Hollis hadn’t been lying about his improved tidiness. His bedroom wasn’t exactly neat, but the chaos was mostly limited to the desk and the chair in the corner. The quarter he had swiped from her pocket was on his dresser. Straightening his books and magazines, she kicked a discarded sock toward the heap of dirty clothes in his closet. His spare room was another story. He could have opened an athletic store with its jumbled overflow of contents.
Wyatt’s bedroom was her favorite, all of the windows speckled with leaves from trees so that she felt like she was in a jungle. On his bookshelves were pictures of him and Hollis over the years. She appeared in several of those. One made her laugh: it was all of them playing house in their preschool and kindergarten years. Aviana was the girl so that made her the wife; neither Hollis nor Wyatt wanted the role of family dog or baby so she ended up with two husbands. With only a hazy view of what marriage entailed, they dressed up in their very best, scaled the trellis to the roof of the porch, and shared a liter of soda they called coffee while they swung their legs over the side and asked one another how work had gone. Wyatt made her a ring out of clumsily braided grass and Hollis, without the dexterity to braid but unwilling to be outdone, presented her with his favorite polished seashell. All three were holding hands in happy matrimony and beaming down to the camera.
The picture beside Wyatt’s bed was of Aviana and the twins back in her first year of college. That was the last time she had seen him, and the first time it was very easy to tell the twins apart. Their mother had made an extremely poor choice of boyfriends after breaking up with Aviana’s father for the last time. Wyatt had taken a hockey stick to the face in a family fight. It left him with a scar on his temple, which extended into his brow and left a slim white line where the hair never grew back.
She liked that he slept with a picture of her watching over him. Just because he wasn’t one to keep in contact didn’t mean that she had been forgotten. A gleam in the nightstand beneath the photograph caught her eye. The drawer hadn’t been closed all the way, and she opened it in curiosity. Oh. There were handcuffs, a blindfold, and other items inside. He liked bondage in his sex life. Something within her stirred with interest, and she wanted to learn more about the women who had submitted to him in this bed. Or maybe he had women use these on him, but Aviana couldn’t imagine that quite so easily. Wyatt preferred to be in charge of everything, an alpha male through and through even in boyhood.
Fighting the urge to examine further, she closed the drawer and quit his room. Her mind turned reluctantly to other things. After breakfast, she would buckle down on her job search. Her options were open to any kind of employment that would take her, so long as it was legal. A person truly renting a room here would have been paying out the nose for the privilege of staying in such a house; she couldn’t afford that but still wanted to give Hollis something.
In the kitchen, she searched through the cabinets and refrigerator. The sink was piled with dirty dishes and the counter was covered in plastic wrappers and take-out containers. Ending up with a bowl of cereal, she washed a spoon and was about to pour the milk when her phone rang. It was an unknown number, which made her hesitate.
It was probably just a wrong number or a spam call. She picked up. “Hello?”
“Hey, Avvie. Are you all right?” It was Wyatt. His voice was slightly deeper than his brother’s.
“I’m all right,” Aviana said, guiltily thinking of the cuffs in his drawer.
“Hollis picked you up, didn’t he?” There was a dangerous tone to the question. If Wyatt didn’t get the answer he wanted, Hollis would have hell to pay.
“He picked me up,” Aviana said hurriedly. “Right away.”
“I don’t want you to use that personal taxi service he likes so much. Not alone, at least.”
“I won’t then. I hadn’t ever heard of it.”
“It’s the same as climbing into a car with a total stranger. Any freak can call his car a taxi. Hollis gave you a room, too? Not the couch?”
“He gave me your spare bedroom. There wasn’t any way to get to the bed in his around all of his stuff. And I can’t sleep on the couch without some deep cleaning first. Your maid called in sick.”
