Mine - A Stepbrother Romance (16 page)

I took her hand and shook it. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”

She smiled, and her shoulders sagged with relief. “Glad to hear it. I’d really like that. How about we have coffee on Monday?”

“Sure.”

With that she turned to leave, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Well, that was one less thing I had to worry about. Now my only major concern was me and Mason. If we kept being so daring about our new relationship, then we were bound to be found out sooner rather than later. We either needed to cool things off or come clean…and we both knew we didn’t want to cool things off. We’d tried that for the last few days, and all that resulted from that was Skype sex sessions while I was at work, evidently.

Damn. We were going to have to break the news to our parents, as much as it might upset them to find out their respective kids were screwing each other like bunnies right under their noses. But how the hell were we going to do that?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

MASON

I’d been out all afternoon with Anders, catching up for a few beers at our favorite pub, but I could barely concentrate on any of the wild stories he’d had to tell me about whatever club chicks he’d pulled in the last few weeks. My steamy webcam session with Arizona earlier had gotten me so hard that all I could think about was going home, tearing her clothes off and fucking her into sweet submission. I’d stayed out with my buddy until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and now I was pulling into the driveway of the house, my cock already stirring in my pants at the thought of seeing her.

Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was still only five o’clock. Dammit. She wouldn’t even be home from work for another hour or so. Sighing, I got out of the car and headed towards the front door, and it opened just before I got to it. For fuck’s sake. It was Emile, my mother’s seedy life coach.

“Mason,” he said, beatific smile on his little rat face. There was a gleam in his eyes as if he thought he knew something I didn’t know, but I already knew about his little affair with Layla so he could damn well wipe that look right off his face. He was wearing billowy white pants and a tight white T-shirt, obviously in the hopes of looking like some sort of yoga guru. “How are you, son?”

Don’t call me son, you hippie little fuck,
I wanted to say. Just because he was screwing my mother didn’t give him the right to call me that.

“Emile,” I replied instead, forcing a smile in return. If I was rude to him, I’d never hear the end of it. “What’s up?”

“I just did a tai chi session with Layla,” he said. “But I have another appointment to get to. Namaste.”

He put his hands together and did this stupid little bow as he spoke that last word, and I rolled my eyes and watched as he headed towards his car. What a pretentious fuckwad. He probably didn’t even know or care what ‘namaste’ meant. I hated those new age charlatan types who appropriated stuff like that from other cultures just to make a quick buck from rich middle-aged white women, and he was a prime example.

As I headed upstairs, I had an idea. I was going to head up to Arizona’s room, strip down and give her a nice surprise when she arrived home for the day. I threw open her door a moment later, and I was shocked to see my mother sitting on her bed.

“Expecting someone else, Mason?” she asked, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Er…I was just coming to say hi to Arizona. Wasn’t sure if she was home from work yet,” I lied, rubbing my chin.

“Really?” she replied. Her green eyes gleamed, and she patted a manila folder that was sitting on the bed next to her. “Why don’t you come take a look at this file?”

I took a step towards her. “Let me guess, you’ve been trying to dig up some sort of shit from Arizona’s past to make her look bad to Roy so he’ll send her packing?”

“Oh, not at all,” she replied. “This is all very much from the present. I know what’s going on between you two. I’ve suspected it for a while, but now I know for sure.”

My heart stopped cold in my chest, but I kept my voice calm. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing going on.”

She laughed. “Don’t bother denying it. Here.”

She opened the folder and pulled out a photo. “Care to change your story now?” she asked, shoving the picture in my face.

Oh shit. It was me and Arizona kissing in the Jacuzzi just a few days ago. How in the hell did she get that? She hadn’t even been home that day.

“Emile came by to drop off some new workout gear for me the other day. Then he saw you two doing that in the hot tub and decided I needed to know,” she said, answering my question before I’d even asked. “You’re lucky he brought this to me and didn’t take it straight to the tabloids.”

I threw my hands up. “Fine. We were going to tell you guys, but we weren’t ready yet. But I guess the cat’s outta the bag now.”

She tilted her head to the side, gazing at me shrewdly. “No, it doesn’t have to be, as long as you do as I say. You end this disgusting little tryst you have going on with her, and I won’t tell Roy or anyone else. Neither will Emile.”

“It’s not disgusting,” I said. “Look, we knew it might be hard for you and Roy to hear; that’s why we’ve held off on telling you for so long. But there’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing.”

“I think you’ll find you’re incorrect about that. Roy is a
lot
more conservative than you’d think. He wouldn’t even have sex with me until our wedding night.”

I rolled my eyes. “I really don’t need to hear about your sex life, Layla.”

She stood up and slapped me so hard across the face that my eyes watered, and I drew back and stared at her, utterly shocked. We’d certainly had our share of problems in the past, but she’d never resorted to physical abuse.

“I’ve told you a hundred time and I’ll tell you again, don’t call me that,” she hissed. “Now, as I was saying…Roy would be utterly beside himself if he found out what you and his daughter are up to. And not just him. Can you imagine what the world would think if this became public? Which it will, if you don’t stop. Do you
really
think no one will care that perfect little heiress Arizona’s been fucking her stepbrother?”

“No, I don’t think the world will care,” I replied, my cheek still smarting from where she’d slapped me. “Arizona and I aren’t related. We aren’t doing anything wrong.”

“I think you underestimate how stupid the general public is. They won’t see it the way you see it. You also underestimate how much the public loves a juicy sex scandal. Salacious stories sell, and it’s always the woman who gets dragged through the mud. Remember Serena Hewson?”

