My Billionaire Stepbrother (Lexi's Sexy Billionaire Romance #1) (6 page)

I’m sure of all of this because if I did consider them blood, things would be so much more complicated. I wouldn’t be able to divorce myself so fully, for one. And as far as Angela …
 

“Angie,” the black-haired woman confirms for me, breathlessly.
 

Her hair is black, not chestnut brown. She’s short, not tall. She’s slight, almost bony, not rich with subtle curves.

“Angie,” Samantha echoes.
 

“Cum inside me,” Angie purrs. She manages a purr because I’m in her tight little snatch, not her ass. Sam is the experienced workhorse. This other girl is just …
just
…
 

I pull out, flip her over, and bang her from behind so I won’t have to see her face. Sam straddles her back, her still-sopping pussy leaving streak marks on the other woman’s pale skin. She’s fingering herself, rubbing her tits, saying happy birthday over and over and asking if I’m enjoying my present.
 

It’s too much discussion, so I take a few final thrusts, pull out, and aim upward to shoot my spunk into Samantha’s yapping mouth. I must be pent up because it’s a gusher. I hit her tits, icing her nipples. I hit her tongue. She laps it up, like the whore she is.
 

Angie rolls over, and the two of them lie side by side, rubbing themselves, rubbing my shiny finale as if finger painting.
 

“Happy birthday,” Angie says.
 

“Happy birthday, baby,” echoes Samantha.
 

I don’t want to hear it. I wipe my dick with my boxers and walk back to the finished part of the terrace, still naked with a flagging erection, leaving my women to dry.

ANGELA

T
HE
PHONE
RINGS
IN
THE
kitchen. Not my cell — the house phone. The one we have because even though Mom has her cell, she can’t quite get over the idea of not having a corded thing connecting us to some sort of imagined security in some sort of upcoming disaster. In Mom’s world, it’s sensible to pay a monthly house phone bill because the apocalypse might come and cell phones will stop working. At that point, everyone will stop worrying about the apocalypse and instead go about protecting the hardwired phone lines so that people like us — those few left in the world with a phone on the wall — can call 911 and have Jesus come save us. Which he would because Mom tells him she hates Jews in her prayers.
 

I pick up the receiver.
 

“Hello?”
 

But nobody is there. Just a dial tone.
 

I go into the living room. I left Parker’s personal assistant’s birthday card on the coffee table, and its red-enveloped buffoonery insults my eye upon passing. I’ve already sacrificed my dignity enough by keeping the Olive Garden gift card and have recovered some of that dignity by determining to use the thing no matter what Bill tries to insist. But I won’t keep the card. Or the envelope. The greeting inside is an insult. I don’t buy that Parker signed it any more than he, hopefully, will believe that I signed the one Mom and Bill sent him without my permission.
 

I can’t decide whose side I’m on. I hate Parker for sure. I hate how he abandoned us. I hate the fact that there was a
Rolling Stone
feature on him a few months back and that I actually read it while at the Barnes & Noble in town. I hate that in the feature, he doesn’t mention his family, and I similarly hate that the reporter included his net worth (a number that began with a B), and that we’re still here in the town’s asshole, penniless. I don’t want his money because I don’t want his pity. But at the same time I can’t help hating that we can see his apartment building downtown from our front porch — known not because he sent us the address, but because it was in
Rolling Stone
. I hate that he’s just across town but is in a whole other world, going out of his way to turn a cold shoulder from so relatively nearby.
 

But at the same time, I’m a little on Parker’s side. Mom and Bill’s motives are so transparent, they might as well be a pair of windows.
Happy birthday
indeed.
Life landmark
indeed.
Need to forgive, forget, and renew acquaintances
indeed. They want his money. Parker probably told
Rolling Stone
he didn’t have a family. He has one fucker of a dad and the charity cases that his father glommed on to.
 

As much as I hate Parker, I think I might do the same things in his shoes. His father belittled and hit him. Mom hates him and always has. Our relationship, as stepbrother and stepsister or anything else, never had a chance at normality sprouting from that weedy garden.
 

Part of me, for sure, hopes Parker sees that phony, obvious, insulting card for what it is:
begging. Selling out. Debasing of pride.
We don’t have much, but we’ve never taken county money. I don’t want pity from anyone, even if we did once share a bedroom wall.
 

I’m thinking this while tossing the card in the trash, heading to the utility room and grabbing my running shoes.
 

The phone rings again. I pick it up. Nobody there.
 

Sighing, I sit in one of the wooden chairs around the kitchen table. When I’m bent over, lacing up, the dingy, flaking linoleum assaults me as if I haven’t been seeing it every day for half my life. The landlord won’t replace it, and yet we’ve been here far longer than anyone should ever rent an armpit like this.
 

