Mask - A Stepbrother Romance (33 page)

“No! Of course not! It’s not like that at all,” I said. All he’d ever really told me about his father was that they didn’t exactly have a close relationship and hadn’t for over a decade now, but there was no way I’d include personal stuff like that in my assignment.

“Then what is it ‘like’?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at me and emphasizing the word ‘like’ with air quotes. “Because right now, this looks pretty fucking bad, Sasha.”

“It’s just a paper for one of my psychology classes.”

“Just a paper? Oh, sure, I guess
that
makes it okay to call my father a sociopath, then.”

“That’s not what I was saying.”

He shook his head, seemingly not even hearing me. “I thought…” he began. He was staring at me now, his eyes hard with anger. “I really thought…”

Before he could finish that sentence, he stormed out of the room. I considered going after him, but it was clear that he needed some time to cool down before he was going to be rational.

I closed my eyes and slumped my head into my hands, just waiting…

Slam.

I heard the front door, and as his car screeched out of the driveway a moment later, a tear slid down my face. Why hadn’t I just told him what I was doing in the first place, before I even started writing the paper, and why hadn’t I asked him if he minded me writing about his father? Better yet, why hadn’t I asked George if he was okay with it? After all, he was a public figure who other students had written about in the past, but he was still my stepfather. I should’ve asked, but I hadn’t. So what the hell had I been thinking? My lack of communication skills had once again screwed up what could have been an awesome night for me.

That was something I really needed to work on.

I slid down onto my bed, allowing my body to sink into my mattress. I had no idea what the hell to do now. I picked up my phone, wanting desperately to call him, but I knew I couldn’t until he had cooled off, so I decided to call Robin instead. She was the only other person in the world who could calm me down.

She picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me. I did something really dumb,” I said, more and more tears sliding down my face.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” When I didn’t immediately answer her, she started to panic more. “Do you need me to come over?”

“No. I just…I screwed up with Logan again. I didn’t tell him the psychology paper I’m writing is about his father, and he found it and freaked out. Then he stormed off.”

“What?” she said. “That’s it? I thought it was going to be something really bad. Didn’t you explain to him that it was just some bullshit coursework?”

“He doesn’t care; he’s just pissed that I wrote about his Dad at all. Then he accused me of using him for information.”

“Sasha, don’t worry,” she said. “That sounds like the sort of crazy shit that’s said in anger. There’s no way he meant any of it.”

I chewed my bottom lip for a moment, just pondering this. “You think?”

“I think he’ll be back in an hour or so, apologizing for acting so crazy. You never know what his family have been through before—they might have experienced something like this in the past. I mean, his father is an important man, so maybe people have tried to get close to Logan before, just so they could get info on his father and sell it to the media, or something like that. Like, for example, he used to see that bitchy Chelsea girl, remember? I bet she tried crap like that occasionally, seeing as her parents are part of George’s opposition.”

She was right. Logan had told me in the past that his father absolutely hated Chelsea, and part of the reason for that was because he was worried she would pass on information about him to her parents’ campaign. I wasn’t sure if she ever actually had, but it was obviously still something the Ryder men tended to worry about.

I sighed as I considered this. It was a stupid idea for me to write about George in the first place, even though it had sounded cool when I first thought of it. For all I knew, someone aside from my teacher could get their hands on the paper and misinterpret it in the same way Logan had, and that could negatively affect George in some way. I should’ve just chosen someone else for my case study from the very beginning.

“Where’s his mother, anyway? Maybe
she’s
somehow the issue and that’s why Logan is so freaked out,” Robin continued.

“I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t really know what happened, but I know she passed away when he was a kid.”

“Oh.” I heard the obvious awkwardness in her tone. “Sorry, I…”

“No, it’s okay, you didn’t know. Like I said, I don’t even know what happened to her.”

I sat back up on the bed, angling myself so I could see into the mirror on my dressing table across the room. There I saw a red-faced, tearful and very messy version of myself—a sorry state of affairs, to say the least.

“What are you going to do about your paper?” Robin asked. “Keep it, or scrap the idea for another subject? I mean, it seemed like a really cool idea at first, but if it’s gonna cause problems, maybe it’s best to leave it.”

