Break Me: A Stepbrother Romance (2 page)

My breath was coming short. “Bram,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“I’m looking at you,” he said. He was. His dark gaze was moving over my body, taking in every inch as he leaned over me. My breasts, my tummy, my opened thighs. My skin tightened everywhere his eyes touched. “You look good, Summer.” He raised his hot, intent gaze to me. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to read.”

I opened my mouth, but couldn’t make a sound. He’d pushed my legs open, and I could feel myself throbbing hard, wanting him to touch me. He read my mind and leaned over me, letting my hands go, bracing himself on one arm. With his other hand he traced the seam of my lips through the wet fabric of my bikini.

I gasped and arched. “Bram, we shouldn’t be doing this.”

“I don’t give a fuck about what I shouldn’t do,” he said roughly. “If you want to, and I want to, that’s all that matters.” He leaned in close to me, his lips barely brushing mine, his breath on me. “I’ve seen how you look at me. Do you want to do this, Summer?”

His finger had stopped, and the only thing I wanted was for it to start again. “Yes,” I breathed.

He rubbed along my lips again, and at the same time he leaned in and kissed me.

I’d only ever been kissed three times, and they were all awful. The boys had slobbered on me or made a smacking, sucking noise that made my gut churn. I’d never been kissed by anyone with experience. Until Bram. He kissed me long and easy, teasing my lips, making me comfortable. Then he opened my mouth and licked inside me, once, and then deeper. I let my mouth open and let him do it, greedy for more. I kissed him back and tried to lick him, and our tongues tangled. He tasted like sweetness and beer.

When he broke the kiss, he was panting almost as hard as I was. “You want more?” he asked me.

“Yes. Yes.”

He pulled down the straps of my bikini top, exposing my breasts to the summer air. I was too far gone by then to feel embarrassment. He dipped his head and took a nipple in his mouth, sucking it, and my back arched off the ground as I moaned. Then he sucked the other nipple, and I tangled my hands in his hair.

He looked up at me and smiled. “You like that.”

“Oh, God, yes,” I panted.

He was running his finger along my seam again, digging in harder this time through the fabric. I could see his chest rising and falling. “You’ve never fucked anyone before.” It wasn’t a question.

“No.”
Please don’t let that be a turnoff. Please, please…
I’d never had sex, but this summer I’d learned how to please myself. Thinking about him. Thinking about this. And I’d never admit it to him, but I’d done it a lot.

Now he ran his finger along the edge of the opening of my bikini leg, digging in. He leaned down and circled my nipple with his tongue. “Is that what you want?” he said hoarsely. “You want me to fuck you? You want me to be your first?”

“Yes,” I said. “Bram, please, yes.
Yes
.”

“We can’t go back if we do it,” he said. “We’re not supposed to, but no one will know. If I fuck you, I fuck you. I’ll be your first. That’s it.”

I squirmed against him and bit my lip. “Fuck me,” I said.

His eyes widened briefly in surprise, then he rose and grabbed his jeans from where he’d dropped them on the beach. He pulled his wallet from the pocket, then pulled out a condom in its wrapper.

Oh, my God,
I thought.
I’m really going to do this. I really am.
I tried to feel bad, to feel afraid, but I didn’t. All I felt was crazy desire for him. I’d been shy all my life, but I wanted him now. It felt perfectly right. I didn’t want any other guy to be my first.

In one motion, he shucked off his swim trunks and knelt between my legs again. Now he was completely naked, his cock big and hard. I’d never seen a naked cock outside of internet pictures before, and now I was throbbing somewhere deep inside my body, somewhere I’d never felt before. My bikini top was too tight, even though it was pulled down. Everything was too tight. I undid the top and threw it aside. Bram grabbed my bikini bottom at the hips and pulled it off, the motion rough and urgent. When I was naked, he spread my legs open and looked down at me.

I was so wet I felt myself soaking my upper thighs. The hot summer wind blew across my body, between my legs. My nipples were hard as chips of ice. I arched my back a little and relaxed into the sand, completely spread for him, and closed my eyes. I heard him rip the condom wrapper and put it on.

Then he was leaning over me, braced on his arms. He kissed me again, but it was more urgent this time, and he broke it quickly, his teeth scraping my lip. “If it hurts, just say so,” he said. “I promise I’ll stop.” He dropped his head until his breath was on the skin between my neck and my shoulder. “Oh, fuck yes. Like that. Just like that.”

He was sliding into me, and it didn’t hurt at all. It felt big, and filling, hitting the empty spot inside of me. He was going slowly, the way easy because I was so slick. I whimpered.

