“I think it’s up to me to decide that,” I said, an angry vein twitching on my forehead.
Cerie sighed. “Okay, okay, you’re right. I’m really sorry, Sophie. We’ll stay out of your love life from now on. Promise.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything, still seething.
“Are you gonna come back inside, or do you want me to drive you home?” Lana asked, her voice tentative.
“I think I’ll just go,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get a cab.”
I didn’t want to be fighting with my friends, but they weren’t exactly making it easy for me. They waited with me in silence until my cab arrived, and before I left they both wrapped their arms around me.
“Don’t be mad for too long,” Lana said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
I nodded and stepped towards the cab before turning and giving them a half-hearted wave. We’d had fights before, and I knew it would all blow over soon. I just needed some time to calm down. On the ride home, I stared out the window and thought of Drew pushing me up against the closet door, his eyes dark with a mixture of anger and lust. He’d said he didn’t really want me, but that expression had definitely said otherwise.
Whatever. I needed to forget about it. What had happened between us that night at the hotel was in the past. I’d met someone else now, and hopefully soon the whole Drew debacle would be a distant memory. Things were finally looking up.
Chapter 5
Drew
“You’ve come down in the world, man.”
My friend Caleb skipped a stone over the water in the creek behind the Ramirez house, and I laughed.
“How’s that?”
He grinned. “Usually we’d be sitting by your pool in Medina, getting foot massages and watching hot chicks frolic in bikinis, and now we’re hanging out beside a dirty river?”
“I’m only here for the summer. Besides, we can always hang at yours,” I said, trying not to get defensive. Unlike Caleb, I hadn’t been born into wealth, and this creek had been one of my favorite play spots as a kid.
We’d dragged a couple of lawn chairs from the back garden down to the water, and we were languishing on them in our shorts and aviators. We’d both taken our shirts off earlier to catch some sun, and by now we were on our fourth beer each.
My phone buzzed next to me a second later, and I glanced at the text before immediately hitting the delete button. It was Vanessa, my ex. We need to talk, it had said. Fuck off, we didn’t need to talk. I wasn’t usually the girlfriend type, but she’d seemed really great when we first met, and I’d taken a chance on a relationship only to discover that she was absolutely insane. She’d somehow gotten into my phone and onto my Facebook account and deleted the contact details and profiles of every single girl and woman I knew, even my cousins and aunts. Fucking ridiculous. She’d seriously been that insecure and jealous. When I’d called her out on it, she’d taken a pair of scissors to half my wardrobe. See? Batshit crazy.
“Who was that?” Caleb asked, looking across at me. “Potential action?”
“Nah, it was no one.”
I looked across the creek to see four giggling girls on the other side, a little further down. They were all whispering and staring at my abs, and Caleb grinned as he noticed them too,
“Babe alert,” he said, giving them a cheeky wave. “Now there’s some potential action.”
My mind was on Sophie, but I gave myself the pleasure of checking out the bikini-clad girls. They had the slim, toned bodies of girls who never skipped a gym session and probably subsisted on grilled chicken breast and salad, and usually I’d like that, but that was before I’d had a taste of Sophie’s voluptuous curves. Her body was absolutely smoking, even when she was just hanging around the house in a faded old dressing gown, and I quickly realized I wasn’t the only one who thought so as Caleb turned his head and let out a low whistle.
“Yet another babe,” he said, and I turned my own head to see what he was looking at.
Sophie had come out of the house to water the potted herbs on the back porch, and she was wearing a pair of black shorts and a loose, crinkled T-shirt that looked about a hundred years old, even from this distance. My cock stiffened as she bent over to refill the watering can, and I abruptly turned back to Caleb.
“Dude, that’s my stepsister,” I said, suddenly struck by an inexplicable urge to smack him in the face for daring to look at her like that.
“What, the one who rejected you the other night at Mint?” he said with a smirk.
I threw a bottle cap at him. “Shut the fuck up. You know what she said to me at that shitty party her friend invited me to last night?”
“What?”
I filled him in on how she’d apparently only approached me at Mint based on a dare, and Caleb snorted.
“Who the fuck does dares now? Are they all mentally twelve years old?”
“Exactly what I thought,” I replied. “Pretty pathetic.”
His lips pressed into a smirk. “You know what? I’ve got an idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s be pathetic too.”
“Huh?”
“If they wanna act like fuckwits and involve you in their stupid games, then we should do it right back at them. You know, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, or whatever the fuck that saying is.”
“I’m still not following.”
He sighed impatiently and rolled his eyes. “Okay, dumbass, I’ll spell it out for you. I dare you to fuck your hot stepsister. Do to her what she was gonna do to you.”
I shook my head. “No way, man. We’re not twelve. Besides, you got any idea what my old man would do to me if I did that?”
“So what? Don’t be a pussy. I know what the real problem is. You can’t pull her. You’re off your game.”
“Bullshit. I’m fine. You’re the one with the problem. Your game is weaker than a hand-job from a depressed sloth,” I said, annoyed by the thought of someone thinking of me as unable to pull a chick, even if it was a friendly jab.