Wyatt sighed in exasperation and Aviana said, “Is that all right with you? Me staying in your spare bedroom?” Nervously, she babbled at him. “I’m not going to be here long. I promise. I don’t want to be in the way. I just need to get a job and I don’t have much money, but I can give you two a little for rent-”
“Avvie, stop talking.”
She stopped talking.
“Stay in my spare bedroom and I don’t want your rent money. I’m still without a clear date for when this set-up will be done, but I definitely don’t want to walk into a house that Hollis has been happily trashing. If you’re willing to clean it up, I’ll pay you.”
Startled, she said, “I should do that in exchange for staying here. That would be much more fair.”
“Are you honestly going to argue with me about this?” His voice was dark.
Wyatt wasn’t one to cross lightly, and why was she rejecting a chance to earn extra cash? “No. I would be happy to do that.”
“Good. I’ll pay you more if you do his laundry. When he runs out of clothes, he tends to just steal mine rather than washing his. Hold on a second.” She heard muffled male voices. When Wyatt came back, he sounded tired. “All right. The last thing I wanted to tell you was that there’s a can mixed in with the soup in the kitchen that has a roll of emergency cash in it. I know he’s living off corn dogs and microwave macaroni and other crap. You can use that money for real food, and the key to my Libation should be in the mudroom. The store is only a few blocks away and you can drive it to job interviews.”
It was too much, far too much that he was giving her, but she would lose the fight. Then Wyatt would be irritated at her for starting one in the first place and wasting his time.
“I will. Thank you. Is the set-up not going well?” she asked tentatively.
“No, it’s not. The contractor hired a passel of absolutely incompetent sub-contractors. Everything is two weeks behind where it should be and there’s no reason for it except that this is what happens when you try to do everything on the cheap.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You aren’t responsible for any of this mess. Have a swim in the pool. That’s what I wish I were doing right now.”
“I wasn’t apologizing because I was responsible. I was just sorry that you’re having to deal with this.”
“I choose it. I could be sipping champagne and tanning on yachts with Hollywood stars instead.”
“Because that’s just so you, Wyatt.”
Abruptly, he laughed. “Yeah, I wouldn’t be any good at that. But I am good at this. I just wish the sub-contractors were good, too. I’ve got to go pretty soon, Avvie. But tell me: are you really okay?”
She didn’t dodge the personal with Wyatt the way she and Hollis did with each other. “Just hurt that my father insinuated I was a lazy freeloader when I had a broken leg this summer. He’s thrown himself into a new relationship and the woman wants me out of the house. I’m like a pet that needs to be rehomed to him.”
“I’m the one who should be apologizing. I should have called you when Hollis told me about the accident.”
He was as hard on himself as he was on everyone else. “You were working,” Aviana said, although his long silence in truth had rankled her. She had thought they were closer than that back when they were in high school, but then in college he drifted away.
“No, that’s not an excuse,” Wyatt said. “I’m sorry. I should have taken the time to do that. And there isn’t a lazy bone in your body. Your father is just thinking with his . . .”
“Dick,” she finished. “It’s okay. I’m all grown up and you can say those words around me now.”
“It wasn’t the word so much as the context. Nobody wants to think about his or her parents in those terms.
” Someone shouted in the background on his end. “Take care, Avvie. Remember the can.” He hung up. Her mind strolled back to his drawer and a muscle between her thighs twitched. Her ex-boyfriend Mark had never tied her down or restrained her in any way, finding the idea disrespectful even with a very willing partner. She wouldn’t have minded his strong hands around her wrists pinning her to the pillow at all.
After eating breakfast, she rustled through the soup cans to find the one that had money. One lifted easily and she pulled it out. Five hundred dollars had been squirreled away inside. Millions upon millions of dollars in the bank and Wyatt still kept this. Left home alone frequently for days and even weeks as young teens, they had run out of food and money to buy more.
