Eventually, left with very few other options, she decided to take another approach. It wasn't getting worse. He wasn't violent with her. He still had his job, still had the house, still managed to cook food every night, pick her up from dance class and keep the house relatively clean. He may have been drinking way more than he should have, and he may have been depressed, but he never drank in front of her, never forgot his duties as a father and never once let his responsibilities slip. Sash lost herself in dance classes, carried on as usual, forget about her father and let the rest take care of itself.
It took him a long time to get over it and move on, but eventually, four years after they'd decided to split up, when Sash was an awkward fifteen year old girl, more grown up then many of her friends, he met and married Dante's mother, Tracy.
Tracy had been widowed two years earlier when her husband died in a helicopter crash, coming back from a business meeting in Boston.
By all accounts, he was a womanizer and generally a nasty piece of work. Upon hearing the sad news, the only thing that Tracy was upset to hear was that his life insurance was destined not for her, but for their only son. A bountiful payout to be gifted to him as soon as he turned twenty one. Tracy had stood by him through thick and thin, despite the fact she knew he was cheating on her, not because she loved him, but because he had a well paid job and a company credit card, which had provided for a life she was happy to grow accustomed to.
When she met Sash's father, it was like seeing a completely different side of the coin. She didn't care that he didn't have piles of cash, because for the first time in her life, she realized what it was like to be in love.
With little left after debts were cleared, state taxes were paid, and accounts were added up, Tracy, and her then eighteen year old son, Dante, already well on the way to becoming a man, with the astute business knowledge of his father, moved into their home.
From the first moment she clapped eyes on him, Sash was blown away. Another one of the moments she remembers with absolute, crystal clear clarity. That smile. That rough jawline dotted with stubble. The blue eyes that looked at her like he wanted to devour her. The tousled hair, cropped carefully and left to style itself naturally. He looked like he'd floated out of a dream, or walked somehow from the pages of one of her magazines. Already, she was thinking about him in a way that she knew she shouldn't.
Of course, in the first few years, he never paid attention to her. He was hardly at home anyway, either with one of his many girlfriends or working on some kind of business project, but whenever he was, Sash made the most of it, melting just to be in the same room as him.
She was pretty and athletic, but awkward and gawky with it, and small compared to the full chested women she saw him with constantly, those that from time to time he'd bring home, and Sash would have to hear through the thin walls that divided their rooms, squealing in orgasmic delight like pigs rolling in sun baked mud. He didn't even care about them either, happy to change from one to the next as though pulling on a different pair of socks.
She hated him because of that, jealous that those woman got to spend time with the man she had to call her stepbrother and not just hers, and just in general because he wanted nothing to do with her anyway. She knew he was out of bounds, but it didn't stop her dreaming. She knew it was taboo, but she couldn't help wanting it.
Every day that passed she fell more strongly in love with the man she knew she could never have, and despite that, or perhaps because of it, he seemed to be more and more determined to show her that he wasn't interested. Sash wasn't stupid, but she couldn't help the way that she felt, no matter how taboo or forbidden it was, or how unlikely it would be to ever happen. She grew up spending half of her time wishing her dad had never met Tracy at all, so she could avoid all of this and get on with her life, and the rest fantasizing about Dante, just once for one amazing night, turning his attention to her instead of all of the other girls he decided were temporarily meant for him, only to cast off in the morning like a snake shedding its skin.
The night it happened, she wasn't prepared for it at all. Not only that, she had no idea how to react when it did happen.
Leading up to it, Dante had started to act weirdly protective and completely out of character. He'd begun to show much more interest in her than he ever had, wanting to know where she was going, who she was hanging out with, and offering to give her lifts to places instead of letting her take the bus.
She'd started pole dancing classes a few months before, and felt much more confident with herself because of it. She'd noticed guys showing much more interest in her than before, and she was getting sick of fobbing them off with lame excuses, while she maintained her fantasy about her impossible stepbrother. Her friends were beginning to tease her too, keen to know whether she planned to lose her virginity at all, or whether she was saving herself for a life of celibacy.
The classes, and the confidence paid off, because a few weeks before it happened, Kevin, one of the line backers on the college football team asked her out. Dante had an athletic body, but he hated team sport. He ran and cycled to keep in shape, but he always looked down on football, describing it as 'a waste of time game played by a bunch of meat-heads.'
Sash thought it was because of this that Dante seemed upset that she had said yes to Kevin, as though in doing so she was personally offending him. She'd grown out of her fantasy with Dante, or at least she'd come to terms with the fact that nothing was ever going to happen between them, and had to start thinking about moving on. Kevin wasn't exactly Sash's type, but he represented a good enough stop gap, and anyway, Sash liked making her stepbrother feel jealous for once. Dante was only a month away from his twenty first birthday. In just over four weeks, he'd get his hands on the money he desperately needed to start his business and secure his ticket out of the his step-family's home. Sash needed some way of filling the gap.
The night it happened, when Sash danced for him and he pulled her close to steal a kiss, they both went to the same party.