“I don’t know. I guess I could do it on a similar subject and pick someone else as the main focus. That way I’m not causing any issues with my family.”

“Yeah, it’s still not due for a week, so you can definitely handle that. Anyway, Logan will come around, there’s no doubt about that. As soon as he realizes how much he overreacted, he’ll come back.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“He will,” she said. She sounded so confident that I knew there was no point arguing with her. “Besides, he lives with you. He has to see you and talk to you at some point, regardless of what’s going on between you.”

“I guess. Okay, thanks.” I tried to sound hopeful, even though I didn’t feel it. “I’ll see you in class on Wednesday.”

“Yeah, and chin up, okay?”

I knew she was trying to reassure me, but it wasn’t working. This glum feeling wouldn’t go anywhere until I’d made up with Logan, and while he was off doing god knows what, there was no chance of that happening.

After I ended the call, I stayed on my bed for a while, staring into nothingness and trying to work out what I was going to do, but all I could see was a whole lot of problems and no real answers.

Bzzt.
My phone beeped and vibrated with an incoming message a moment later, and I scrambled around to find it. It could’ve been Logan, wanting to sort out this mess as much as I did. But then I clicked on it and opened up the screen, and all I saw was the name I wanted to see least in the world.
Becca.
My ex-friend, the one who’d slept with my old boyfriend behind my back.

Great…just freaking great.

What the hell did she want?

Chapter 14

Logan

“Goddammit.”

I muttered to myself as I heard Sasha getting ready in our shared bathroom. I still hadn’t spoken to her since last night, because I’d been way too fucking pissed, and I worried that I’d say something I regretted. Every time I thought about speaking to her and trying to patch things up, I remembered the essay I’d seen on her screen, and a lump of anger would appear in my throat.

Okay, so my Dad and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye ninety-five percent of the time, but that didn’t mean Sasha could come in here and start twisting things around by writing about my father and calling him a psycho of some kind, just because he was successful in politics. Even if it was for a college paper like she’d said, that didn’t make it okay. Someone aside from her professor could get their hands on that paper and use it in order to smear Dad’s reputation; for example, they could release it as an exposé piece—something like ‘
Ryder’s Stepdaughter Tells All – What’s it really like living with the Lieutenant Governor
?’ It sounded farfetched, but I’d seen more shameless grabs at publicity from the opposition before. Surely Sasha knew that sort of bullshit happened all the time in our world.

I just didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t feel like I could go to Dad and speak to him about it without being accused of shit-stirring, so after the fight, I’d driven around for hours, all by myself. In the past, I wouldn’t have cared so much about anything a chick said or did to piss me off, and I definitely wouldn’t have driven around alone. The old version of me would’ve immediately made some calls and fallen into the arms of another girl to comfort myself. After all, I had a phone filled with names and numbers of girls who were guaranteed to be good to go at a moment’s notice, but something was holding me back. As angry as I was right now, I would never do that to Sasha, and she was still the only girl I could think about touching.

I’d expected to calm down a little by the end of last night, but here I was a day later and still royally pissed. I still cared about Sasha, but I knew I couldn’t face talking to her about the issue right now; not when I was like this.

I headed down into the kitchen to grab something to eat before class, a gloomy black cloud hanging over me. I poked my head into the cupboard, and a soft feminine voice called out to me a moment later.

“Logan?”

I turned to see Sasha standing by the kitchen island counter, and as I faced her, I saw sadness and fear shadowing her expression. That, combined with her nervous body language, caused my anger to melt away like ice in the summer sun, and seconds later, it was like I’d never even been mad at her, despite how pissed I’d been for the last eighteen hours or so. Shit, I just couldn’t stay mad at her, not when she was looking at me with those huge puppy-dog eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I…” She bit her lower lip and cast her eyes down to the tiled floor. “I know I’m the last person in the world that you would want to help right now...”

“Help? In what way?”

I didn’t mean to, but I must have still sounded pissed, because she took a step backwards, looking defeated. “Never mind. Just forget it.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” I said, stepping closer to her. “Tell me.”

She hesitated. “I wouldn’t be asking you if I didn’t really need your help, and if I didn’t think it would affect you too.”

