone tonight," I say, softly. There's no question that he hears me. His arm wraps around my shoulder and pulls me in close.

  "Shh," he says softly. When I open my eyes again, we're at the hotel, and my head's at least three minutes clearer than it was when I shut them. Somehow, even feeling more alert hasn't changed my mind.

  I don't want to be alone tonight, and the only man I can think of in the world who I want to spend it with is slipping his arm out from around my shoulder to stand up and grab his luggage from the rack.

  "Get up," he says softly. "We're here."

  Chapter Ten

  I hadn't expected her to crack so easily. I'd expected the game to last longer than it did. Maybe she didn't realize who I was, after all. It was a long time ago, and she was a lot younger than I had been when I finally had to leave.

  Maybe she was just like her mother, and she couldn't live without a man for five god damned seconds, and I was the only one around.

  It's difficult to say, because for a moment there, I had almost believed that she was a hard worker. Serious. A real blue-chipper. Which is entirely at odds with my image of her mother, to be perfectly frank, and I think that's understandable.

  What I'm less certain of is whether or not the image fits her perfectly. It's just something that I'm going to have to see.

  I lay on the bed and I close my eyes and all I see is her. Her and her mother and everything that I'd left behind a long time ago. Dad's off the hook. It took a long time before that happened, but he's off the hook.

  Which leaves just the girl and her mother. Deep breaths now. It's not doing him any good to think about it all. If it was going to do him good, then sure. Lose sleep over it. But there's no plan going forward.

  He's not going to ruin her life for nothing, and there's no proof that she deserves it at this point anyways. But the fact is, at some point, the opportunity will arise.

  I should have forgiven them all a long time ago. Any therapist would have told me so. It's not about them, they'd tell me. It's about you. And for a long time I hadn't thought the name 'Deborah Greyson,' in anger or otherwise. It wasn't until her daughter stepped into my office.

  Mixed emotions flood through me. They always will, when you're in the middle of something like that. Particularly when you get mixed up in someone's marriage problems when you're young. Particularly when the someone whose marriage problems you're stuck in the middle of is your father.

  It might not be fair to Deborah to hold everything against her for so long. It probably isn't fair to Autumn to hold her accountable for any of it.

  Fuck fair.

  It wasn't fair what happened to me, either, but nobody had come along and asked his opinion on it. I lost his home and had to go out and figure out a place to stay while I worked my way through school.

  There are plenty of people out there who say, 'nobody helped me get where I am.' They're usually full of shit, in any practical reality.

  Maybe they didn't borrow any money—they usually did, but they can have the benefit of the doubt at the very least—but they got plenty of help. Just not in the form of dollars and cents.

  They had a place to stay. They had parents who would feed them if they ran out of food money for the week before the check came through. They had at least some sort of safety net.

  Well, I never say that nobody helped me get where I am. Everyone I knew helped me, with two notable exceptions. Supposed to be my parents. Or, my step-parents. My step-mom whose sexuality was a weapon, and Dad, who decided to stick by her, rather than his son.

  I open my eyes and turn to set my feet on the ground. I'm not getting any sleep this way. I need to cool down. The plane ride home is going to be extremely long and extremely frustrating if I don't. I don't get enough sleep as it is. Every article that comes through my inbox says so.

  Which means I can't be sitting there hyper-focusing on ancient history. I moved on. I got through school with all the help I could ask for, from anyone who would listen, and I used every bit of help I could find to get my firm off the ground.

  Now that it's off the ground, I can be the one to give help sometimes. It's nice to be able to give back to the people who helped you, or to give forward to the people who might go on to help someone else some day.

  The whole world turns on that kind of thing. You have to feel like you owe something, and then you pay into the pot. It's wonderful, beautiful, perfect.

  There's on person who doesn't need my help, though, and if she does need it, she's not getting it. And now, as if she's trying to prove me right, she's taking her body—her incredible, hard to refuse and harder to forget body, and she's trying to use it against me.

  Just like her mother.

  Well, I'm not twenty years old any more. I'm not some idiot kid who just wants to know what the hell is going on here.

  The situation might look similar, but the tables have turned in every real sense of the word. So maybe, if she's lucky, I'll let her make her play.

  But I don't expect for one second that I'm going to find anything has changed. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

  Then again, maybe that applies both ways. Dad was always a dope. Never able to see the bigger picture. It's tempting to think that I'll be different, that I know better.

  But if I don't—

  I shake my head, padding down the hall toward the ice machine.

  I can't afford to worry about things like that. Can't afford to even think that I might be the one getting played. Because if I am, and I don't see it coming, that will be twice to the same woman, practically.

  And I'm not going to make the same mistake twice, no matter how pretty or smart she is. You can't afford to make the same mistake twice, when margins are thin, and I've been walking a razor since I left home ten years ago.

  Chapter Eleven

  The plane ride back was worse than the one going out. At least the way out to Phoenix, I knew that if I died, I'd at least be dying going out to do something new and interesting and doing the work I loved.