The job search would wait. The ludicrous interview had been so discouraging that she was happier at the thought of cleaning up the house. She started in the living room, picking up and straightening everything, and moved to the kitchen. Once that was done, she pulled the vacuum out of the laundry room and ran it around the ground floor. The laundry had to wait until she talked to Hollis. His suits for work might have to be dry-cleaned. The shopping she would do tomorrow as well. There was enough food to get by another night, as long as she wasn’t picky about frozen burritos, cereal, and soup.
When the vacuum was put away, she checked her cell phone. The noisy hum had covered up two calls. The first message was from her father, which surprised her. His tone nothing but amiable, he asked how she was doing and made small talk about the weather. Reading between the lines, Aviana surmised that something had gone wrong with his grand plan to push her out and have his girlfriend move in. His eagerness to prove his devotion could have spooked Ramona. If it wasn’t that, then he was just lonely for the moment.
The second message was from the unpleasant secretary, who reported that the company thanked her for her time and interest but had chosen to go with another candidate for the sales position. Confident that the lucky winner was Boner Killer, Aviana deleted both messages. She would rather do laundry than work in that bizarre office with a boss who couldn’t even bother to tie his shoelaces.
Out of tasks to do around the house, she scanned around for anything she could have missed. Wyatt had told her to take a swim for him. Without a suit, she couldn’t. But the pool looked more and more inviting the longer she stared out the window. Deciding to wear one of her long T-shirts that she wore to bed, she put it on and went outside. The late summer heat pounded down on her. At the deep end, she dove in.
The warmth on her skin extinguished, to be replaced with a delicious coolness. She kicked, feeling the strength in her right leg and the weakness in her left. Her hair streamed out behind her as she pushed up for air.
She should have tied it back, but it was too late now. It got in her face when she tried to swim freestyle, so she did breast stroke instead. Back and forth, back and forth, and when she got sick of the T-shirt dragging at her, she pulled it off and swam naked. Then she rolled over to do the backstroke, the front of her warmed, the back of her cool, and the steady rhythm lulling her to a peaceful state where she didn’t think about anything but the next stroke.
When she tired, she closed her eyes and floated. All she could hear was the quiet underbelly of the pool, broken by gentle lapping when she bobbed above the surface. This was like taking a vacation. All the tension ebbed away with the ripples of the water. Things were going to be all right for her.
Then she opened her eyes to Hollis.
He was standing at the edge of the pool and smiling down to her. She yelped and dove under the surface. Close to the shallow end, it only took one pulse of her arms to reach the bottom. It couldn’t be five o’clock yet and she’d never thought that he would come home early. And now he had received quite the show.
Her lungs began to burn. She couldn’t stay down here forever. Pushing up, she swam over to the side and let that shield her nudity. He had taken a seat on the chair beside the water. Aviana castigated herself heartily. In addition to not binding her hair, it hadn’t occurred to her to bring out a towel. “Well, this is embarrassing. Hi, Hollis.”
“How do you think I swim?” Hollis said, loosening his tie and leaning back in the chair. “It’s not a public pool and the neighbors can’t see through the trees, so I just strip and jump in.”
She tried not to imagine him naked. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Your miscalculation is to my benefit.”
Even in the cool water, her body was heating up. Giving him her most charming smile, she said, “Would you be so kind as to go into the house and get me a towel?”
His grin was teasing. “I don’t know. I’m kind of tired. But all you have to do is go to the shed over there. We keep a stack of beach towels on the shelf. It’s just a few steps away.”
A few steps that she would be taking entirely naked and right in front of him. An electric tingle went through her. “Please?”
He chuckled and got up. Going to the shed, he opened the door and pulled out a bright green towel. Then he returned to the pool, where he unfolded it and stretched it out. “Here you go.”
He had already seen all she had, so why was she being shy? She pushed over to the ladder and went up it step by step. Drops of water rolled down her body and pattered back into the pool. His eyes trailed down as she came up. In ordinary circumstances, she would have been far more self-conscious. But the intensity of his gaze reassured her that he liked what he was seeing.