He paused, but I didn’t protest, so he started again. All the way in, until he was completely inside me. I shifted my hips instinctively to take him deeper. It hurt a little, having him this deep, but the pleasure was so intense I didn’t care. I liked it.

“Yes?” he whispered in my ear, checking with me.

“Yes,” I whispered back. “Yes.”

He slid out again, then back in, faster this time. Then again, and again. He seemed to be losing control. “Oh, fuck, that’s good.”

I tilted my hips more and wrapped my arms around his waist, digging my nails into his back. “More.”

“Fuck yes,” he said. He liked to talk. It was making me hotter. He stroked me more, harder, harder, as my body rocked against the sand through my towel. “I want you to come, Summer. Have you ever made yourself come?”

“Yes,” I confessed. I knew how to get myself off. I’d been doing it all summer while picturing him, alone in my bed. In the shower. “But I want—I want you to do it.”

He withdrew—I groaned—and reached down, sliding his fingers between my legs. I was so slick that his touch moved over me easily, teasing me, circling my clit. “Is this what you do?” he said in my ear. “You rub your pussy like this?”

But I couldn’t talk anymore. That dirty word in my ear, his fingers on me—I was arching beneath him, my breasts pressing up into his chest, my head tilting back. My whole body was nothing but sensation, nothing but the feel of him touching me. “Oh, God,” I moaned. “Oh, God, Bram, oh, God—” and then I went over the edge and started to come, my body spasming hard.

“Jesus, Summer,” he said. He ripped his hand away and braced himself over me again, thrusting into me as I came, letting me convulse on his hard length as I lifted my hips and gasped. He pounded into me, pressing my body hard into the sand, his cock drilling me, and the orgasm rolled on and on. “Oh, fuck me, yes,” he growled, and then he was coming too, as my own orgasm subsided, and I could feel him pulsing hard. When he finished he lay on top of me for a moment, both of us gasping.

He braced himself on his arms again and looked down at me. He was still on top of me, still inside of me, but suddenly I couldn’t read his expression. Was he regretting it already? I tried to think of something to say.

But he spoke first. “Let’s wash up,” he said.

He led me into the lake, both of us naked, and I let the water soothe me. I felt happy and awkward and amazing, all at the same time. My body was hot and cold and it felt new. I’d never been skinny dipping before, let alone in daylight, and suddenly I didn’t care.
Maybe I’m not such a good girl,
I thought.
Maybe I’m a bad girl after all.

Bram came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. I looked down at his flexed muscles, holding me. “That’s it,” he said gently. “That’s all there is for us. You know that, right?”

I leaned my head back and looked up at the sky. Summer was almost over. I’d be going home to my mother, and Bram would be leaving. “I know.”

I thought maybe I’d have more time, but I didn’t. He went out somewhere that night and didn’t come home. The next day, when my dad and Brenda came home, he was gone. He left his mother a message that he had hitched a ride with some friends going to South Carolina for a week. I pictured him in the back of someone’s grotty van, drinking beer and smoking pot, his hand down some hot girl’s pants, our day at the beach totally forgotten. I swallowed my pain and stayed in my room until it was time to go home to my mother.

Three weeks later, my dad called me. Some guys had held up a liquor store and beaten the owner. Bram was one of the guys. He’d been arrested with the others, and was on his way to jail.

It was six years before I saw him again.

P
resent Day

S
ummer

“
D
ad
, you can't do this by yourself,” I said.

“Sure I can,” my dad said. “You worry too much.”

We were in the back yard of my dad's house in Michigan, and he had a pair of shears in his hand. He was trying to cut down a dead vine along the old back fence, but the task was complicated by the fact that he'd broken his leg two weeks ago and was leaning on crutches, his leg in a cast.

It was just the latest in a long line of disagreements we'd had since he'd broken the leg. My dad had always been strong and capable, and he'd never been laid low before. It wasn't going well. He kept insisting he could do everything he'd done before, even the dangerous things. Like uprooting the garden.

I swatted away summer mosquitos and put my hands on my hips, wondering what to do. I was twenty-four now, and I'd been living in Terre Mills, Michigan, for two years, ever since I'd dropped out of college to start my own business. My mother had been furious, but my dad had understood—he ran his own business, too. We'd always been alike, me and Dad. Since I was old enough to move out and live on my own, I hadn't really considered living anyplace except Terre Mills, to be close to him.

Still, that didn't mean he didn't drive me absolutely crazy.

“At least let me help,” I said.

