Dirty Stepbrother - A Firefighter Romance (The Maxwell Family)

by Alycia Taylor

  “So where do you guys start out?” Susie asked. She was sitting on my bed…supposedly helping. Mostly, she was just getting in the way.

  “Las Vegas—MGM Grand,” I said with a smile. I’d never been to Las Vegas I was excited about it like a kid on Christmas.

  “Cool,” Susie said. I love Las Vegas. Will you guys have time to do anything while you’re there?”

  “Not a lot,” I told her. “I think we stay one night and then move on.”

  “And then you just keep going east?”

  “Yeah, we go east and then south, I think. I know we have a show in Texas and one in Florida, too. I’m hoping while we’re in Florida we can go to Disney World.”

  “Cool. I haven’t been there since I was a kid. You got really lucky getting this job,” she said.

  “Especially considering they fired me,” I told her with a smile.

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you….you think that hot executive Jake guy wants to fuck you?”

  “Susie!”

  “I’m just saying…he hired you back after the other producer fired you and he’s kind of had his eye on you from the start…don’t you think? It seems like he’s trying hard to get close to you. Isn’t that unusual for an executive and an intern?”

  “I guess it’s not the norm, but it happens. Are you saying that you don’t think it’s possible for me to just be really good at what I do?” I knew it was silly, but I was kind of hurt. It was as if she was saying I couldn’t possibly be so good at my job that he was genuinely impressed with me.

  “Of course not. That’s not what I’m saying at all,” she said. “I know how awesome you are. I just know how men are. They think with their dicks. Usually when you think they’re doing something nice it’s because they expect something in return.”

  Susie was very cynical for a twenty-two year old. She’d been in more than one bad relationship. She was attracted to older guys, and more than one of them had turned out to be married. Susie dumped them as soon as she found out, but it left scars. She wasn’t nearly as trusting as she used to be.

  “I don’t think they’re all like that,” I told her. I liked to not judge any one person by my past experiences with others. “Jake hasn’t been anything but professional and a gentleman. I might be tooting my own horn here, but I think he really likes my work. Even when all the crap was going on with Tristan and me sneaking around, I think I stayed pretty focused. The other girls get all ga-ga when he walks in the room, but I’ve never even flirted with him. Maybe he finds that refreshing. I think if he was going to give someone the job just to get a piece of ass out of it, it would have been one of those girls.”

  “Or, maybe he finds it hot…maybe he thinks you’re hotter than those other girls,” she said with a grin.

  “Shut up!” I threw a pillow at her, “I want to believe I got the job on my merits.”

  Turning serious she said, “I’m sure you did. I’m just being cynical because I hate men right now.”

  “Boo!”

  Susie and I both screamed. Tristan had stuck his head around the doorframe and yelled at us. I hadn’t even heard him come in.

  “And I rest my case!” Susie said, holding her heart. “Hey, jerk! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  Tristan shot back, “If you haven’t had one yet looking at that face in the mirror by now, I think you’re safe.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Okay, you two knock it off.” Sometimes I felt like I was the mother of two adolescents…maybe even pre-adolescents. They bickered like children, always trying to one up each other in the insult department. The funny part was I thought they really did like each other. It was how they showed it.

  “Are you still packing?” Tristan asked. It was a rhetorical question, I’m sure. One look around the room and it was obvious that I was still packing.

  “You don’t even try to sound smart, do you?” Susie said. She liked to tease him about being dumb and he teased her about being ugly. He wasn’t dumb and she wasn’t ugly, but for some reason that was the relationship they’d settled on.

  Tristan ignored her that time and said, “I’ve been here for an hour, listening to you talk about me.” I tried to remember what we’d been talking about and then I saw him grinning and knew he was full of shit. He told me then, “Ethan texted me, he said that he and the other contestants are going over to Sal’s for dinner. You want to go?”

  I did need some time out and getting to know the people I was going on tour with couldn’t hurt. “What time are they going?”

  “Now.”

  “Oh. No, I can’t. I have to finish this. I don’t want to leave it a mess.”

  He looked around and grinned and then said, “Alright, I’m going to take off then. Just make sure you have the bed cleaned off when I get back. That includes Susie, too. I don’t want to bump into that in the middle of the night.”

  “You know you’d give your right arm for all this,” Susie told him.

  Tristan snorted and said, “I’d tear off my right arm to beat it away from me.”

  I rolled my eyes and tried not to laugh. It was mean, but funny. His personality was showing through more since he wasn’t numb all the time—or pissed off. I kissed him good-bye while Susie rolled her eyes and then I asked her, “Are you going to do something to help me or are you just going to sit there?”

  She pushed herself up off the bed with a tortured sigh and said, “Sure, you don’t defend me when your boyfriend insults me, but please do let me help you.”

  “Shut up! You give as good as you get. You don’t need me to stick up for you.”

  “True,” she said with a grin. “I could outwit him seven days a week and twice on Sunday. I’m not sure what you see in that Neanderthal anyways.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Sure, he’s good-looking in a cave-man kind of way…”

  I laughed, “Knock it off. That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about.”

