The following hot, steamy stories from Aya Fukunishi and KA Taylor are all available FREE OF CHARGE to Kindle Unlimited members. Just click the links to download your free copies straight to your Kindle!
~ The Dominated by the Billionaire Series ~
At His Command
On his Orders
With His Consent
For His Affection
With Her Obedience
~ The Her Submission Series ~
Her First Submission
She Learns to Kneel
Master Teaches Her Control
~ Standalone Books ~
The Bangkok Nights Trilogy
Erotica: Volume 1
At the Mercy of the Witch
In Every Hole: Tentacle Sex
The Dictator's Concubine 2
Begging For It: The Breeding Trilogy
Learning to Love 2: Abi's Practical Sex Ed.
Mating Amelie: Shifter Erotica
My Lover the Bigfoot: Monster Erotica
Ladyboy in the Water
Satisfying Sarah
Bondage in Bangkok
Stepbrother, Where Art Thou?
Stepbrother Forbidden
~ Books from KA Taylor (Aya's romance pen name) ~
Wolves of the Five Tribes: The First Alpha
Wolves of the Five Tribes: Bloodcoat Rogue
STEPBROTHER FALLEN
by
Aya Fukunishi
Copyright © 2015 by Aya Fukunishi
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Printing, 2015
A Bangkok Nights Publication
Uh oh. Duck and cover. Mom's going a little crazy again.
"Karl, what did I tell you about leaving your wallet just sitting here on the table?" There's no mistaking the tone of her voice. Mom's on the warpath. "You have to get out of the habit! I'm sick and tired of warning you time after God damned time!"
Dad drags his eyes from the TV and looks over at my mom, tapping her foot and pointing at the sideboard like a cartoon version of a nagging 50s housewife, then sighs and slowly lifts himself from his chair. I could pick the tone of that sigh out of a fucking lineup, I've heard it so often this past month. Over the eight years of their marriage I've studied the complex language, weird customs and bizarre, creepy mating rituals of my parents, and by now I'm the Dian Fossey of Karl and Aubrey Moriarty. Parents in the Mist.
Translating this particular sigh from dad is pretty simple. It's one of his favorites: a sad, dejected drawn out groan that says 'I really want to keep watching the golf in peace, but I'll give in for the sake of an easy life.' I probably hear it five times a day, and ten on Sundays, but for the past few days it's been pretty much the only sound he's made.
I roll my eyes at mom's paranoid display, and watch from the safety of the couch as Karl trudges over to the sideboard to make a big show of slipping his wallet in his pocket. He looks like he's about to say something, but for the thousandth time over the last month he manages to count to ten, bite his tongue and remain silent. Good call, dad. Any noise he makes now that doesn't sound like some form of 'sorry, I won't do it again' would have the same effect as poking a silverback gorilla in the balls with a sharp stick.
Mom's been a nervous wreck for a month now. It was kinda funny when it started, but now her constant fretting is starting to wear a little thin. Ever since she learned that she'd have to share her home with Karl's long lost son her craziness has stepped up a notch, from regular 'mom jitters' (the condition that leads a parent to believe that a dish might explode into deadly shrapnel if it goes unwashed for more than an hour) to grade A, full blown crazy, where they get up in the middle of the night to change the cat's diaper and sing it a lullaby.
Mom really didn't take the news well. She's always worn the pants in the marriage. Dad's the big boss at work but the house is unquestionably mom's territory, so when dad pretty much made a unilateral decision that his son would be coming to stay mom took it pretty hard. The initial shock and bitter arguments gradually gave way to a grudging acceptance, but mom's 'concerns' about the new arrival have made the atmosphere pretty damned tense, and if anything it's only gotten worse over these last few days as the clock counts down to zero hour. It's been... well, it's been a pretty messed up month.
I freeze as Mom's roving eyes land on me, and I brace myself as she fires off another shot of concentrated neurosis. "Maddy, put away your iPad. Don't just leave it lying around."
I hold the tablet up for her mom to see. "It's not an iPad, mom. It's a Kindle." I tilt my head back over the arm of the couch to look at mom, upside down, still fussing over the sideboard. "You wouldn't let me have an iPad, remember? You said I'd spend all my time playing Candy Crush, flunk out of school and end up flipping burgers in McDonalds." Mom has a vivid imagination, especially when it comes to dreaming up worst case scenarios. "Besides, I'm using it right now. Why would I put it away?"
She impatiently waves away the correction. "Well, whatever it is just make sure you don't leave it lying around the place. You left it out on the coffee table last night, and I don't want to see it there again. Rafe will be here soon, and I need the house nice and tidy when he arrives."
