Stepbrother Romance: The Complete Box Set

by Diamond Durango

  Following Hollis down the stairs, Aviana joined him on the walkway. They went to the car together, Hollis whispering, “Why are we sneaking around?”

  “Do you want to answer a lot of questions about how you and your mother and your brother are doing? And how great it was when Dad had his boys around and how much he misses those days? Why don’t you ever call? Want to come over and watch the game sometime?”

  “Point taken.” Unlocking the trunk, he lifted the suitcase effortlessly and tucked it inside. She dropped her backpack and one of the purses in after it.

  “Nice car,” she said. It was a blue Phemus sports car, sleek and expensive.

  “I have a lot of dough to burn,” Hollis said.

  “Trust fund baby.”

  “You know it. Mom is flabbergasted that we have jobs. She keeps saying but you don’t have to!”

  Once they were in the car and driving away, relief stole over Aviana despite the financial pickle she was in. “How is your mother?”

  “She’s okay. Still shopping. Still partying. Still with Creepy Cabott.” Hollis coasted into the fast lane to get around a slow-moving bus. “How’s your leg?”

  “Healing fine. It just gets sore sometimes. The muscles atrophied in the cast and I’m building them back.”

  “That’ll teach you to go jogging.”

  “It certainly did.” She had been jogging one moment, and lying in a flowerbed in the next moment. The sole witness was an old man watering his lawn across the street. The woman behind the wheel had been holding up her cell phone rather than watching where she was going, and her car drifted over the lane. The front tire went up the curve of a driveway outlet and onto the sidewalk, where the bumper smacked into Aviana. Aviana had been listening to her tunes and had no idea the car was coming up behind her. At least it was going slowly. The driver didn’t stop after striking her. She just yanked the car back into the road and sped away. The cops hadn’t been able to identify her, and all the witness could say was that it had been a blue four-door with bumper stickers, two small heads of children visible through the back windows. Aviana had been ridiculously relieved that it wasn’t Milan escalating yet again.

  “I didn’t interrupt anything for you tonight, did I?” Aviana asked Hollis.

  “No,” Hollis said. “I was thinking about going bowling, but I can do that tomorrow. Want to come along?”

  “Sure. But be warned: I won’t be any good. I’ve never bowled before,” she said. He grinned like something was funny about that and she asked, “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Tell me. Or I’ll line drive a bowling ball into your nuts next.”

  “It won’t hurt me. I wear extra protection any time I’m around you. Got to protect the family jewels.”

  “Please?” she wheedled.

  “I just thought of Corrie and Cassie, those twins that Wyatt and I dated for a short time. They were such girls, unlike you.”

  “Thanks?”

  “Not in a bad way. They just wouldn’t do anything. Everything was either a Guy Thing or a Girl Thing, and bowling would have fallen under Guy Things so they never would have gone. It got to be really boring after a few months.”

  “When the sex high wore off?”

  “I’m up for anything. If Cassie hadn’t liked kayaking, then what about skiing? Rock climbing? Biking? But those were all for guys to her. And she didn’t like to get sweaty. She wanted me to sit around at her home night after night and watch her scrapbook. Is that a verb now?”

  Aviana laughed at the thought of hyperactive Hollis having anything to do with scrapbooking. “If you two weren’t doing anything together, then what did she have to scrapbook about so badly?”

  “It was all stuff she’d cut out of magazines. Pictures of favorite actors and clips about their lives. Kind of a teen girl thing to me, but she was twenty-three.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “That’s why it didn’t last.”

  It never lasted for him no matter what the girl was like. “I still don’t know what’s funny to you about me going bowling.”

  “Because at least you’ll try it,” Hollis said. “Oh, and there was the wedding scrapbook! I forgot about that one. Cassie and Corrie passed it back and forth between them to stick in pictures of things they wanted for their joint wedding. They were big on that. They wanted to get married together and were so excited that our kids would be double first cousins. After a while, Wyatt said that Corrie seemed more excited about him and me being twins than anything else about us as people. We hadn’t purposely gone out looking for twins to date, but by the end, it was becoming clear that they had.”