He laughed. “Let me finish. If you go through with it and actually succeed, you get my Phantom.”
Dammit, that was actually pretty fucking tempting. Caleb’s old man had bought him a Bugatti Atlantis Phantom recently, and it was the one car that money couldn’t buy for me. There’d only ever been one made, and he had it. I’d been desperate to get my hands on it for a while now, and he knew it.
“And if I don’t succeed? What’s in this for you?” I asked, drumming my fingers against the edge of my chair. One of the girls across the water was watching me closely, her eyes glued to my tattooed biceps. I ignored her and glanced at Caleb, who had a shit-eating grin on his face.
“If you don’t, then you have to be cool with me hitting on her. Because that is one fine piece of ass right there.”
He let out a whistle and waved, and Sophie looked up and gave him a half-hearted smile and wave back from where she was standing. I swore I could actually feel my blood pressure rising. Why the hell did I even care if he checked her out? She’d been nothing but a bitch since I arrived back in her life…yet every time I so much as blinked, there she was in the forefront of my mind, invading my brain like a goddamned virus.
Jesus. It sounded like I was in love with her with the way I was overthinking everything. But there was no way that was true. As she’d made abundantly clear to me the other week, we’d both changed since we were kids. We didn’t know each other the way we used to, so there was no way I felt anything for her at the moment other than mutual disdain.
“Well?” Caleb said, raising his eyebrows when I didn’t immediately respond.
“Fine. Let’s do it,” I finally replied with a curt nod, not wanting to betray my true feelings. What Caleb didn’t know was how desperately I still wanted to screw Sophie, as much as I’d pretended to write her off as some childish bitch. That was crap. As much as I fucking hated to admit it, I hadn’t stopped thinking about her gorgeous face and body in days now, not even
for a second, so if I went through with this stupid dare of his, not only would I get to sleep with her, I’d get myself a sweet new ride.
He also didn’t seem to realize how easy this was going to be for me. There was no fucking way I was going to fail this stupid dare of his. Picking up chicks was a piece of cake for me, and once I really laid on the charm and knocked off my douchebag stepbrother act, Sophie would be like putty in my hands. Yeah, we’d gotten off to a bad start, but all I had to do was try to remind her of the times we’d had as kids, when we’d actually been close. If I played into the nostalgic side of things, I could easily worm my way back into her affections, and then into her pants. And soon after that, I’d be sitting pretty in my new car. Yep, piece of fuckin’ cake. This might have been the best deal I’d ever made.
Let the games begin.
Chapter 6
Sophie
For my Mom, having Tony and Drew move in was like a wonderful dream. She finally had a typical nuclear family who could all have breakfast together around the kitchen table every morning, chatting and laughing like nothing else in the world mattered. For me, it had been more like a nightmare, but dammit, of course my nightmare just happened to look like a dream come true. Yep, I was talking about Drew. Who else?
And speaking of dreams…well, I’d been seeing quite a lot of Dan in the last week, but it was still Drew in my head every single night, invading my dreams with his tight abs and muscled arms.
Strangely enough, he’d actually been nice to me for the last few days, but that only made the situation worse. It meant he was up to something. I could just tell, although if you asked me how, I wouldn’t have an answer. Basically, I was just sitting around waiting for a bomb to drop, and it wasn’t a matter of ‘if’, it was a matter of ‘when’.
Part of his ‘suddenly nice’ act had involved agreeing to help out at the summer camp for the couple of days my Mom had asked us to do, so now we were on our way there together. I sighed under my breath as I clung to my cardboard takeout coffee, and Drew glanced over at me from the driver’s side.
“Do I turn left up here?”
“Uh-huh.”
The hum of the city was falling behind us and quickly giving way to the wide expanse of gorgeous Washington scenery, and as we pulled onto the winding road that led to Mom’s land, my heart slowly swelled with excitement. Even though I wasn’t too chuffed about having to go camping with Drew, I was still looking forward to getting out and about in the wilderness and showing the kids a good time. The blue sky and tufts of forest in the distance filled me with a sense of freedom that I hadn’t felt in a long time due to countless exams and college application essays, and I rolled down my window and took a deep breath of cool, fresh air.
My phone had lost signal earlier, but it came back for long enough to receive two texts from Cerie. We’d already made up after our silly fight, and true to her word, she and Lana hadn’t brought up Drew ever since, other than asking how my family was doing in general. I texted her back, and glancing at the clock on the dash a second later, I saw that it was almost lunchtime. The kids would have arrived at the camp earlier, but there were some volunteers up there already who would be helping them settle in. Our job today was to get all the food prepped for lunch and dinner, and between that we were going to help out with some activities for the kids.
“What do you think about setting up an orienteering course for the kids?” I said, looking over at Drew.
“What, like learning to use maps and compasses and shit like that?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “Nah. Too boring. They want fun.”
“Learning can be fun.”
“Yeah, for nerds like you,” he replied. So he was back to being a tool again. Good to know.