  If I died on the way back, one, I'd just be going back to work, and two, almost worse somehow, I'd be dying after a crap plane delay. As if the fact that the flight was delayed caused the death. A bunch of horseshit, is what it would be.

  To compound matters, the flight hit turbulence and just stayed in that turbulent air for a good quarter of the four-hour flight.

  Floating up a few feet and the feeling the air just drop out from under the wings. A horrifying reminder that at any minute, the wings could fly off the plane and then we'd plummet forty-three thousand feet to our deaths.

  And there would be nothing any of us could do about it.

  There was a certain strange familiarity to the situation. Train-wreck was the usual term, rather than plane-crash, but Mom is exactly that.

  Some women mellow with age. They drop the drinking, drop the smoking, and they calm the hell down. It would be a miracle if that happened to Mom. Not that every time she goes a day without a drink, she doesn't try to tell everyone she knows that she's quit drinking, and this time it's for good.

  It lasts between twelve and thirty hours before she's back at it. So the feeling that eventually, you're going to come crashing into the ground and there's not a damn thing that you can do about it, is a feeling that she's more than used to.

  Somehow the difference between 'your life will be ruined' and 'you'll die in a horrible fireball' seems wider than normal, though, when it comes down to it.

  So when I saw the skyscrapers in the distance, my head plastered to the window with just the intention of seeing it coming when
we either reach safety or careen into the earth, it came as an incredible relief.

  We descended as a team, my stomach twisting and jumping and kicking and thoroughly convincing me that I'd never be completely alright with airplanes. The captain did most of the work controlling the airplane, while the passengers and the flight crew did the harder work as a whole of making sure that the plane continued moving on faith alone.

  The wheels touched down, and I stayed seated as the rest of the cabin stood. It would be nicer to just be able to get off the plane immediately, but if I couldn't, then I wasn't about to do something as silly as force myself into a thronging crowd of people desperate to get into the terminal.

  After all, I'm not desperate. I've got time. I've got no plans today. Work isn't going to get done. Eric was very clear on that. Don't come in, just get some rest and come in in the morning. No problem, I said. I can do that.

  And I can. Easy as pie. Just go home, relax, and don't do anything that would get me into trouble? Well that sounds like my kind of Friday. And Saturday and Sunday, for that matter.

  Armed with a full night's sleep, I play back the events of the last week in my head. I play back the research in the New York office. I play back the trip down to Phoenix, talking to anyone and everyone with the possible exception of the guy in the mail room, who I don't believe got more than a snippet of legal advice.

  The last day—my face gets hot. I shouldn't think about it. Flirting is one thing. I can flirt. He can flirt. We can flirt together. Men and women flirt naturally.

  Talking about going to bed with a man is a very different thing than just a little laughing, teasing, and playing around. A very different thing indeed, but not to worry because I'd stepped well outside that boundary.

  The line starts to thin out, as people go past. I let them continue until there's a decently large break in the bodies passing down the aisle, and then I slip out of my seat.

  The plane caught a lot of turbulence, sure. I didn't like it one bit. Not one bit. But the seats, on the other hand… they'd been something else. Nothing like the ride down, they were large and luxurious and leather and everything she could have wanted. Like sitting in first class, only every seat on the plane was that nice.

  I pull my bag down from the overhead compartment and drag it out. I've got to get down to the baggage claim next, but I'm in no special hurry. After all, nobody's going to take my luggage. Why would they?

  And I'm not in any special hurry today. Just to, what? Go home? What's at home that I want to be there so badly?

  Nothing. Exactly right. Nothing's there. So I don't need to go and I don't particularly want to go. But I've got to sleep, and I've got to do it in a bed, so… home.

  The apartment is quiet. Always is. Nobody talks to me, nobody looks at me. Maybe a 'hello' on the way out the door, but otherwise, nothing. And that's how I wanted it. Besides the fact that I don't want any particular social interaction, I especially don't want to get involved with the people who have to live in the sort of place that I'm paying for.

  I drop the bag as soon as I get into the door. It lands on the fake tile floor with a thump, one that nicely approximates the sound of my body hitting the couch when I get into the room.

  But that's not how things go, because as soon as I step through the front hall and into the front room, I stop dead.

  "Oh," Mom says. She's got a faint smile. "Hey, Autumn. You're home."

  I don't know how much she's had to drink, but I know it's more than she should have had, and I know it's more than I want to deal with right now.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "I came to see you," she says. Her voice sounds almost sad.

  "How did you get into my apartment?"

  "Oh, uh. That nice man, Mr—Mr whatsit, at the office. He let me in."

  I make a mental note to talk to Elliot about personal boundaries and my mother, particularly the fact that she doesn't know how to obey them so he's got to do it for her.

  "Well, you've seen me. Get out of here, I've got stuff to do."

  "Don't act like that, Autumn."

  "Why shouldn't I? This is my apartment. Go home. I'll call you an Uber."

  "No—come on. Don't do that. No. Come on."

  I try to keep the frown off my face. I've been trying to be more positive. Something about the way you act informing the way you think. Mindfulness and stuff.

