Defender: A Stepbrother Romance

by Kira Ward

  Defender

  A Stepbrother Romance

  Kira Ward

  Copyright © 2015 by Kira Ward

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Defender

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  The End

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  One

  Crawford

  I knew I was going to fuck her the minute I saw her. Tall, blond, built like a fucking stripper; she was exactly the kind of girl I could take standing up in the dirty club bathroom and forget her name before I’d even zipped up my pants.

  It’d been a long day. Three depositions, two hearings, and a client who had no idea what it meant to keep his damn mouth shut. I spent half the day shutting people up, the other half cleaning up the mess that came from them not paying attention to me. But there was nothing new about that. If a client ever listened to a word I told him, I might fall over dead in my office. Hell, if it weren’t for all the meditation and workouts with my personal trainer, the stress the clients dished out might have already sent me halfway to the grave.

  She saw me coming, this girl, in my Boglioli suit and Brutini oxford dress shoes, dollar signs glowing in her eyes. She knew money when she saw it. Nothing could have taken her eyes off of me. And, no wonder. With my thick, dark hair and what I’ve been told are soulful, nearly black eyes, women can’t help but stare when I come their way. I’ve never had trouble getting a girl to do whatever I want. Except for that one…

  I grabbed a drink at the bar, swallowed it in one gulp, and headed out to the dance floor where she was gyrating in a skimpy, white dress that barely covered her thighs, let alone the peak of lacy material that was pushed so far up her snatch that it couldn’t have been comfortable. She smiled when she saw me coming, raising her arms and moving her hips like some sort of snake charmer. I slid a hand over her hip and pulled her hard against my side. The idea that I’d picked the perfect girl was confirmed when she raised her leg and pressed one of those thick, gorgeous thighs against my cock.

  We didn’t even bother to exchange names. My tongue was in her mouth before she said a single word, my hand boldly exploring the flesh left bare by her thong panties. She tasted like cheap whiskey and cigarettes. It was a nasty habit that more and more young women were getting into. I can’t say that I liked it much, but you learn to live with what’s available.

  I took her out to my car ten minutes later, her hand on my cock the entire drive to my condo, another promise that she would soon fulfil. I didn’t understand colleagues who moaned and groaned about how hard it was to date these days. They talked about expensive restaurants and proper phone etiquette. I just shook my head. I didn’t understand why they would bother with all that bullshit. When a girl is so willing to shed her panties after a few drinks, why bother with the whole courtship routine? And who needs the same girl in his bed night after night? Didn’t it get boring, fucking the same old pussy over and over again?

  I couldn’t imagine it. I mean, yeah, my mother would love to see me settle down with some good, Christian girl, a couple of snot nosed kids hanging on to my pants cuffs. But not everyone wanted that particular version of the American dream. I was perfectly content with my million dollar condo, my Porsche 918 Spyder and my fucking freedom. I didn’t need some girl telling me when to come home, who to socialize with, and how often I could have sex. I was my own man. I had a mother and I left her house a long time ago. I wasn’t looking for another.

  She was amused by the doorman in the lobby of my condo building who took an obvious look at my hand under her skirt. But the laughter left her lips when we climbed onto the elevator, and I shoved her up against the back wall, my fingers sliding inside her already wet hole. We barely made it into the apartment before the clothes started coming off. She managed to get her dress over her head at the same time her tongue was doing something quite interesting along the outer edge of my ear. It was…wet.

  I turned her around and pushed her against the kitchen counter, ripped her underwear from her ass and thrust my cock inside her almost before I managed to get my pants completely out of the way. She cried out, loud enough to make me glad that my closest neighbor was out of the country at the moment, her hands straining behind her to grab something–anything–as I moved into a quick, violent rhythm.

  That’s was why I loved my lovers tall and sturdy. I loved to fuck like it was the first–and potentially last–time I would ever feel my cock slide into the wetness of a tight kitty cat. Gentle was not in my vocabulary when it came to sex. Caring what was happening in the mind of my lover was enough to make me lose my hard-on. I liked it rough. And I liked women who could keep up with me.

  This girl…damn her pussy was slippery. She was enjoying it, if the little screams escaping her lips told me anything.

  I don’t remember how we got to the bedroom. After that first quick, hard fuck, we found a bottle of bourbon hidden in a cabinet somewhere. And then…clothes flew, tongues explored interesting places, and that’s the last I remembered.

  My phone was ringing. That shrill ring tone from some 80’s song that I would forever associate with my childhood. It was my mother’s ringtone.

  I reached over the still sleeping blond and searched the floor blindly for the cell. It wasn’t there. It took a minute, but I finally realized that it somehow found its way to a glass I don’t remember leaving on the nightstand. I grabbed it just as the beep indicating a new voicemail sounded.