I let my silence hang in the air. I know exactly why mom wants the house to be tidy, and it has nothing to do with being a good hostess. It just means there won't be so much expensive stuff laying around for the deadbeat criminal to slip in his pocket and pawn for drugs, guns and hookers. It's for the same reason that she's had locks fitted to all the bedroom doors and hidden the good silverware up in the attic.
Crazy lady.
I also know the reason for all this tension: Rafe fucking Stone, a name none of us had ever heard until a month ago, and a name that now hangs over the family like an angry, bruised storm cloud. When mom says 'Rafe is coming' she uses the same tone you might hear from Ned Stark warning of the approaching winter. Just the sound of his name is enough to send her to the edge of a panic attack.
OK, lemme back up a little. You might think I'm being a little hard on mom, and I'd hate for you to think I'm a bitch (I'm really not, I promise), so I'll tell you all about the terrifying specter that is Rafe Stone, and you can decide for yourself.
I guess I should give you a little background. Here goes...
I'm Madison Moriarty, and I live in a fancy suburb of San Francisco with my mom, Aubrey, and my stepdad, Karl. I turned 18 a couple of months ago, and two weeks ago I graduated from Harvey Milk High here in SF. After the summer I'll be moving down to UCLA where I'll major in English Literature before going on to become either a world famous author or the best damned waitress this side of the Rockies, but for now I'm pretty much just sitting around, enjoying the summer.
What else?
Shit, I don't know. What else do you wanna know about me? I hate describing myself. I always feel like whatever I say I'm either bragging or selling myself short. I should be better at this shit. God knows everyone my age has enough practice at self promotion with Facebook status updates.
I guess I'm just a regular kid - sorry, bright young woman. Solid B+ student, clean criminal record, blond hair, nice clear alabaster skin I hope I'll keep forever. Maybe a few pounds of puppy fat I'd like to lose, if only someone would invent a fat free Big Mac. I don't wanna make myself sound boring or anything. I'm not a wet fish, but I'm just normal.
The one thing you should really know about me is that I've wanted to be an author as long as I can remember. My dad was a pretty successful author, and though he died before I was o
ld enough to read any of his books he passed on that enthusiasm for words to me before he left. I'd love to follow in his footsteps and write stories about my adventures around the world, but I need to actually have those adventures first. Y'know, get some experiences under my belt, like Ernest Hemingway, only not a fat drunk. Right now I just don't have any stories to tell.
Mom's pretty much just like me, aside from a little streak of crazy that bubbles over every so often, but I guess she has an excuse for that, considering what she's been through.
When I was about five years old my dad - my real dad, I mean - died in a car accident. He was driving me and mom home from the theater, where we'd watched Ice Age, when a drunk driver plowed into us while we were sitting at a set of lights. It wasn't a spectacular crash or anything. We were just sitting there at the same intersection we passed every day on the way to school. Dad was waiting for the lights to turn green, mom was tuning the radio and I was sitting in the back seat, playing with a little soft toy of Manny the mammoth. A few seconds later the car was upside down, and dad was dead.
So, yeah, mom doesn't like change. She likes routine. She likes every day to be just like the last, and when things get a little crazy she gets a little crazy.
Shit. I am being too hard on her, aren't I? Sorry, mom.
Anyway, mom and dad - I mean Karl now, not my real dad - met when I was about eight years old, and they married when I was ten. Karl has his own record label that makes him a lot of money, but these days he's semi retired. He says music is a young man's game, and now he spends most of his time watching his investments and shouting frantic instructions at spandex-clad guys on ESPN.
Mom's kinda halfway retired too. She used to teach Spanish at Harvey Milk, but these days she just does a little private tutoring whenever she gets bored. It's not like she needs the money.
So, yeah, that's my family, I guess. We're not crazy rich, but we have a nice house with five bedrooms, a pool out back and a couple of cars in the garage, so mom and dad are pretty much just living the American dream, right? It's pretty dull and not exactly romantic, but they have enough savings that they don't have to worry about the cost of my college tuition, and they can just relax and enjoy life. It's not a bad set up.
So now you'll probably better understand why mom kinda went off the deep end last month. We were sitting around the dinner table when the phone rang, and that's when the craziness began. The guy on the phone told dad he was a public defender working out in Colorado, and he told dad he might want to sit down (that's never a good sign).
At first dad assumed it was some kind of prank played by the guys at the office – they're always dreaming up new ways to tease the boss – but as the call went on he realized that it could only be true. The guy on the other end of the line had too much information for it to be a prank; too many details of Karl's past that only mom and I know.
Karl has a son. Bang out of the blue, a kid has been dropped in the middle of his life like a live grenade. Not even a good kid. An asshole.