Serena Hewson was a White House admin worker back in the late eighties who’d had a long, sordid affair with the supposedly happily-married President. When the scandal had broken to the media, everyone had branded her as a home-wrecking slut, and three decades later she was still a household name.

“I fail to see how a former White House employee has anything to do with this,
Mom.
”

“See? You know exactly who she is and what she did. Thirty years on, and everyone still remembers her, because she was involved in a juicy scandal that went public. Do you want your little Arizona to be tarred with the same brush? Somehow I don’t think so.”

“I’m not the fucking President, and I’m not already married to someone else,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “It’s nowhere near as big of a deal as that.”

She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Oh, but I can make sure it becomes just as big as that. Bigger. You know I can do it. I have the media wrapped around my little finger. And I am not letting myself become
that
mother who allowed something like this to happen under her roof. I have an image to protect, and this little dalliance of yours is not helping me. It ends now, or I take these photos to the press.”

I laughed, even though none of this was funny to me at all. “You just said you want to protect your image, and yet you’d take this to the media and make sure it blows up? You don’t make any sense.”

“If I take it to them, I can control the situation and prevent the clusterfuck for my image that will result if someone else breaks it to the public when you inevitably get caught,” she said, lighting up a cigarette. Ha. If you read any magazine article about her, you’d read about how she eschewed smoking and drinking in favor of a healthy vegan lifestyle. Bullshit.

“And why the hell would you want to do that?” I asked, hands curling by my side.

She took a drag and then continued. “I told you. I have an image to protect. So when I take it to them, I’ll be the poor, innocent mother who had no idea what was going on and was dragged into this awful situation by her cunning little slut of a stepdaughter. Arizona’s face will be all over the papers for the next six months. She won’t be able to leave the house without being hounded. Even when it’s died down, people will still whisper about her till she’s old and grey. Of course you’ll be fine, because no one cares what men do. But she’ll forever be ‘that’ slut. Is that what you want for your precious little whore?”

Her words stung; probably not as much as her bi-monthly Botox injections, but still…Christ, she was a nasty bitch. I knew her well enough to know one thing for sure. This had absolutely nothing to do with protecting her image. She just couldn’t stand Arizona, plain and simple.

“No,” I said through gritted teeth. Her threats weren’t empty. I’d seen her take down rivals before, using her power over the media to her advantage. One particular actress she’d had a vendetta against had never been able to find work in her field ever again.

“Even worse, her relationship with Roy will be shattered. She’s always said that all she wants is a relationship with him, and she doesn’t care about the money. But after this all blows over, all she’ll
have
is the money. He’ll probably still let her have her inheritance or at least some of it, but he won’t want anything to do with her in public. Not when her existence alone is a PR nightmare for his company. She’ll be back in freezing old Wisconsin in no time.”

She blew a smoke ring in my face. “So decide, Mason. Do as I say and end it with her right now so we can avoid all that drama, or end her life forever. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

“You’re just doing this because you hate her,” I said, my eyes narrowed into slits. “You want her to be hurt either way. If I break up with her, she’ll probably leave just to get away from me, and if you fuck her over in the media she’ll definitely leave.”

It was hardly a choice. Make her leave, or make her leave with public shame and derision hanging over her head.

She simply shrugged. “I liked things better when it was just me and Roy.”

Ah, there it was. Her true motivation.

“It was never just you and Roy,” I said.

“You don’t really count. You’re not his real son,” she said with a sniff.

Fuck. I couldn’t do this to Arizona. I couldn’t break her heart by ending things, but I also couldn’t give my mother any further ammunition to ruin her life. She’d seen Arizona as a threat from day one, all because she thought she’d take away attention from her, and now she was lashing out in response to that threat. She
wanted
me to see how far she’d take it. She wanted me to keep things going with Arizona, just so she could destroy her relationship with Roy. Then my mother could have him all to herself. She didn’t even care about her own relationship with Roy all that much; her affairs were proof of that. She just wanted the money, power and attention that came with being married to a billionaire. Arizona was clearly getting in the way of all that by monopolizing so much of Roy’s time and attention.

I’d seen smear campaigns in the media before. It didn’t matter what the truth was; once the word was out about something, it stuck with people no matter how much they were later told otherwise. And people would fucking love this story.
Billionaire’s Daughter Caught In Tawdry Relationship With Her Own Stepbrother!
Old women would be clutching their pearls and reaching for their smelling salts all over the country.

I didn’t want Arizona to go through the rest of her life tarnished by the image my mother and the media would paint of her, and I especially didn’t want to be responsible for ruining her new relationship with her father.

I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes. I didn’t want to end it, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew what had to be done. If I chose to do nothing, then I was being selfish. Breaking it off with her might break her heart, but she’d get over it eventually. She’d find love again with someone else eventually, and her life would be hell of a lot easier without the public shame hanging over her head that’d result courtesy of my mother and the tabloids if I stayed with her.

I knew if I actually spoke to her about this and told her what my mother had planned, she’d try to convince me to stay with her and say she didn’t care about anything the media or anyone else said. But she had no idea of the damage that could do to her future. I had to end it, and I was going to have to make her hate me in order for that to happen, as much as it fucked me up. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I didn’t want this.

I didn’t want any of this.

“So,” my mother said, stubbing out her cigarette right on Arizona’s silk sheets and looking straight at me. “What’s it going to be?”