  “Crawford, it’s mother. Eden’s got herself into some trouble, and we might need your help. Can you call me?”

  I groaned. That was the last fucking thing I needed right now.

  Eden.

  I never asked for a stepsister, especially not the one I got. The idea of bailing her out of trouble–again–tasted worse than the dried sex and sour booze in my mouth.

  Two

  Eden

  I woke with a start. I didn’t initially know where I was. The room was dark, but there was light shining through a window in the door, and my bedroom door didn’t have a window in it. And there were noises–the squeak of rubber soled shoes, the sound of metallic carts being pushed around, the beep and chirps of some sort of electronic machines–that weren’t the kind of noises my apartment, even with its thin walls, ever exhibited.

  “Eden?”

  I started to turn my head, and a pain erupted behind my eyes. I tried to reach up to feel what was going on, but there was a tube wrapped around my arm that wouldn’t let me move more than a few inches without a new pain igniting in the back of my hand.

  “Don’t move,” my Dad’s voice said somewhere in the dim room. “You’ve got an IV in your hand.”

  “And a bandage on your head,” my stepmother, Vera, said.

  “What happened?”

  “You were in a car accident.” My Dad’s face came
into view a few inches in front of my face, then a worried frown marred his handsome features. “It wasn’t terribly serious, but you have a pretty deep gash on the top of your head.”

  I tried to reach up to touch it again, but again the IV tube tugged at the needle buried deep in the back of my hand. I groaned. Mom, her thin hands shaking just slightly, tugged at the tubing to free my movements. Her fingers were cold as ice as they brushed against me.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Of course,” she said, her eyes jumping to my Dad’s face before settling on mine. “Just worried about you. You’ve been unconscious since we got here.”

  “I have?”

  “Yes,” Dad said.

  I could see better then, the room coming into focus. It wasn’t as dark as I had first thought but still dim. There was a lamp on in the corner, and it brightened the room enough that I could see the bags under my Dad’s eyes and the continuous tremble in Mom’s hands.

  “Do you remember what happened?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head slowly, pain again igniting behind my eyes. This time, when I instinctively raised my hand, it moved without restraint, my fingers brushing against a heavy bandage that covered the majority of my forehead and a good portion of the top of my head.

  “I had a date after work,” I said. “A blind date that Jeannie set up. It didn’t go well.”

  “At Zirki’s?”

  I nodded, immediately regretting the quick movement. I touched my head again, as though the pressure would help ease the pain. “I remember leaving the restaurant but after that…”

  There were little flashes of memory. The cute valet who handed me my keys. The smell of old hamburgers in my fifteen year old Ford. The asshole who talked only about himself–who wasn’t even interesting. The guy was an accountant who lived with his grandmother, for God’s sake!–coming out of the restaurant. Pulling away from the curb a little too fast.

  “I don’t remember what happened after I left the restaurant,” I mumbled.

  My Dad shared a look with Mom that told me they weren’t surprised by my answer. And that made me wonder what happened that would cause them to adopt the expressions that they hadn’t pointed in my direction in…well…it’d been a good six months since the last time I messed up bad enough to cause that “it’s-not-her-fault-her-mother-died-when-she-was-a-toddler” look to be exchanged over my head.

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  My Dad’s eyes fell on my face. They were kind eyes. I used to like to just stare into them when I was a little girl, telling him that I could see angels dancing there. They were blue, a pale blue like crystal clear water on the beaches of the Maldives. Mine were like his, but with flecks of brown and green that muddied the color a little. But his…they were so calming that I could never imagine anything bad could happen as long as I could see his eyes.

  But his eyes were clouded with something…concern, maybe. “They checked your blood alcohol level when they brought you in. It was routine. But it came back over the legal limit.”

  “We had wine at dinner,” I said, suddenly remembering downing three or four glasses one right after the other to kill the frustration of the horrible date. The guy actually ordered for me–of all the gall–without bothering to ask if I was allergic to fish. I’m not, but I can’t stand salmon. And guess what he ordered for me?

  “You must have had quite a bit because your numbers were fairly high, Eden,” Vera said. “High enough that it took all your Dad’s charm to keep them from putting you in handcuffs in the ER.”

  A trickle of dread began to run down the length of my spine.

  “And the car you hit… It was a Bentley,” my Dad said.

  I closed my eyes, wondering if I could just go back to sleep. If I went back to sleep, maybe I could wake up somewhere else and discover that it had all just been a nightmare.

  Mom’s cold hands picked up one of mine. “I called Crawford. If anyone can get you out of this mess, it would be him.”

  I groaned.

  Crawford was the last person who would rush to my rescue. Not after what I put him through the summer before he went off to law school and never looked back.