She stepped into the towel and he wrapped it around her. “Would you like to go out for dinner?” he asked. “Then bowling? My treat.”
“I would love to.”
“Anything else you would love to do?”
She shivered. It was the strongest come-on he’d ever given her. She didn’t care if it was just one night and they went back to being friends. At least she would have the night. It had been over a year since she’d had sex. Mark had been her one and only boyfriend, back in her junior year of college. A year ahead of her, he graduated and went home to Florida. She had liked Mark and Mark had liked her, but they had both suspected a long-term relationship wouldn’t work and didn’t even attempt one. The parting was friendly though wistful, and she had put him behind her since then.
But she missed sex tremendously. If Hollis’ hands went wandering tonight, she wasn’t going to do a damn thing to stop him. Looking up into his gorgeous blue eyes, she said, “Maybe. You’ll have to find out.”
He kissed the tip of her wet nose. “The house looks great.”
“Your brother is paying me to clean up after you.”
“Clean up yourself and let’s go downtown. You pick the restaurant. I’m in the mood for anything.”
He wasn’t just talking about food. Holding the towel to her front, the back of it fell open as she walked to the house. When she looked over her shoulder, he was enjoying the view.
She was in the mood for anything, too. She went upstairs to shower and dress.
Chapter Four
They had a delicious meal in a corner restaurant, the sky turning purple outside the windows and an ever-present hum of traffic accompanying the soft music that was playing overhead. Now they were dawdling over a lava cake in a melting pool of caramel ice cream. Both were too full to keep eating, but it was too good to let it be cleared away. Every bite Aviana took had to be followed by a long pause to let her stomach find room for another. The waiter was shooting them the evil eye for eating so slowly.
“One question,” Hollis said suddenly.
“One question about what?” Aviana asked.
“About me.”
He had deftly kept her talking about herself all through dinner. Light, inconsequential topics like school, with Hollis throwing in occasional remarks about his college. Not his own experience, but people he had known while there. His offer to answer a personal question startled her.
“Okay,” she said, game for this change, and cast about for something she wanted to know about him but believed he
would never answer. Almost immediately, she found it. “How did Wyatt talk you into getting a job? When you were in high school, all you wanted to do was drive fast on the freeway and hang out on the beach.”
He looked so uncomfortable that she nudged his leg under the table and said, “I can pick an easier question. What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?”
“No,” Hollis said. “I want to do this. I’m just . . .”
“I know.”
“It’s like darts. Anything I answer honestly, genuinely, it gives someone a target. A way to pin me down.”
“But you’re assuming I want to throw something at you.”
He took that in and nodded. “It’s a long answer.”
“We have time.”
“That was all I did want at the time, a fast car and a beach full of girls in bikinis. Then I went off to college with no plans other than sneaking booze and having fun. Wyatt bugged me all the time about thinking ahead, getting a job after we graduated. I didn’t want to. I didn’t care. I didn’t know why it was so important to him that he made something of himself. Our great-grandparents did that for us, by working hard at their company and getting rich. As soon as we turned twenty-one, we were set for life. So I screwed around semester after semester, doing just enough work to get by while he crammed. I thought he was being stupid. He thought the same thing about me.”
They put their spoons to the dessert at the same time, clinking them together as they scooped up a little more cake and ice cream. “We turned twenty-one before our senior year and got our money. Two point two billion dollars each.”
She hadn’t known the exact amount. “Oh my God!”
“It went from one little store to the second largest furniture retailer in the world. I figured that I would finish school to make Wyatt happy and then get started on a grand life of flying around here and there chasing the waves, chasing snow, chasing mountains, one endless vacation. And I did that, just as soon as I had the diploma in my fist. I had a girlfriend briefly at the time. She was a trust fund baby, too. I moved into this posh apartment and found myself surrounded by dozens of trust fund kids all grown up. And do you know what they did?”
Stepbrother Romance: The Complete Box Set Page 8