In the car on the way, Dante turned to his little stepsister and said,
"Are you going to fuck him tonight?"
Sash was surprised by the tone of his voice. What did he care if she fucked him? She wasn't going to, but there was no way she was going to let Dante know that.
"I might", she said, "depends how I feel. You going to fuck Alicia?"
"What do you care?", Dante said, saying the words Sash hadn't dared to.
At the party, Kevin got drunk. He took Sash into a room upstairs, pushed her onto the bed and tried to fuck her. When she said no, he held her down and put his hand over her mouth. He was fucking around, too drunk to realize he was scaring her, but Sash had no idea of that. She bit his hand and then screamed as loudly as she could to make him stop.
Dante was the first to get to them, practically ripping the door out of its frame to get through it. He pulled Kevin off his stepsister and threw him into a corner of the room, and she'd never seen him so angry. In that moment, when Dante held out his arm to pull her off the bed, she saw something in the way he looked at her, that made her realize that the way she felt had a chance of being reciprocated. She saw in his look her own feelings reflected.
Sash spent the next two hours getting drunk, refusing to give up on a good party and go home just because Kevin had been a dick, partly because she was scared of what might happen if she did, and partly because she was scared that it might not, and the sexual tension she felt between them like electricity was something else entirely. During that time, from the moment he rescued her from Kevin, until the moment she decided it was time to go home, Dante never let her out of his sight.
In the car home, Sash rested her head on Dante's shoulder. She could have left it there for a lifetime and been happy.
At home, Sash invited him into her room. She told him she was drunk, he'd be gone by the end of the month, and she wanted to give him a going away present. That was all true, but what she really wanted was to know wh
at the look he had given her really meant. The invitation was enough for Dante. With their parents asleep in the room at the end of the corridor, with no idea what either of them were doing, he let his stepsister take him by the arm and lead him there.
Dante took a moment to examine the room, while Sash put on some music softly, careful not to wake their parents. When Dante had investigated to his satisfaction, picking up things only for Sash to grab them from him quickly and put them down again, he sat on the edge of the bed.
With her audience in place, Sash took her shoes off and tiptoed to the floor in front of him, ready to perform the most important dance of her life. She wasn't the only one who felt like they were doing something they shouldn't.
With her stepbrother's eyes moving rapidly across her body, and before she changed her mind, ignored the mounting tension and stopped it altogether, she began to dance for him. She worked her hips rhythmically, smoothed her hands over her body, pushed her tits up and stuck her ass out. What started as a bit of a joke, quickly turned into a tight, sensual performance, designed to please him, and the more she threw herself into it, the more turned on she got.
For a long while, Dante just watched her in silence twisting through the moves she'd learned in class, his eyes scanning the contours of her body greedily, his hardened cock hidden by his folded arm. When he realized the time was right, he stood, pulled his stepsister into him, pressed his hot lips against hers, and stole a kiss.
She lost herself momentarily in him, his hardness swollen against the space between her belly button and her pussy, until she broke away, scared suddenly by what had happened, only to falter backwards and almost tumble to the ground. Her heart beat wildly in her chest, and she could feel the back of her neck burning up, butterflies swarming in the base of her belly. Did that really happen?
"Sash", he whispered, but Sash was shaking her head.
He closed the gap anyway and took her again, one hand on the back of her neck to pull her into him and make sure she couldn't escape. This time she didn't try, and they fell together onto the bed, a mess of hot skin and short, peaking breaths. Dante wrestled her T-shirt off quickly and Sash fought his belt buckle, desperate to undo his trousers and release what she'd already felt was inside.
What they wanted to do was too urgent to discuss it. They could decide at a later date whether it was something sensible or not. He practically tore off her bra to get to her perfect, perky little tits. A moment later, he was sharing them in his mouth, biting them gently and tonguing the mottled skin of her hardening nipples. His belt undone and his trousers lose enough at the top, she slid her hand in and groped for his cock. Dante moaned as she gripped the base and squeezed, his cock rock hard already.
He was ready to pull them down and expose himself completely, and she was ready to let him take her, when they heard the footsteps in the corridor and the knock on Sash's door.
Sash froze. Quickly, she pulled her hand out of her stepbrother's boxer-shorts as though she'd suddenly realized his cock was on fire. She folded herself into him and Dante pulled her close, as though in doing so they'd both be hidden. He put his fingers to his lips and told her to be quiet.
"Sash?"
It was her dad.
"Fuck", Sash mouthed, suddenly aware of what she was doing. "Fuck."
"Are you awake in there?"
She rolled away from Dante and sat on the edge of the bed. Her heart was beating so much she could hear it. Quickly, she snatched up her T-shirt and pulled it on. Dante was shaking his head. "Don't."
"Dad?", Sash said eventually, coiling the words to pretend she had just been asleep. "Is that you? I was sleeping."
Dante rolled his eyes. Already his cock was beginning to soften.
"I saw the light", her dad said. "Then I heard the stereo was on. Are you alright?"
"Yeah, sorry, I must have been really tired that's all. Sorry if I woke you."