She’d really piqued my curiosity now. What would she need help with that could affect me?

“Come on, just tell me,” I said. “I promise I’ll help. Forget about our fight yesterday. We’ll talk about that later.”

She nodded and wiped away a stray tear before looking up at me. “I’m being blackmailed,” she said, her voice low and hollow.

Her words shot an icicle right through my heart. I didn’t know exactly what I’d expected her to say, but it wasn’t
that.
She was being blackmailed? Over what?

“What? How? By who?” I asked. I had so many questions that I barely knew where to begin.

She let out a tired sigh before carrying on, and I finally noticed the purple circles under her eyes. She obviously hadn’t had any sleep last night. “My ex-boyfriend, Travis, cheated on me with an old friend of mine called Becca. They’re still together now, and Becca is the one who’s blackmailing me.”

“Why?” 

“Because of your father,” she said. “Apparently she recently found out that my Mom married him, and she knows that he’s important, well-known, and has a lot of money.”

“Oh. Right.”

I wasn’t particularly surprised by the revelation concerning my father, because it was an unfortunately common problem in wealthy families. People always wanted to leech money, and they’d go about doing it in any way they could.

Sasha wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if she were trying to keep herself from falling apart. “When I was with Travis, I did something really stupid, and Becca found out. God, I can’t even say it.”

I reached out and tentatively patted her shoulder. “We’ve all done stupid shit, Sasha. I almost got arrested for drunkenly pissing in a public place last year after a party, so I won’t judge you, I promise. I’m in no position to do that, and neither is anyone else.”

Her face went bright red, but she nodded anyway. “Okay,” she said in a small voice. “I…erm…ugh, this is so stupid, but one day while we were dating, I let him take some nude photos of me with his cell phone. I guess I was totally deluded while I was with him, and he convinced me that we’d be together forever, and it was supposed to be just between us. I didn’t even know he still had them, and I certainly never expected any of this to happen…”

I sighed. I heard about stuff like this happening all the time. Some asshole guy would convince his girlfriend that he wanted to marry her and that his love for her was eternal, just so he could get some nudes to jerk off over.

“No one ever expects that to happen,” I said. “I get it. It’s not your fault. You trusted him, and now you know better.”

“I know, I know,” she said. Tears were sliding down her cheeks in earnest now. “I’m just…I don’t know what to do now that Becca’s found the pictures. This whole situation is spiraling out of control, and I don’t know how to stop it!”

She was on the verge of hysteria now, so I rubbed her back and made soothing sounds. “Shh, it’ll be all right. Just try to calm down. When did this begin, and how exactly is Becca trying to blackmail you?”

“Well, I got the first message yesterday, not long after you left.”

“And what did it say?” 

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and read aloud to me. ‘
Hi Sasha, Becca here. I’ve just been looking through Travis’ phone, and I found something very interesting…want to see? Xoxo.
’

“And you replied?”

“No, I ignored that one. I had no idea what she was talking about. Then she sent me one of the photos.”

I almost asked to see the messages, but I stopped myself just in time as I realized what a shitty idea that was. Seeing as Becca had sent one of the nudes, it would be inappropriate for me to ask to see the message exchange. I mean, I’d seen Sasha naked before, but not like this.

“Then I got this one: ‘
I doubt you’d like these to be released now, huh? Do you want your Mommy to find out that her precious princess Sasha is really nothing more than a common whore
?’ So I replied with, ‘
Leave me alone’
. I expected that to be it. I wasn’t biting, so I thought she’d vanish. I had no idea what she was actually after at that point.”

“But she didn’t vanish.”

“No. She sent another really long one. It said: ‘
Robin told me that your mother recently married a very rich and very important man. I looked into it. Lieutenant Governor of the state, right? I doubt he’d want his reputation tarnished by your saggy tits, but I could very easily send these pics to the media and tell them it’s his new stepdaughter acting like a whore. So maybe you should pay up…oh, and by the way, don’t bother involving the police in this to try and stop me. If you do that, I’ll send the pics right away, and you’ll still be in deep shit even if I go down for it. I’ll message you with the details of how much I want soon. Ciao!
”

I gritted my teeth. “So she definitely wants money.”