“I'll be fine, fine.” He waved a hand at me. He lived alone—the marriage to Brenda had ended years ago, and she was long gone. Even after the divorce, my dad had still been his easygoing, optimistic self. That is, until the accident that broke his leg. Ever since then, there had been something different about him, as if something worried him and brought him down. He'd also been more irritable, but I figured that must be from the pain. “You don't have to hover over me, you know,” he said. “I've cut vines before in my life. Don't you have to be at the shop?”

I sighed. While I was in college, studying economics—and hating every minute of it—I'd started a sideline buying old furniture from estate sales, refinishing it, and reselling it at a profit. I'd originally started it to make side money, but soon I discovered that I not only liked it, I was really good at it. I could spot pieces that had potential, that were genuine antiques, and that would look a million times better with just a little bit of work. I also had the knack for fixing things up. It had become such a profitable sideline that I'd dumped college and opened my buy-and-sell antique furniture shop in downtown Terre Mills. It wasn't making me a millionaire, but it was making me a living, and it sure as hell beat working in an office for someone else.

Actually, my life was pretty good. Except for the fact that I was single, and my last boyfriend had been a disaster. Everyone had thought he was perfect, and that I was crazy to break up with him. But I'd rather live alone, and die a dried-up old spinster, than go through what I’d gone through with him ever again.

“The shop is closed today, Dad,” I said. “It's Sunday.”

He lowered the shears and looked at me, nearly losing his balance on his crutches. “Sunday? It is?”

“Yes.” I was used to this—for all my life, my dad had never been able to keep track of what day of the week it was. “Is that important?”

“Oh, hell.” He let the shears drop to the ground and pulled back his sleeve, looking at his watch. “It's three o'clock!” He started hobbling back through the yard toward the house, nearly falling over more than once as he pressed his foot in its booted cast to the ground.

“What is it?” I called as I hurried after him. Oh, God, he was going to fall and hit his head, and I'd be helpless to do anything except call 911. I was already worried about him all the time, since I lived in my small apartment downtown and he was alone in this big house. He hadn't let me move in with him to look after him, even for a little while. Nate Friesen was stubbornly proud.

“I'm going to make some tea,” he muttered to himself as he stumped up the steps to the back door. “Or coffee. I don't know which one he'll want. Oh, hell, I'll just make both. Summer, do we have any coffee?”

“Dad, please!” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead and following him through the mud room to the kitchen. “Just tell me what's going on!”

He stopped and turned to me. His hair had gone grayer since the accident, his features more drawn. He took me in, standing there in my t-shirt and yoga pants, my hair in a ponytail, flip flops on my feet. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “I don't think you're going to like it.”

I stared at him. I couldn't imagine what he was talking about. “What? What is it?”

“Maybe you should sit down.”

Oh no, this was bad. Did he have cancer or something? “Just tell me. I can take it.”

“Bram is coming home.”

The breath went out of me.
Bram
. I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and dropped into it, landing with a thump. The blood rushed from my head and I thought I might faint.

Bram. Still my stepbrother, though Brenda and my dad were long divorced. Criminal. Ex-con. The man who had taken my virginity on a hot, steamy beach, on an afternoon that I was starting to think had wrecked my life.

I hadn't seen him since that day. I only heard about him secondhand through my dad, who kept in touch with him. I knew nothing about him, least of all why he would come here. “What do you mean?” I said. “What are you talking about? Is he out of prison?”

“He got out two months ago,” my dad said. “He's been at a halfway house, getting his feet under him. But the last time I talked to him, I knew—”

“Wait a minute. You
talk
to him?”

“All the time,” Dad said. “I never stopped. I just didn't mention it because I didn't know how you would react. I know how your mother felt about cons.”

I shook my head. When he was young, my dad had stolen cars. He'd been running with the wrong crowd, something he freely admitted now, and it had ended up with him doing a few months in a minimum security facility the year after I was born. My mother had been ashamed, and their marriage had never recovered. Even long after the divorce, she'd bad-mouthed my dad and the mistakes he'd made. She was remarried now and living in Colorado, and I didn't talk to her much, since she'd seen my dropping out of college as a betrayal.

“It isn't that,” I said to my dad. “It's just... I didn't know you were close.”

“Bram was a good kid,” my dad said. “He was wild, I know, and he made mistakes, just like I did. I always felt like I could help him have a better life than me. When he was arrested and sent away...” He shook his head, his eyes hard and sad. “I felt like I'd missed my chance to get through to him. It was my fault, in a way. I should have steered him on a better path while I could. So I've stayed in touch, because I know he could do something if he gave himself a chance.”