  He turned onto the freeway. Traffic was light, or as light as it ever got on the freeways around Los Angeles. She looked at the drivers of the other cars, seeking Milan. He wasn’t there, and she turned back to Hollis. “Is Wyatt still grumpy?”

  “As always, but he packed up his grumpiness three months ago and flew it to New York so that he could help set up our new satellite office. Luxure is expanding now that the economy is getting back on track. He’ll be back next week or the week after sometime, depending on if Mom talks him into going into some charity function with her.”

  “I don’t hear from him much. Not at all over the last year or so, and pretty rarely in the two years before that.”

  “He works like a fiend. I only see him now and then because I live with him and work for the same company.”

  “Is he dating anyone?”

  “Not since Rissa from the accounting department. They stopped seeing each other right before he went to New York. It was just a couple of dates, but she thought it was immature of him to live with his brother. I don’t get that. It’s a large place. We’re not sleeping in bunk beds with a pile of stuffed animals in the same room; we each have our own wing. And . . .”

  He trailed off, Aviana sensing that he had been about to reveal something too personal. In the tumultuous childhoods the twins had had, they had been each other’s sole constant. Aviana understood why they stuck together as adults. If she had had a blood sibling, she hoped that they would have been close, too.

  “Anyway,” Hollis said, “Wyatt told her to take a hike after the third or fourth date when she kept making comments about it. We like living together. It works for us. Wyatt needs me to get him out of his funks and he keeps me from becoming a playboy.”

  The silence to fall then was a little uncomfortable. Hollis reached out for the radio controls and said, “Music okay with you?”

  “Sure.”

  He put it on to a rock song, which she turned up. The discomfort vanished as they danced along to the beat, Aviana reminded of the second time their parents had married. She and Hollis had argued like cats and dogs, but a good song stopped a fight in its tracks. Then he’d throw out his hand imperiously, demanding a dance, and they would spin around the living room, singing and laughing and Wyatt yelling at them for being such dorks.

  When the station went to commercials some time later, he flipped it off. Aviana said, “I know it was you that ate all the marshmallows out of the cereal.” That had been the spark to some of their most infamous battles.

  “Yeah, it was,” Hollis confessed. “I’d get up super early and dig out all the marshmallows so I could eat a bowl of those. But you got me back.”

  “Yes, I did,” Aviana said, still pleased about her revenge many years later. “Dug them out myself while you were at the dentist and duct-taped the box shut. You were so triumphant the next morning when you finally pried it open. And then you found nothing but the wheat bits spilling into your bowl.”

  He steered off the freeway as she asked, “Did you really use my toothbrush on the neighbor’s dog all the time like you said you did?”

  “Do you seriously want the answer?”

  “Upon reflection, no.”

  “I did. Just once, but I did do that.”

  “Oh, Hollis. That’s so disgusting.”

  “I don�
�t even remember why I was mad at you that time. I bragged about it to Wyatt and he told me that if I ever did it again, he would use my toothbrush to clean the toilet. I knew he would, so I didn’t push my luck.”

  “Remind me to give Wyatt a kiss when he comes back from his business trip.” That made it sound like she was going to hang out in their home indefinitely. “If I’m still there. I’m going to find a job and apartment as fast as I can.”

  “No rush. So, who’s the chick that you got booted for?”

  “Her name is Ramona and she can’t figure out how money works.”

  “Oh! She’s like Mom.”

  “Your mother has better clothes and impulse control, but other than that, they share remarkable similarities.”

  “Here we are.” Driving past a wall around a property, he pulled into a long driveway lined with foliage and parked in front of a huge house. With their trust fund, Hollis and Wyatt hadn’t had to hold back when it came to real estate. This home had to cost two million dollars or more. Several of the upstairs rooms had walls mostly made out of glass, which gave a view of the trees all around the house.