  “You poor thing,” she said, still grinning. “I think we should celebrate your last night here…even while we’re packing. How about you go open us a bottle of wine? I think it would help me pack faster.”

  “You’re hopeless,” I told her, shaking my head. “Not only are you not doing anything, you want to distract me with wine.”

  She picked up a shirt and folded it and said, “There, I did something; now get me some wine.”

  I rolled my eyes; she really was hopeless. I went to get the wine, though, just as she knew that I would. I wasn’t just a pushover when it came to Tristan—it was how I lived my life. As I walked by the couch, I saw Tristan’s duffel bag and a canvas bag just dumped next to it. I sighed and shook my head. He acted as if he had maid service or something that was going to come along cleaning up behind him. I guessed it was a man thing; my dad used to do the same thing and my mother and I would go along picking up after him.

  I went over and picked it up to put it in the bedroom; when I did, a thick pile of paper work fell off the top. I bent down and picked it up. I hadn’t ever been to court for anything, but my late boyfriend had…plenty of times. I could tell from where I stood that it was something official. I sat down on the couch and looked at them. They were legal papers, and as I flipped through them, I saw that he was being sued for back rent. I sat there and read where it said how much he owed and how long he’d owed it. According to these papers, he was evicted sometime during the summer. He’d been staying with me for three months and he owed for the three months before that. That son of a bitch had never said a word. What the fuck? He’d been lying to me the entire time?

  I dropped the papers and the bags back down where I got them and went into the kitchen for the wine. I opened the bottle of red wine that Susie and I had chilling in the fridge and took a swig of it right out of the bottle. Then, I took it and two glasses back into my room. I sat them on the dresser and collapsed down on my bed, somewhat dramatically.

  “What happened?” Susie said.

&n
bsp; I wasn’t sure if I should say anything or not. Tristan hated for other people to know his business. I trusted Susie, though, and I really wanted to talk to someone about it, so I said, “Apparently my boyfriend is broke and has been for a while. He was kicked out of his apartment a few months ago, just about the time he showed up on our doorstep with his suitcase. He’s also being sued for back rent.”

  “I knew he was a bad seed,” Susie said with a grin.

  Her grin didn’t sit with me well at the moment and I lashed out. “Shit! I’m glad you find it amusing.”

  “I don’t, I’m sorry.” She sat down next to me on the bed. I could tell she felt bad for making a joke and I felt bad for snapping at her.

  “The least he could have done was tell me,” I said. “Three months, Susie! He’s had three months to tell me. You think there would have been one moment when he could have brought it up in conversation, or even in one of his groups at the rehab. He never even told his therapist he got evicted…at least I don’t think that he did. I’ve been there for almost all of the meetings.”

  “You’re right, he should have told you,” she said, cautiously. I had the feeling she was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear. Hopefully she wasn’t going to defend the lying S.O.B. I didn’t want to hear that right then. She finally said, “But, think about it….you’ve been supporting him, Elly. It wasn’t really hard to figure out that he didn’t have any money. I mean, you knew he didn’t have much money, right?”

  I looked at her and said, “Yeah, I knew he didn’t have much. I wanted to help him, so I wasn’t worrying about it. But right now, I guess I just feel kind of like he’s been lying to me all this time. I hate to be lied to.”

  “Yeah, an omission of that size is the same as a lie…to us anyways. I tried telling that to my last married boyfriend. He never said he wasn’t married, but still…men see the truth differently, I think.”

  “I know, you hate men today. I’m starting to see your point. The truth is the truth; there are no varying degrees of it.”

  “And yesterday and probably tomorrow….” Susie was still talking about hating men. She smiled sympathetically and said, “I agree with you. The truth is the truth and he should have told you.”

  “I guess I should look at this from the bright side. In nine months, my boyfriend is going to be a millionaire. I’ve never been with a millionaire before.”

  “Yep, that’s definitely the bright side. You should get him to propose before he gets it so when you divorce him, you’ll get half.”

  I laughed and said, “Yeah, there’s a plan. Then I’ll be a half a millionaire…as long as he doesn’t blow it.”

  “Oh! There’s your solution! Don’t blow him no more until he comes through with the cash,” Susie said. “Like I said before, they all think with their dicks.”

  That made me laugh, I could always count on Susie to lighten the mood.

  Chapter Three

  Tristan

  I was on my bike, on my way to the second to last therapy appointment I had at the rehab. I was not going to miss one fucking thing about it. If I’m being honest, I was surprised that I made it that far. It was the furthest I’d ever made it sober—over a hundred days clean. Elly deserved some of the credit for it, but I had to give a lot of it to myself. It wasn’t easy getting clean, and it sure as hell wasn’t easy having to talk to these strangers about all my shit. But right then, when it was so close to being over, I was really glad I did it. The next day the tour bus would be leaving and it would be all expenses paid for nine months—then I’d have a fucking million dollars. Life was definitely looking up. I hoped that those nine months would go by as fast as the previous nine months had. Actually, most of those last few years were a blur. Sometimes I’d hardly known what month it was; I just went from one altered state to the next.

