Dare: A Stepbrother Romance (2 page)

He said that last part in a smug tone, as if he didn’t believe I was up for the challenge. Little did he know I was more than up for it. I nodded, and he took my hand in his before leading me across the room, past my friends and out of the club. Cerie and Lana grinned at me and gave me the thumbs up as we passed, and soon Drew and I were alone in an elevator, on our way to the penthouse suite of the Laurent. Neither of us spoke, but that was okay. This wasn’t a date, and we both knew we weren’t here for conversation.

He swiped a keycard into a lock when we arrived on the top floor, and I admired his broad shoulders and back as I stood behind him. Compared to him, I felt tiny and vulnerable, despite my curvy frame. When the door opened, I stepped forward and drew in a sharp breath as I took in the incredible view from the window on the other side of the spacious room. City lights sprawled out below us, and I admired the beauty of it before gasping as Drew came up behind me and slid an arm around my waist.

Something warm touched my back, and I realized it was his bare chest. Ha. He hadn’t wasted any time; he’d already taken his shirt off.

“Like the view?” he whispered in my ear, his warm breath making me shiver.

I turned around and raked my eyes over the contours of his inked chest, arms and stomach. God, his abs were so sculpted that I could probably drink champagne out of them if he was lying down.

“I think I like this view better,” I replied, curling my lips into a half-smile.

“And you say
I’m
the forward one,” he murmured.

His blue eyes smoldered, and my own brown eyes felt plain in comparison. Excited butterflies took flight in my chest, dipping and diving at the look of pure possession in his gaze. He cupped my face, caressed my cheek and leaned in, and I barely had time to register what was happening before his lips crushed down on mine, devouring me with the intensity of his kiss. Every inch of my skin tingled with mad desire as his big hands coasted over my shoulders before sliding the zipper to my top down, and I closed my eyes and leaned further in, returning his kiss with equal passion.

So much passion sparked between us as our lips met that oxygen seemed to vanish from my lungs entirely, and I could feel my panties dampening with need as my insides clenched.

“You’re so sexy.” Drew’s gravelly voice sent electricity shooting down my spine as he pulled away from my mouth and yanked my top off, and my nipples tightened into hard little nubs under my bra, begging for his touch.

There was an invisible pull between us, so thick and strong I could almost touch it. He slid an arm around me again, and within the blink of an eye, he’d thrown me down onto the king-sized bed. I skittered back towards the pillows, watching with fascination as he shed his jeans and boxers.

He was totally nude now, and I bit my lower lip as he reached down and slowly stroked a hand over his rock hard shaft. No wonder he was so arrogant…his cock was huge. Was that where the word ‘cocky’ came from in the first place?

He motioned towards the bedside table to the left of me. “Grab me a condom, babe.”

As I leaned over to the drawer and opened it, he was suddenly upon me, and I let out a giggle as he pushed my skirt up to my hips, yanked my legs apart and slid a hand inside my black panties. My breath caught in my chest, squeezing its way into my lungs, and with one quick groan he was spreading my lower lips and rubbing slow circles on my clit.

“Stop!” I said as I playfully pushed him away. I’d only managed to get the bedside drawer halfway open before he’d attacked me.

As I pulled out a condom and shut the drawer a second later, something caught my eye, and my smile died on my lips. It was a small wastebasket a couple of feet away, and if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, there were two already-used condoms lying in it. He must have already had at least one other girl up in here tonight. For some reason, my heart suddenly plummeted into my stomach at the sight of it.

I didn’t feel strong, empowered and sexualized. I felt weak, cheap and used, and I couldn’t understand why I’d thought this whole thing was a good idea. I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore, but was this
really
how I wanted to remember my first time - a hotel room with a perfect stranger who’d never give me a second thought afterwards? Earlier on, I would’ve said yes, but I now knew that was naïve. Now that I was actually in the moment, I realized exactly how much I didn’t like the idea of casual, no-strings-attached sex. Something about it just felt so wrong, like I’d have to be dead on the inside to enjoy the total lack of real intimacy and meaning.

As I hesitated, Drew’s hands were all over me again, stroking, caressing and squeezing, and I abruptly got up and pulled my skirt back down over my thighs before hunting for my top.

“What the…”

His eyes narrowed with confusion, and I looked down at the floor. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I have to go.”

“Huh? What the fuck are you talking about?”

I cast my eyes around, looking for my black and silver clutch purse. “I have to go,” I repeated.

“You can’t be fucking serious,” he said. “You tease me and get me all hard and raring to go, and then you just fuck off before we even start? You can’t do that!”

Ugh. He sounded like such an entitled prick. My cheeks burned, and I glared at him.