He saw my face and chuckled. “Relax, I was just kidding. You’re right, it might be cool to do that. We could make it fun by setting up something like a scavenger hunt where they have to read maps to find the stuff. We can say they’re treasure maps, and they have to learn how to read them properly and figure out coordinates and stuff. But let’s just see what they’ve already got planned. Your Mom said the other volunteers have already set up a bunch of stuff for them to do.”
His scavenger hunt suggestion was actually not a bad idea, and I stared curiously at him out of the corner of my eye. Was he actually taking this whole volunteer thing seriously? I honestly thought he’d only agreed to come to get on my nerves, but he was going out of his way to make cool suggestions for the benefit of the kids at the camp, which I doubted he’d make any effort to do if he was only trying to piss me off.
The cluster of wood cabins soon came into view, and Drew parked up the car before helping me get my small suitcase and sleeping bag out.
“We’re only here for two days until the rest of the volunteers arrive,” he said. “Did you really need to bring a whole suitcase?”
I laughed. “You’re the one who brought five extra blankets.”
“I get cold, so sue me.”
I half expected him to make some crack about needing me to keep him warm at night, but he didn’t. Weird. He was really off his game. Some of the other volunteers greeted us, and we were introduced to all the kids soon after. They’d been in the middle of playing a game of tag.
“Who wants some lunch?” Drew said, his voice booming over the excited chatter.
There was a chorus of young voices all saying the same thing. “Me!”
“All right, Sophie and I are gonna go get that ready for you all, so you guys finish your game and then meet us in the main cabin. Got it?”
The kids nodded and then dashed back off to play, aside from a couple of small girls who decided to hug him before giggling and running away. I couldn’t help but smile as I watched the way he interacted with them. Who knew Drew the prick could be so good around kids? They all seemed to love him, and we’d only been here for five minutes.
We headed into the main cabin, which had been renovated by my Mom’s friend a few years ago when she’d had the idea to set up the summer camp. One side of it was a kitchen for food prep and storage, and the other was a sort of general area with chairs and tables that could function as a meeting room, dining room or indoor activity room. As Drew got acquainted with the kitchen, he let out a low whistle.
“Pretty decent set-up,” he said, motioning towards the dishwasher in the kitchen. “At least we don’t have to do any dishes. By the way, where do we sleep?”
“I’ll be in the big cabin to the left where the girls sleep, and you’ll be in one of the other ones with the boys,” I replied. “Don’t worry, they’re sectioned off so you don’t have to sleep right next to a bunch of snoring kids.”
“So there’s no special adult cabin for us?” he said, waggling his eyebrows at me and accentuating the word ‘adult’.
“You wish,” I replied with a snicker.
He quirked a brow at me, and I felt a hot rush to my cheeks. Don’t even think about it, I chastised myself. I’d been on three dates with Dan now, and I needed to concentrate on him, not my evil yet sexy stepbrother. I pushed my feelings of attraction aside and got started on making stacks of ham and cheese sandwiches, and Drew got the grill going. The cabin soon filled with the heavenly scent of grilled ham and cheese, and he looked over at me.
“Why does your Mom keep this land? You know, it’s gotta be worth quite a bit these days, seeing as they’re developing everything around it.”
I shrugged. “Financial worth isn’t everything. The kids love coming out here every summer, and if she sold it that probably wouldn’t happen anymore.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Anyway, I’ll put the plates and cups out. Can you go get the kids?”
“Sure. Plates are in that cupboard,” I said, pointing to the cupboard on the far side of the kitchen before heading out to get the kids in for lunch.
The rest of the day, Drew continued to be nice. He even went out of his way to plan out and set up the entire scaveng
er hunt that he’d come up with earlier for the next day. It was like aliens had abducted the Drew I now knew and replaced him with a clone of the old Drew, the awesome friend I’d grown up with all those years ago. I hated to admit it, but I actually really liked him when he wasn’t in his douchebag mode.
Just after dinner, the head volunteer stood up at the front of the dining room and clapped his hands together.
“Listen up everyone! I just need to quickly go over some details for the scavenger hunt which our friendly new volunteers have set up for tomorrow. You all need to be awake and at breakfast by eight-thirty so we can get started first thing, so make sure you’re all dressed and ready by then.”
He went through some more details, and at the end of his speech, he flashed everyone a big grin.
“Now…who wants some toasted marshmallows around the campfire?”
The kids loudly approved of that, and Drew and I headed outside with everyone. We all sat around munching on s’mores as the kids chatted between themselves, and one of the older ones caught everyone’s attention a while later.
“Guess what? It’s time for scary stories!” she said. The rest of the kids cheered her, and she launched into an urban legend about a girl who’d been babysitting when the phone rang, and she quickly realized the call was coming from inside the house.
A chill ran down my spine as I listened. I knew it was just a silly tale, but I’d never liked scary stories. The only horror movies I’d ever watched were ones I’d seen with friends, and even then I hid under a blanket half the time.
Another boy got up and told his own imaginative story about ghosts and monsters in the woods on this very land, and he finished by holding a flashlight under his chin and making a scary face. “And that’s why you don’t go near these woods at night. You never know what could be lurking out there!”
There were a few giggles, and one of the other volunteers stood up.
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