  Three

  Crawford

  “Has she been arrested?” I asked, tugging at my tie as I turned from my desk to look out on the breathtaking view of my office windows. The corner office. Wasn’t that the office everyone on professional based dramas always wanted? Mine was on the twenty-fifth floor, a room that sported floor to ceiling windows on two sides. They were tinted but done in such a way that my view was completely unobscured. And that view was simply breathtaking. Who could resist such a perfect view of Manhattan?

  “Not yet,” Mom said.

  I adjust my smartphone, pressing it closer to my ear so I could hear her better. Mother had never really learned how to overcome the timidity that my father’s overbearing personality created in her, not even with a man like Alistair as her husband. Ali was the complete opposite of my real father. He was kind, gentle, an artist who made a lot of money selling unique metal sculptures out of an old barn, but still lived like a poor farmer in a house that had seen four generations of his family come and go. That house would be Eden’s one day. And she’d probably burn it down.

  “Then I wouldn’t worry about it. They probably messed up the blood sample, or something. If it was reliable, she would have been in handcuffs the moment the results hit the cop’s hand.”

  “They wanted to, but your father convinced them she wasn’t going anywhere, especially since she was unconscious at the time.”

  That got my attention. Mother had said Eden was taken to the hospital after her car accident, but I didn’t ask how serious her injuries had been, and she hadn’t offered. The idea of Eden injured…

  I shook my head. It didn’t matter. She was still alive or Mom wouldn’t be so concerned with her future. “Have the cops come by the hospital this morning?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If they do, let me know. Otherwise, I wouldn’t panic just yet. Like I said, the test could have been collected improperly; the results could have been different from what you were told, or a half dozen other things could have happened. Until Eden is taken into custody, there’s no reason to jump to conclusions. Okay?”

  “Okay, Crawford,” Mom said, the relief palpable in her voice.

  And that annoyed the hell out of me.

  Alistair and Eden came into our lives when I was in middle school and Eden was still in elementary. Eden’s mother died of breast cancer when she was two, leaving her with no memory of her mother and spoiled rotten by Alistair. The first time I met her…I should have known things would not go well between us. She bit my finger because I wouldn’t let her have a piece of my chocolate bar.

  Our parents married a few years later. She followed me around everywhere I went, always there when I wanted to be alone. After a while, I had to just live with it. I mean, what do you do when a little girl with big blue eyes like hers stare up at you with crocodile tears running down her cheeks? I’m an asshole, but I’m not made of steel.

  So I let her. I let her follow me around, took her along when I hung out with my friends, even let her come stay in my dorm at Stanford one weekend my senior year. And that was the biggest mistake of my life. If I had known what she was going to do…

  But I wouldn’t think about that, because it always pissed me off and I didn’t want to be pissed while I was on the phone with my mother.

  “Have you ever considered letting Eden face the consequences for her actions, Mom?”

  You would think I had asked if she’d ever considered leaving her favorite cat out in the snow all winter. She gasped, a sound that was more audible than every syllable she’d spoken since she picked up the phone. “Why would we do that?”

  “Maybe she would finally learn a lesson if you and Alistair weren’t always there to bail her out.”

  “But she would go to jail.”

  An image of E
den in prison orange like the young client I’d just visited in the county lockup raced through my mind. It made me sit up a little straighter and turn from my amazing view. I navigated back to my desk only to discover my assistant had walked in without knocking, something we’d talked about a dozen times in the past. Why couldn’t the girl listen?

  “I have to go,” I said abruptly into the phone. “Call me if something else happens.” I stabbed my finger against the disconnect button without waiting for my mother’s response. “What do you want, Carrie?”

  My assistant smiled like I’d just handed her a diamond tennis bracelet. “I have messages for you. Mr. Collins called three times, asking if you’d be able to make dinner on Friday. Judge Willis wants to know if you plan on filing a change of venue in the Rodriquez case. And…” She flipped through the pink slips she held in her hand. “Oh, and Mr. Stone wants to see you in his office at ten.”

  I tilted my head just slightly as I studied her. “Mr. Stone wants to see me in–“ I glanced at my watch–“fifteen minutes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You do realize he is the senior partner of this law firm, yes?”

  “I do.”

  “Don’t you think you should have led with that information?” I asked, conjuring my most charming smile.

  Carrie blushed as she rocked back on her impressive three inch heels. “I should have. I will next time.”

  I nodded, my smile widening. “That would be great, Carrie.”

  She smiled then, too. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

  “No, I think that’ll do it.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned and headed for the door, swinging her hips in an alluring movement that I enjoyed for a second. She had this habit of wearing tight A-line skirts that hugged her quite ample ass. Every time I looked at it, I imagined that ass bent over the front of my desk, her fat little kitty just barely peeking out under all that roundness. It was a nice thought, but even I wouldn’t fuck someone on my payroll.