“I don’t owe you anything. You know, women are allowed to change their minds,” I said. “We’re allowed to say no. Amazingly enough, we’re even allowed to vote!”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Thanks for the lecture, Miss Feminism 101. I wasn’t insinuating anything sexist, I was just saying it’s pretty fucking rude to purposely give a guy blue balls.”

“Well, I’m sure you can find someone else to take care of that,” I said, gesturing towards the trash can as I finally located my clutch.

He looked mystified, as if no one had ever dared to reject him before, and as I turned and strode towards the door, he called out to me.

“Wait!”

“What?” I replied, turning back to face him. Maybe he wasn’t so much of a jerk after all. Maybe he was about to say he’d be okay with taking things slower.

He smirked and put his hand on his crotch again. “You don’t know what you’re missing out on,” he said. “You could’ve had the best night of your life.”

Nope.

I rolled my eyes and continued towards the door, not even bothering to look back. I was making the right decision. Yes, I’d led him on, but that was before I’d had the stark realization that this whole thing was wrong for me. It was far better that I leave now rather than do something I knew I’d end up regretting. What did it matter if I’d pissed off Drew the Adonis? He was obviously an arrogant asshole who deserved to be taken down a peg or two for once.

Besides, I was never going to see him again, was I?

CHAPTER TWO

SOPHIE

“I still can’t believe you left that hottie up there all alone,” Cerie said, twirling a red fruit roll-up around in her hands. I wasn’t with her, but I could see her on my computer monitor.

It was the morning after our big night, and I was on a group Skype chat with her and Lana. I sighed. “I had to leave. I changed my mind. It wasn’t for me.”

Lana’s forehead creased with concern. “Sorry for pushing it on you. We really thought we were helping.”

“You were helping!” I said. “The whole thing was my idea. It’s not your fault. I just decided I’d rather sleep with someone I actually knew. No big deal.”

“I was actually referring to the sheer willpower it must have taken you to leave him,” Cerie said. “Seriously, I’d dump my boyfriend for just ten minutes with that Drew dude.”

“Does your boyfriend know that?” I teased as Lana giggled.

A voice almost identical to mine called out to me from downstairs in our Redmond home. “Honey, I’m back! Can you come downstairs?”

“In a sec, Mom!” I shouted before turning my attention back to the screen. “Gotta go. Mom just got home from her business trip.”

My Mom had spent the last seven years working like crazy to keep us afloat, and for the last couple of years that job had entailed regular trips all over the country. I’d always been pretty self-sufficient, so it suited me just fine. Her most recent trip had been to Nevada, and I headed downstairs with a yawn, rubbing my eyes. Hardly anything had even ended up happening last night, but I was still exhausted for some reason.

I found my Mom in the lounge room, and she threw her arms around me in a warm hug before gesturing for me to sit.

“What’s up?” I asked, puzzled. I could smell espresso, and I could hear something clanging around in the kitchen. I craned my neck and looked towards it. “Who’s in there?”

Mom stared at me and played with the hem of her shirt. She only did that when she was anxious about something. “Honey, there’s something we need to talk about,” she said. “You remember how I told you that I may have met someone a few months ago?”

“Uh-huh,” I replied. She hadn’t given me any details other than the fact that she’d started seeing someone, and I assumed she hadn’t wanted me to know because it was her own private business.

“Things have become a lot more serious between us,” she said.

“So you want me to meet him.”

“Well…it’s a little more complicated than that. Tony, could you come in here?”

A tall greying man came out of the kitchen with two cups of coffee, and he set them down on the coffee table in front of me before rising back up to his full height. No way. It was our old neighbor, Tony Buckley. Thirteen years ago, he’d been a single father barely scraping by and trying to build his own company, but when I was around ten, his business had suddenly exploded. He’d moved away from our middle-class neighborhood to somewhere more suitable for someone with newfound riches, and I hadn’t seen him since.

His only son, Andrew, had been my best friend during the time they’d lived next door, and my heart warmed at the memory. He’d been a scrawny kid with glasses and perpetually messy hair, and although we’d both been considered the geeky outcasts of all the neighborhood kids, it had never stopped us from having tons of fun with each other. When his Dad’s company had taken off, I’d been devastated that Andrew had been forced to move. I’d only been ten, and he’d only been eleven, so we were hardly in a position to argue against the decision. They’d left very suddenly, and I’d never even had the chance to say goodbye properly. I’d had to find out about it from my Mom.

“Mr. Buckley!” I said. “What are you doing here? Wait…you’re not…”

My voice trailed off. Tony must have been my Mom’s new boyfriend! Why else would he be in our house making us coffee while my Mom nervously spoke about someone she’d been seeing?

“It’s good to see you again, Sophie,” he replied, giving me a warm smile. “Now, I guess your mother’s told you that we’ve been seeing each other.”

“Err…she was about to tell me, yes,” I replied.

They both looked at each other with soppy expressions on their faces.