I felt tears sting my eyes. This was my dad—a man with a great heart. This was why I'd fought with my mother all my life for the chance to be close to him. “But you don't really know him, Dad,” I said. “Not now. He's been in jail for six years. He might not be the kid you remember. Why is he coming here?”

“The halfway house isn't working for him,” my dad said. “If he stays there much longer, he's going to fall into the same pattern again. I know I can stop it and turn him around. He has no one else, nowhere else to go. So I offered to take him in.”

“Here?” My head was spinning. Bram Riordan, alone in this house with my dad every day? What if he'd turned into a psycho criminal in jail? “I don't know, Dad.”

“It's perfect, actually. He can help me around the house, keep me company, help me get things done.”

I pressed my lips together. No acknowledgment that I'd been trying to do that
exact
same thing for weeks, and I'd been getting the brush-off. No, he'd rather have Bram for some reason. “And is he going to chip in for his room and board?”

“He is, from the salary I'm going to pay him at the garage.”

I jumped out of my chair. “You gave him a
job
?”

“Of course I did. He's an ex-con, Summer. You think he's going to get work with that on his resume? He was always good with cars, and he's a fast learner. I'm giving him a chance.”

I stood there, not even knowing what to say. So many things could go wrong. Bram could rob the business, or drive customers away. He would be living and working with my dad, day in and day out. He'd have every opportunity to rob my dad blind, and my dad was too trusting to see it. “This is a terrible idea,” I said. “Can't you just help him get an apartment or something? Give him a reference?”

“Summer,” my dad said. His tone was the one he used when he was tired of arguing and the conversation was over. “There's no discussion here. It's already done. In fact, Bram will be here any minute.”

“You can't trust him, Dad.”

“Why not?”

Because he popped your daughter's cherry one day right under your nose, and then he ran out on us.
But I couldn't say that, so I just said, “It's a gut feeling.”

He turned away from me, leaning on his crutches. “I'm going to make coffee.”

Fine. Okay. There wasn't anything I could do about Bram Riordan coming home, at least not yet anyway. But I sure as hell didn't have to be here when he arrived. I fled to the front hallway, looking for my purse, my keys. I wanted to be out of here and miles away when the man I'd last seen saying
Oh, fuck me, yes
as he pounded his cock into my orgasming body came through the door. I had just tucked my purse hurriedly under my arm and grabbed my sunglasses when I looked through the window on the front door and froze still.

Too late.

There was a man coming up the walk. He wore jeans and a dark gray hoodie, his hands in his pockets, and his head was bent, looking down as he made his way to the door. He was big—really big. Bigger than I remembered, and covered with muscle. His dark hair wasn't long and wavy as it had been six years ago, but was now cropped close to his head. He walked boldly and gracefully, his shoulders hunched like a boxer's, and as he climbed the steps to the front door he raised his head.

Dark brown eyes, chiseled cheekbones, a mouth made for sin. Bram Riordan.

He saw my face through the window and his eyes locked on mine. I stood frozen, watching him approach the way a mouse will watch a falcon descend on it, helpless to run away. My mouth went dry.

He didn't bother knocking or ringing the doorbell—he just grabbed the door handle and flung the door open. “Summer,” he said, his voice a low growl. “Long time no see.”

“Bram,” I managed.

He looked me over—quick, cocky, his gaze burning through my clothes. I wasn't dressed provocatively, or so I thought, but suddenly I felt naked. I had no makeup on, and I'd been working around the house all day, getting sweaty. I felt like he could sense me, smell me, see every detail I didn't want him to see. But I raised my gaze and looked him in the eye.

This wasn't the Bram I remembered. This man was older, wiser, tougher. He was definitely more muscled—he'd been sleek and strong six years ago, but he'd bulked up in prison, and now I could see he had a wide chest, massive shoulders and arms beneath the hoodie, tapering into slim, muscled hips. The same tattoo showed from beneath his collar. Along with the cropped hair, he looked like a man who was dangerous. A man you didn't want to fuck with. A man who could definitely hurt you.

I caught a whiff of his scent, spicy and masculine, and my nipples went hard. He'd always been a rebel, but now he was a beast. Fucking this man wouldn't be like losing my virginity on the beach. Fucking this man would be dangerous, and it just might break you in half.

It made my blood race in my veins. I'd had nothing like this in my life since him, especially my sex life. And that was a big part of my problem.

“That's all you've got?” he said to me now. He was still staring at me, the two of us locked in silent combat. “Not even a greeting?”

“Here's your greeting,” I said. I stepped closer to him and rose on my tiptoes. There was no way he couldn't see my hard nipples from here. I leaned close to his ear and murmured: “Hurt him and I'll kill you.”

Then I brushed past him and out the door.