"That's ok. Just try and get some sleep."
When he finally went back to bed, leaving Sash and Dante in awkward silence, the moment had been emphatically broken.
Sash has spent three years wondering what would have happened had her dad not interrupted them. It was in that moment, more strongly than any other in the four weeks that followed it, that she was ready to have him take her virginity.
Dante slept in his own room that night, banished there by Sash, and even though he didn't want to go, the last thing he wanted was their parents finding out what had happened.
Over the rest of the month, Dante couldn't keep his hands off his stepsister, and the more he insisted, and the closer they got to going all the way, the less comfortable she felt about it in general. It wasn't that she didn't want to, because she wanted to more than anything else in the world, it was because nothing else scared her so much in her life.
She was scared of losing her virginity in the first place, frightened to death of someone finding out about them and absolutely terrified that if she did let him take it, he wouldn't need her any more, and he'd cast her away just like every single other girl she'd seen come and go in his recent past.
She'd dreamt about being with him ever since she first saw him, and the snatches of time they found together, either in the dead of the night when their parents were already in bed, out in his car, parked up in the middle of nowhere, or once in a motel room at the edge of town, were so earth shatteringly incredible, that the more she lost herself inside him, the greater the risk if it was all pulled away. He made her feel like nothing else on earth and she was desperate not to lose that happiness, only she did anyway by deciding to deny him the one thing he so desperately wanted.
Even though she promised him that the day she was no longer living under her dad's roof, and they could find a place secretly together, would be the day she'd finally let him take her virginity, it clearly wasn't enough. When his twenty first birthday rolled around, and the money got credited to his account, he was out of her life so quickly she didn't even have time to say goodbye. That was the last time she saw him, before she chose to walk back into his life, and let him take her finally.
Sash rolls over onto her side, feeling a little sick at what has happened. Three years ago, she denied him her virginity and it's clear he never forgave her for doing it. As she catches herself rubbing her belly again, caressing the skin there in smooth loving circles, she wonders whether she'll ever forgive herself either.
Chapter 10
The dust, the tacky memorabilia that hasn't been changed in over half a century, the quirky comedic sign that says 'you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps', the jukebox, the worn leather booths, and most of all, the general bust up nature of the place, doesn't make it look like a bar a billionaire businessman would usually drink in.
Much of the room is cast in shadow, preserving the anonymity of the handful or so patrons. This is a place people come to be anonymous. Where they come to think, to forget and, most importantly, to drink. Dante is here to do all three.
Nursing a poor imitation of an Old Fashioned, Dante sits at the bar, his suit alone worth more than most of the rest of the people in here have ever earned in their whole lifetime.
At twenty one, Dante made his first million. The small amount of money left to him from his father's company was all he needed to get started. A year later he'd bought the huge tower block in the city for his headquarters in cash, and expanded his interests, from computer software into clubs and commercial property.
Just before his twenty fourth birthday, Dante turned over a billion. Not many people could say that. Not many people had such an exceptionally quick rise to the top nor the capacity to know how to stay there. Dante had a knack for it. He made more money in a day than ninety nine percent of all Americans. Men fought each other to line up alongside him, hoping somehow his infectious charm would rub off on them, and women, drawn by his natural magnetism and rugged good looks, went crazy just to throw themselves at his feet. He had everything that he had ever wanted, apart from
just one thing. The one thing he had always been denied.
Another bar sign catches his eye. 'There are no regrets in life, just lessons.'
He snarls at it, curses under his breath, raises his glass to his mouth and downs the rest of his drink. When he places the glass back on the counter, a quarter turn out of habit, to set the embossed company logo into a more favorable position, someone has already sat down next to him.
A raise of the glass is enough to get the attention of the bartender.
"You buying?"
Dante shifts sideways in his seat to look at her. She's prettier than he expects, and much younger than her voice led him to believe. A quick glance reveals an athletic body she's not shy to show off, healthy, peach-colored skin, and innocent, chocolate brown fuck-me eyes. She's not a whore either. She doesn't have the distant, detached look, nor the beaten up air the requirements of that job instills. That doesn't mean she's not dangerous, but when has that ever stopped him before? Besides which, she might help him make a decision. At least if she can't, she'll help him take his mind of making it for a while.
"Sure."
Dante is impressed by her confidence, his broad smile spreading across his face to make the girl feel comfortable. It's a smile that you can't help but fail to warm to. "What would you like?"
"What are you drinking?"
"Old fashioned. Apparently it's their specialty"
The bar tender puts a glass down on the counter top and fills it with bourbon and ice. There is a warmth between him and the girl that suggests they already know each other.
"You always drink alone-?"
"Dante", Dante says, filling in the gap for her.
"You always drink alone, Dante?"
"Do you-?"
"Katy. And yeah, I do if I'm looking for conversation."
Dante ignores the irony. Drinking alone and looking for conversation aren't the kind of things that usually go together, but he's sharp enough to know what she really means.
Heated: A Stepbrother Romance (Full Length Novel) Page 6