“We ran into each other on a business trip down in San Francisco a while ago,” Mom said. “We decided to have a coffee to catch up, and well…the rest is history.”

“Oh. Um…that’s great,” I said, breathing a quiet sigh of relief.

Tony had always seemed like a decent guy, and my Mom deserved a little happiness. She hadn’t exactly had the best luck when it came to relationships. She’d been married to my father for thirteen years, and he’d been a violent son of a bitch up until the day he disappeared.

I’d been eleven at the time, and he’d gone off on a fishing trip with a friend of his. There’d been some sort of freak storm which led to an accident, and my Dad had fallen overboard and been swept away. By the time the Coast Guard had arrived, it was too late and he was gone. They never found his body, but it was assumed he had drowned. So my poor Mom had gone from having an abusive husband to having no husband at all. For someone like her, that was hard. She’d married my father quite young, so she’d never really been alone before until his death, and despite the awful way in which he’d treated her, I could tell she still missed having the company of a man. Since then, she’d gone through a string of douchebag boyfriends, but Tony would be a nice change.

Mom began to pick at the hem of her shirt again, and I arched a brow. There was more.

“Mom?” I said, and she sighed.

“This is going to be hard for you to hear, so I apologize in advance, but we got a little carried away while we were in Nevada,” she said.

I hadn’t realized they were
both
in Nevada this week, and my chest tightened a bit as a silly little thought burrowed into my brain. Las Vegas was in Nevada. Surely they hadn’t secretly run off and gotten married at one of those insta-wedding places…they had to be referring to getting carried away with something else.

But even as I thought it, a broad grin crept across Tony’s face, and Mom held out her left hand to display an enormous sparkling diamond, although it wasn’t half as bright as her eyes at the moment.

“We were talking about what we want for the future, and we decided to throw caution to the wind and just do it.”

“So you got engaged?” I said, hoping to God that was all it was.

“No,” she said. ‘We’re married. We went down to one of those silly little Elvis chapels in Vegas and tied the knot, and well…now we’re here.”

I felt a twinge of hurt in my stomach as her words washed over me. They couldn’t have waited to get married and had a proper wedding? My Mom couldn’t have invited me, her only daughter?

“I know it’s all such a sudden thing, but it just felt so right. We wanted you to be there, but you’d just graduated and we didn’t want to get in your way while you made your final decisions about college,” my Mom said, seeing the crestfallen expression on my face. “But we couldn’t keep it from you any longer.”

“You would hardly have been getting in my way,” I replied, my expression darkening momentarily.

“Things are going to change as little as possible,” Tony said, trying to defuse the situation. “I don’t want to uproot you from everything, so until you go off to college, I’m going to come and live here rather than make you and your Mom move to my Medina place.”

Mom looked at him as he spoke and then stared back at me, waiting for me to respond.

Oh hell. I guess I should have been happy for her, despite her running off and getting married behind my back to our old neighbor. At least I knew Tony and Andrew, or at least knew them almost a decade ago. It was better than her marrying some complete random.

“It’s okay,” I said, getting up and throwing my arms around her. “I understand. I…um…I’m happy for you guys.”

“Thanks, honey,” she whispered in my ear as she hugged me back.

I pulled away a moment later and looked over at Tony. “So what about Andrew?” I asked. “I guess he’s technically my stepbrother now. When are you going to tell him? And how’s he been?”

He smiled. “He’s been great. Working hard since he finished school last year. I actually already told him about your mother and me, and he’s coming over here to see us all soon. It’ll be nice for you two to catch up after all these years. I can still remember you two running around and playing in the mud together like it was only yesterday.”

Right on cue, the doorbell rang, and I smiled back at Tony. “I guess that’s him. I’ll get the door.”

I dashed out of the lounge and into the hall, and my pulse raced with excitement as I wondered what Andrew looked like now that he was all grown up. Was he still the same scrawny-looking geek, or had he grown into his looks? My question was immediately and horrifyingly answered as I threw the door open.

Oh, hell no.

Standing at the door with a polite smile on his smarmy face was
Drew.
Drew the model from Mint nightclub. God, no wonder he’d looked so familiar to me the other night! I hadn’t just recognized him from his modeling campaigns…I’d recognized him from my childhood as well. Now that I knew the truth, I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t occurred to me. He was several heads taller now, with perfectly chiseled features and muscles that would make a professional boxer jealous, but the eyes were the same twinkling blue ones that I remembered from so long ago. I’d been stupid to miss it. Dammit, why wasn’t I one of those people who Facebook stalked all their old childhood friends? If I was, I would’ve known who he was the second I saw him last night.

Speaking of last night, I’d been in his hotel room...in his bed. I’d kissed him. I’d seen him naked, and I’d very nearly let him swipe my V-card. And now he was my stepbrother.

Oh, crap.