Of course she did. Everyone always did.

“Yeah. She used to have a drug problem—I only found out about that after we stopped being friends—so I guess she wants more money to fund that, among other things,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Logan. I’m so stupid.”

She dropped her head in shame as she spoke, but if anyone should have been ashamed right now, it was me. If I hadn’t been such a dick and ignored her after our fight last night, she wouldn’t have had to go through this alone. Now that I was thinking about it, I’d massively overreacted. Sasha wasn’t a bad person with bad intentions, and she’d probably actually thought it would be a cool idea to write about my Dad for her college paper. She hadn’t meant to hurt anyone with it, and I’d been a fucking asshole to think she had.

“How much does she want?” I asked.

“She’s asking for $100,000. Seriously! She also said if I don’t respond by the end of the week, she’s doubling that.”

Shit…this Becca bitch was a real piece of work. There was no way she was getting a hundred grand from my family, let alone twice that.

“Okay. Have you spoken to Robin?”

“No, not yet. I didn’t even realize she was still talking to Becca,” she replied, casting another sad look at her feet. “I kinda thought Robin was on my side after the whole break-up thing, seeing as Becca was the one who did a shitty thing by sleeping with my boyfriend. I guess I was wrong, though. They must still be friends.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth for a second before continuing. “Oh god….Robin knows about you and me. What if she told Becca about that too?”

“First things first. Let’s go and confront Robin so we can find out what Becca actually knows before we freak out too much.”

I watched her nod at my suggestion, a small weight lifting off her shoulders. It had obviously been killing her going through this by herself, and once again, guilt streaked through my veins.

Whoever this crazy Becca chick was, she was going down. She had no idea who she was messing with. I was going to try my best not to involve my father when I fixed this problem for Sasha, because I didn’t want to have to deal with all of the bullshit that came along with that, but if it came down to it and I had no other choice, I would involve him. He would never pay off some young tramp who was trying her luck with us like this, but he
would
make sure she never tried it again.

Ever.

“Okay, let’s get dressed. Call Robin and tell her we’re coming over to see her, and we’ll go from there,” I said.

Sasha nodded again and headed upstairs, and I followed her.

I quickly dressed before racing back outside, grabbing my car keys along the way. Sasha wasn’t far behind me, and it was clear from her mismatched clothes that she was too distracted to care about her appearance. She still looked amazing, though. I could ask her to wear an old hessian sack and she’d probably still look better than the average actress or model in designer gear.

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah. I told Robin we’re coming over. She was a bit confused as to why you’re coming with me, but I couldn’t really explain it over the phone.”

“True. She’ll just have to wait.”

We headed off, and we drove in silence for the first five minutes.

“Logan…” Sasha began to say something before trailing off, and I turned to look at her for a second.

“Yeah?”

“I’m really sorry about what I wrote about your Dad.”

“I know. I totally overreacted, so I’m sorry too. I was being a fucking asshole. I’m just so used to people trying to screw with my Dad and his reputation. Case in point—this crap with Becca.”

“I totally get it. I shouldn’t have written the paper on him. I just thought he’d make a cool subject for a case study on successful people, and it never occurred to me how it might affect his reputation if someone other than my professor got their hands on my paper and misinterpreted it. The sociopath angle wasn’t actually about him—it was about this other case study we read about in class, where some researchers found that successful people are likely to have similar traits to sociopaths. I was just tying that in and exploring how much that research fits in your Dad’s case, and when it comes to him, it doesn’t fit at all. He doesn’t have
any
of the same traits as a sociopath.”

“Well, I still overreacted. I mean, what are the odds that someone aside from your professor would see your paper anyway?”

“I know…but still, it was a pretty dumb idea to write it about a brand new family member, so I’ve changed my paper. I’m writing it about someone else now, and it’s going well.”

“Cool. Glad to hear it. Again, I’m sorry for the massive overreaction. I’m an idiot.”

I braked at a stop sign a second later, and while I waited for the other cars to pass, I slid my hand onto Sasha’s left thigh and squeezed. She responded by putting her hand on top of mine and smiling at me, and I grinned back at her.