  "I'm busy, mom. You can't just drop by whenever you feel like it. I just got off a four-hour plane ride, I'm tired, I just want to lay down."

  "Well then go lay down," she says dismissively. "I can wait until you're feeling better."

  I can feel my teeth grinding. I'm not supposed to do that. I switch the mindfulness bracelet from my right to my left.

  "Mom—"

  "No, I'm fine. Go, go nap. I'll be here when you wake up."

  That's the problem, I think. I know you will.

  Chapter Twelve

  There are several ideas people have of what real work is. They mirror whatever it is that you do for a living almost exactly. If you're a thinker, then thinking is real work. Working with your hands, that's just for rubes. They don't have to do real work.

  If you're a laborer, then working your ass off is real work. Guys sitting on their asses all day, they're just screwing around. They wouldn't know what real work was if it bit them.

  If you're an artist… same, same. Everyone else doesn't understand how hard you work.

  But I think I'm in a good position to see what real work is. I've worked most jobs. Well. I've never really worked much with artists. A web guy did my website. He seemed to know what he was doing, charged a reasonable fee, and my research told me he was the best choice.

  But that doesn't mean that I know what he does. Might be artistic, might be a trade-skill where much of it is learned behavior, and the 'artistic' part is just the last little bit on top of a mountain of actual skill. I use computers the way that most people use firearms: very carefully, and with a good deal of respect for something I don't remotely understand.

  Autumn seems to get them a little better. Six years difference apparently made all the difference in terms of growing up surrounded by computers. Which is fair enough, I suppose.

  It didn't take long to learn that I can let her handle that stuff for me, though. Which is why I'm noticing that she's not handling it at all. She's distracted.

  I know how distracted people work, and they don't work well.

  "Everything okay, Miss Logan?"

  "Huh?" she blinks and turns to me. I like that look. I like every look she's got. I can feel a little shiver run down my spine. An attractive woman is too powerful a weapon to be unleashed on an unsuspecting populace, I tell you.

  "You seem on-edge."

  She blinks away an expression of frustration, hoping I won't notice it. I'm a lawyer, and a trial lawyer at that. I exist in a realm somewhere between scholar, actor, and cold-reader. It's my job to see little things on people's faces, and I see the expression on hers.

  "I've just been having trouble sleeping, sir. Nothing to worry about. I'm taking care of it."

  "Make sure you do," I say softly. "But if you need any help with anything, don't hesitate to ask."

  She hesitates to ask. Indeed, she hesitates to ask, and then decides not to. Whatever she's worried about, it's not something that she wants to think a whole lot about. I can understand that, but what I can't understand is what's got her so worried.

  "It's nothing, sir. Sorry, I'll get back to it."

  I smile at her. She's a hard worker, I'll give her that. Or at least, she wants to be. She works her ass off. And if she was anyone else, anyone at all, it wouldn't be a long time before I was willing to seriously consider the notion of going to bed with her.

  With her, though… I don't know if I should. On one hand, it would be tempting to give her a taste of her own medicine. A taste of her mother's medicine.

  On the other hand, that way madness lies. I'd be making a big mis
take, and it wouldn't be long before I'd find out exactly why you don't put your head in an alligator's mouth. Sometimes, you get to make a cute show for the audience—most of the time, you just get bit.

  I click my teeth together a couple times. I don't know what is stopping me from pulling the trigger. Something at the back of my mind, some little thing. It didn't take long to formulate a plan. Whether or not I should wait to move forward with it is a stupid question on the face of it. Either I do or I don't.

  Yet, now, I'm getting cold feet? Absurd. I take a deep breath. No time to worry about the consequences.

  Do it or don't do it. Either way, make the decision now. It doesn't take long. Only an instant.

  "Autumn?"

  She looks at me, her fingers still moving on the keys. I watch for a moment, a little bit entranced.

  "Mr. Warren?"

  "You want to get dinner tonight?"

  "Sir?"

  "Dinner, tonight. You have plans, or do you want to get something?"

  "I don't know—I really—"

  I can see the questions running through her mind. Whether or not she would be breaking some rule, or something.

  She probably would be. Or, more accurate, I certainly would be. I don't know whether or not I'm making a big mistake. But I don't know if I care, either.

  "I'd like that."

  "Great. I've got a great place in mind. Trust me, you'll love it."

  She smiles. She looks tired, but she doesn't look like she's got the smile on for my benefit.

  "I'm sure I will," she says.

  She turns back to the computer, starts typing again. If she's not careful, Maggie is going to have a serious competitor.

  Now that I look at Autumn, Maggie does look quite a bit like her, doesn't she? It's a coincidence, of course. There's nothing to it. Just a strange coincidence.

  I settle into my seat and take out a pad and pen. Duty calls once more. My eyes flick across the notes I made for myself, just for such a purpose. I'm not going to make the call until I know exactly what I'm going to talk about. It's more professional-sounding when you don't have to flip through papers mid-sentence.