  They collected her belongings and went inside. Walking through the living room to get to the staircase, Hollis tipped his head to the mess on the coffee table and sofa. “The cleaning lady called in sick this week and she’s out of town the next.”

  “You pig.”

  “I’ll clean it before Wyatt comes home.”

  “You meant to say that you will shove it under the sofa before Wyatt comes home.”

  “No, I am getting better about that.” He took her upstairs and pivoted in the hallway that led to the wings. “Ummm . . . I’ll put you in Wyatt’s spare room.”

  She couldn’t hold back her amusement. Innocently, she said, “Why? What’s wrong with yours?”

  He grinned, caught out and knowing it. “I keep most of my sports equipment in there.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  The spare bedroom of Wyatt’s was pristine. Even at five years old, he had put away his clothes and toys and harangued the two of them to do the same. They set down everything beside the closet and Hollis said, “Want the grand tour?”

  “Can you give it to me tomorrow? My leg is done for.”

  “All right. Good night.”

  She hugged him. His arms went around her back as she pressed a kiss to his cheek. You’re a lifesaver, she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say it. Instead, she said, “It’s so good to see you.”

  “I can tell by the massive erection you’ve got in your pocket.”

  “You do that to me.” She snickered, not wanting to let go of him. “It’s just spare change.”

  “I want to believe you. I really do.”

  “Well, you could always slip into my pocket and see for yourself.”

  His hand slid from her back to the front pocket of her jean shorts. A jolt went through her when he dipped his finger inside. The coins rattled as he stirred them around slowly. Then he pulled out and they broke their overlong embrace. Unbearably aroused, Aviana said, “Sweet dreams.”

  “Thanks for the rent,” Hollis said, displaying the coin he had pilfered from her, and closed the door. They would have to talk more about a real rent tomorrow.

  Hanging up her shirts and dresses, folding her pants and underwear into the dresser, she tucked the suitcase into a corner of the closet. Then she set up her pictures, laptop, and her thoroughly chewed on, ancient purple bunny on the desk. The stuffed animal had been a gift from her mother when Aviana was tiny.

  After that, Aviana changed for bed. Out the windows was blackness, only broken by the dim glow of a streetlight beyond the trees. It occurred to her that nobody knew where she was except for Wyatt, Hollis, and herself. In this beautiful home, she was beyond Milan’s reach.

  All she had done in her senior year of high school was feel sorry for the cute but awkward boy on the social fringes of her government class. When the teacher assigned a group project, she’d invited Milan to join her and her friends. That was what had started this. Essentially nothing. The police hadn’t believed her when she said that she’d never slept with him or even gone out on a date. Yet that was the truth. Aviana and Milan were as close to being strangers as two people could be.

  When he was released from prison, he had ramped up his harassment. She hadn’t gone to sleep with the curtains open in almost a year, terrified that she would find him staring in at her when she woke up in the morning. No longer was he satisfied with hanging around campus and watching her from a distance. Flowers left below her windowsill when he was in a good mood, he tapped on the glass and yelled when he was in a bad one. Once he held up a hammer and gave her a creepy smile. Then he walked away just as she picked up her phone to call campus security, terrified that he intended to smash his way in. That was the last time she left her curtains open in the afternoon to enjoy the light as she studied. No time was safe. Her room was like a cave after that.

  On the day she walked into the dreaded but required science class that she had been putting off for her entire college career, her blood had run cold to see Milan sitting in the back. He’d signed up to audit. She should have transferred but it was the only class time that worked in her schedule. The professor soon kicked him out anyway. He wasn’t doing any of the coursework, and would break out in laughter at random moments and disrupt the lecture.

  After that, he turned to stuffing Aviana’s mailbox with pictures that he had taken of her. In class. Around campus. Dancing in a group of her girlfriends at a party. What gave her the chills was that she hadn’t seen him at the party and there hadn’t been that many people there. He had been in disguise.