The story's pretty complicated, so bear with me. In the eight years since Karl married mom I've only ever been given the PG13 version of his past, but over the years - thanks to Google, and the fact that he doesn't really know enough about the Internet to cover his tracks - I've built up a pretty clear picture of the life dad led before he became the 40-something couch potato I know and love; before he became a guy who spends so much time watching ESPN that you could print a 3D replica of him using just the ass imprint he's left in his favorite armchair.
Karl Moriarty was, once upon a time... well, kinda cool. He spent most of his twenties as the lead singer of a Seattle grunge band called The Nut Monkeys, often playing on the same bill as bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden. By the time Nirvana broke through to the big leagues with Nevermind Karl shared an apartment with Dave Grohl, and though Grohl tried to pull Karl along for the ride The Nut Monkeys never quite managed to break into the mainstream (I tracked down one of their live recordings, and I can understand why. They were just awful).
Apparently Karl had something of a one-sided rivalry with Kurt Cobain, who he believed had stolen the spotlight that should have shone on his own crappy band, and watching Nirvana knock Michael Jackson off the top of the billboard chart while his own band was still playing to a dozen drunks for beer money was just too much to bear. Dad accepted defeat, hung up his guitar, bought a suit and, like so many frustrated musicians before him, got a job as an A&R man for Geffen Records, traveling the country to scout talent.
That was how he met Mia.
Mia Stone was the lead singer of a New York punk band called The Fucking Loud Noises. From the few pictures I found online it was obvious she'd been pretty damned beautiful - or would have been, if she'd taken out the massive nose ring, grown out her pink mohawk and stopped giving the finger to any camera pointed in her direction.
Karl and Mia fell in love and quickly married. Dad never explained what really happened next, and the Internet hadn't been of much help. The Fucking Loud Noises never went further than small shows in venues with sticky, beer-soaked floors and no fire exits, which meant that Mia barely existed according to the Internet of the 1990s.
All I know for sure is that the marriage went south almost as soon as it had begun, and Mia filed for divorce and left as soon as the papers were signed. Dad once described it as a beautiful, wonderful mistake, and assured me that he didn't regret a thing, but I've always suspected that's the kind of flowery crap parents only say after they've had about a couple of decades to recover from the stabbing, breathless pain of young love and loss. It's a line straight out of the Big Book of Bullshit for Kids, basically.
That's pretty much where the story ended for Mia. She vanished from the face of the earth – something that was probably pretty easy before Facebook – and until the phone rang it seemed as if she'd just gone up in a puff of smoke on a cold day in the fall of 1996.
Dad went on to form his own record label, stopped dating crazy, screwed up musicians and fell in love with mom, a woman who wore sensible shoes and always paid the bills on time. In the years since then any trace of his rock and roll past have been erased. The angry young man wielding his guitar became a mild-mannered, graying at the temples executive, his stage replaced with an office, his microphone with a laptop, and the lines of suspicious white powder with an addiction to cable sports channels and nice, comfortable chairs.
And then the phone rang, and everything changed in an instant.
When Mia Stone left dad she'd been carrying more than a stack of records and a grudge. He had no idea she was pregnant, of course, and whatever had caused her to leave him had made her angry enough not to tell him even after she'd given birth to his son. From what little the public defender had been able to piece together, it seemed Mia had gotten together with another guy shortly after her son, Rafe, was born. She'd lived with Rafe and this dude for many years somewhere in New York before moving to Colorado where, three years ago, Mia Stone had taken her own life.
The defender was a little hazy on the details from there, but it appeared Mia's partner hadn't been in the picture since New York, and after Mia's death Rafe refused to so much as give the name of the man who'd raised him. Without any public records – Rafe's birth certificate was nowhere to be found, and the boy himself wasn't telling – and without any extended family to fall back on Rafe had been shuffled from foster home to foster home around the state.
Apparently Rafe's hobby was collecting convictions on his juvenile record, mostly small stuff that just earned him a slap on the wrist: trespassing, vandalism, petty theft and the like. A couple of times he'd been thrown out of foster homes after getting into fist fights with the other kids, but no criminal charges had ever been filed.
Six weeks ago, a month before Rafe's 18th birthday, he'd been caught driving a car that belonged to his current foster parents. The car had been reported stolen hours earlier, and by the time Rafe was found behind the wheel he was halfway across the state,
the front passenger seat littered with empty beer cans. He'd told the cops he'd been trying to drive to some gig in Denver.
What happened next is where it got complicated, and where dad got dragged in to the ungodly mess. Rafe's foster parents refused to take him back, and the judge who was due to hear the case decided that – despite the fact that Rafe was only 17 when he committed the crime – he'd be tried as an adult. Rafe's string of arrests for petty crimes had convinced the judge that this was an escalating problem, and without a stable family environment to help bring him back in line the judge figured the shock of jail might finally scare him straight.
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