  I started thinking about the dinner with the other contestants from the night before. We had Mexican food on the show’s dime and it was good. Some of them aren’t bad to hang with either. I doubted I’d ever work back up to having a real friendship with anyone; that just wasn’t in my personality, but it was good to have acquaintances that weren’t dealers. Overall, it was a fun night, but Brooke kept rubbing up against me every chance she got and I had to keep avoiding being next to her. She’d worn a skirt that barely covered her pussy and her big boobs were pushed up over the top of the shirt she was wearing. I was okay with ignoring the stirrings she caused in my pants from across the room but I got a little flustered when she pressed her tits up against my arm.

  Every time throughout the last three months that I had to practice with the rest of them, she would be right up next to me, too. I thought she got that I wasn’t interested back when she made the threats about telling on Elly and me. Obviously not; you’d think she’d have a little more self-esteem. I made a point to tell her again that I wasn’t interested, but she acted like she was in heat. It really wasn’t attractive.

  I had also decided on my way back from the restaurant that when I got home I was going to talk to Elly about it. I didn’t want her to see Brooke acting all familiar when we’re on tour and thinking something is going on between us. I really wanted to keep things as drama free as possible. But Elly was already asleep by the time I got there. She was sleeping in one little corner of the bed and the rest of it was still covered with clothes and crap. I thought about pushing it all off into the floor, but she’d probably be pissed. Instead, I slept on the couch. When I got up in the morning, she was already gone. I texted to see if she was coming to the appointment and she texted back saying that she had to take some paperwork for one of her online classes to a dean. When she finished with that, she’d be there.

  After I won the contest and told my therapist that part of winning was going on tour, he got a little freaked out about it. I got that he was afraid I’d fall back into the party life, but I had to learn how to live my life without doing that. He still hadn’t signed off on me going and the show was requiring it since they paid for my rehab. I would need to talk him into it. I had all my argument points ready. I thought it was good that I was easing back into show business touring with the show. They had their own therapist that goes on tour just in case any of us freak out…and as another deterrent, I’ll have Elly. Elly had fulfilled her promise and gone to every single appointment with me since I was discharged from rehab. She was my rock through all of it, and I hoped that someday I could pay her back for everything she’d done for me—not just financially. I have to admit that I resented her a little at first; I wasn’t used to feeling like I owed someone for something nice they did for me. It was rare for that to happen.

  When I drove into the parking lot, I saw her there waiting for me. Damn, she was hot!

  I parked and she walked over to meet me as I was climbing off the bike. “Hey,” she said.

  She looked like she was going to say something else but then she didn’t, so I said, “Hey. You look hot. Let’s go home and fuck after this…or better yet…”

  Her face changed and she laughed; she already knew I was going to suggest finding a fucking closet or something. She’d gotten to know me pretty well in such a short time. I suppose that’s because there really was not that much to know. It also had something to do with living in such close quarters. It was hard to hide anything from anyone living in a two-bedroom apartment.

  “Now that we’re allowed to do it in the bed, let’s stick with fucking at home,” she said, taking my hand and pulling me into the building.

  We waited for the therapist for fifteen minutes before he finally wondered in, no apology or anything. If I was paying him out of my pocket, I’d have docked him for that shit. Since I was not though, I couldn’t really say anything.

  “So, what’s new?” he asked when he sat down.

  “We leave tomorrow,” I told him. “I still need you to sign off on it.”

  “Right…the tour. I’m still concerned about that, Tristan. That whole atmosphere seems to be where th
e problems for you began. I wonder what might happen if you’re put back into the middle of it so soon into your recovery.”

  “Come on, that’s bullshit,” I told him. “My career didn’t have anything to do with me being an addict. You met my parents. You know damned good and well where my problems stem from. I guarantee you that they won’t be on tour with me or even on the periphery.” He still didn’t look convinced so I said, “Come on, Doc, I can handle this. It won’t be the same as a professional tour. I’ll be surrounded by people all the time that will be worried about bad publicity and there won’t be as many pressures. They’ll make damned sure I’m not screwing up. Elly will be there, too.”

  He liked Elly. Sometimes I got the feeling he was wondering what she was doing with me. That kind of pissed me off. It wasn’t any of his fucking business what she saw in me. That was for me to wonder about. The doctor looked at Elly and said,

  “You will be there, the whole tour?”

  “Yes, I’m actually working on the show. We also have a therapist that will be touring with us. He’s there just for this sort of thing. The producers are all aware of Tristan’s history and everyone will be looking out for him.”

  “Hmm, that makes me feel better about it. Do you think I can have this therapist’s number?”

  “Sure,” Elly said, “I can get that for you.”

  “Good then; Tristan, I’ll need you sign a release of information for him.”

  “What kind of information are you going to give him?” I already didn’t like the idea of the producers all knowing my shit. I didn’t want to keep adding people in the mix.

  “I need to communicate with him, Tristan. He needs to know your background and what’s already been done for you and what you’ve already accomplished. If something happened and you had to go to him for help…well, it would be beneficial to you both for him to be well informed. I can’t share with him without your permission, though, so I need you to sign for it. Otherwise, I’m not going to feel comfortable enough to sign off on you going.”