  She couldn’t root him out of her life as quickly as he was insinuating himself into it. The day she realized one of her online buddies from high school was actually Milan pretending, she deleted her profile. That had made him explode. All of the next pictures in her mailbox had her face squarely within the halo of crosshairs.

  Some stalkers never moved beyond the low-grade stuff; others went from zero to sixty all of a sudden. She battled with an elderly judge over a restraining order, the narrow-eyed, balding man even worse than the cops were. So Milan had had a hammer, but had he actually done anything with it other than show it off? No. Could be that he just wanted to become a repairman. So he had wanted to take a science class that happened to be at the same time she did. Was that a crime? No. So he took some pictures of her on the sly. So what? She was in public and they weren’t up-skirt shots. What red-blooded man didn’t like a picture of a lovely girl? And how she could know for sure that the pictures were from Milan when he hadn’t signed his name to them, and she hadn’t seen him put them in her box?

  He scolded Aviana for tying up the court with juvenile nonsense. Milan was just a hapless romantic and she had spurred his temper by refusing to hang out on the social media with him. That was exactly how the judge phrased it. His lips thinned when Aviana dared to argue that crosshairs were not a romantic symbol.

  She didn’t get the restraining order. Milan couldn’t have been served anyway. He was homeless and laying low, and the police weren’t interested in pursuing it. They told her just to call 911 if she saw him around.

  If he hadn’t landed himself back in prison, then the simple fact of her father’s presence when she moved back home after graduation had kept him away. She still had no doubt that he knew where the house was. But in this house . . . he wouldn’t find her. She didn’t have to close the curtains.

  That was a good feeling. She could wake up in sunlight.

  Her phone buzzed with a text. I’m really glad you’re here.

  Coming from Hollis, that meant a lot. He was such an open, friendly guy that people thought they knew him. They had no idea that they were just seeing the surface. That was all it had been safe to show when he was growing up.

  Her first impulse was to make a joke about it. She pushed past that and wrote back what she was feeling. I’m really glad to be here.


  If you need anything, let me know. Massages are $5.

  She wanted to crawl into his bed and have him open his arms. But even if he had sex with her, she doubted that he would hold onto her afterwards. That risked too much of his heart. He would push her away, like he pushed every woman away. Aviana remembered all the baffled older girls at their high school who had gone on one or two fantastic dates with Hollis only to have him stop calling. When Aviana asked him why, all he would say was that they asked too many questions.

  Questions about him. Questions about his family. Normal, everyday questions that a person asked when getting to know somebody. And that terrified him. After Wyatt, Aviana likely knew him better than anyone else in the world. He didn’t have to dodge questions about his mother when Aviana had seen the woman up close and personal. Calling him stupid when his grades weren’t as high as his brother’s, telling him to shut up and stop bothering her for something as innocent and sweet as Hollis giving her a hug and saying hello. She picked on him so much that he had cried when he was very small. Later on, the jokester took over and he never looked like he cared a whit. He also stayed at his friends’ homes every chance he got.

  The women he ditched thought he was a man-whore, just another callous, insensitive guy who liked to stick his dick into any available warm hole. But that wasn’t it. They had never seen the six-year-old with his eyes full of tears. Wyatt was the golden boy and Hollis was the scapegoat, and in different ways, it crushed both of them. That they had managed to stay friends when their mother was trying her damnedest to pit them against one another was amazing.

  I might take you up on that massage, Aviana wrote to Hollis. But your prices are too steep for me. How about $3 and a punch in the balls?

  You know where I live, sexy lady, he replied, and she fell asleep with a smile.

  Chapter Three

  She slept more soundly than she had in a long time, and woke up so late in the morning that Hollis had already left for work. Giving herself the grand tour of the house, she fell hopelessly in love with it. Her father’s home was very nice, but it paled in comparison to the work of art that she was currently in. There was even a pool and spa in back, colorful bursts of flowers about the walkway.