Our table, as I sit up to tug on the other shoe, is comparatively nicer. We own the table; we don’t own the linoleum. And the table, for what it is, isn’t bad. I picked it out from a used furniture store. You can rent furniture — something I’d never realized. But after it’s rented, you can buy it, too. This table and chair set — the whole shebang — cost seventy bucks ten years ago. I’d bought it with my own money after sitting at the shitty old one Mom and Bill refused to replace and having a leg give out on me. Bill wanted to glue it back, but I put my foot down. I found the set and brought it home.
 

Every step other than loading it into Bill’s truck and bringing it inside I did on my own. I spent my own money. Nineteen years old, technically still a teenager. That may have been my first mistake, fronting the table without making them chip in. It had been like feeding a stray animal. Now that I’d proved I’d put out to support the household, they were dependent. I don’t remember agreeing to handle the whole rent. It happened gradually, like a frog slowly boiling to death.
 

Once my running shoes are on and tight, the phone rings again. It’s getting on my nerves. I snatch it up; my voice is harsh and angry. I’m not mad at the phone. I’m angry at Parker, Mom, and Bill. For a millisecond, I wonder if I could run away — just get into my car and never come back, like Parker did. They’d probably starve. But who fucking cares?

“Who the hell is this?” I yell into the phone.
 

The voice on the other end seems duly chastised. It stammers before answering.
 

“Angela? This is Gina. Is … is your mom there, honey?”
 

My face flushes. If there were a mirror in front of me, I’d look up right now and find myself facing a tomato with almond-brown eyes. My skin is already a few shades darker than Bill’s, but I blush just fine.
 

“Oh, I’m sorry, Gina. There were a few … ”
 

“It’s fine, honey. Can I talk to Maria?”

Maria. Gina. Angela.
Why does everyone seem to have a name that ends with A? By comparison, Bill’s and Parker’s Anglo names are like sledgehammers.
 

“Sure. Of course.” I shout for Mom, who picks up the phone in the other room, from her chair by the TV.
 

I grab my keys. I grab my pepper spray. I grab my whistle. I don’t need anything else. That’s what’s so great about running: in the end, it’s me and the road. Two of the three things I always take are a necessity of this place, not the run itself. I’ve had to use the whistle once and the spray twice, though to be fair one of those times was on a dog. Now I don’t run after dark, but can’t stomach the probably intelligent advice people give about women never running alone. “Alone” is the reason I run. Between my job at the restaurant and my chore-laden home life, it’s the only time I ever truly get to myself.
 

I take our street to its end. I turn right. There’s a park farther on with what look like nice trails, but ironically park areas are the most dangerous in a place like this. I head farther up, finding the trail that snakes through a hilly patch of the dry but beautiful land that’s a hallmark of Southern California. It’s probably not a great idea to run alone here either, but it’s wide open and I’m fast enough that even if someone tried to pin me on the path, I could off-road to population and safety. I’d need to watch out for rattlesnakes, but I’ll take the reptilian sort of over the human variety any day.
 

My mind wanders while running. The path offers an even clearer view of downtown than our porch, and I can clearly make out not just Parker’s tower (I hate that I know he owns the penthouse), but the more angular building that I understand holds his company, WinFinity, as well. I hate how ubiquitous WinFinity is. Two years ago, nobody had heard of them. Now, they’re everywhere. WinFinity-signed artists are winning Grammys. They parlayed one of their catchier songs into a Super Bowl ad on Sunday and a viral hit by Monday morning. Normally, we on the bottom don’t know the companies behind our music, but the press loves Duncan Reed and is curious about the much shyer Parker Altman.
Rolling Stone
was only the start. Even from a distance, Parker’s found a way to vex me forever.
 

I don’t want to think about any of that.
 

I run harder. At a certain point, once I push myself hard enough, all I can really do is focus on breathing. I don’t want to think about anything else. I only want to feel the pounding of my feet and the burning in my lungs. I can’t breathe through my nose anymore; I have to open my mouth to get enough oxygen to fuel me. But I keep going. Soon, I start to get lightheaded, and I know from experience that when I finally slow, I’m going to feel like puking.

You’re not really supposed to sprint too long — short bursts only. Especially if you haven’t done a lot of sprinting, which I haven’t. It’s hard on your system, killer on your muscles and joints. And hey, I’m not a kid anymore. I just had a birthday. I’m twenty-nine, old enough to have a stepbrother who’s thirty.
 

But I keep going, old memories tugging at the corners of my awareness. If I stop, they’ll catch me. They’re growing more insidious the longer I run. It’s not just the card dogging me, or our family’s card to him. Now it’s images from our past. Things I’ve tried to forget. Things from when I was a kid, things that ache today whenever I allow them inside me. Day to day, I get along fine. You’d think I’m normal. But although it’s true that time heals all wounds, sometimes those wounds close with a splinter inside.
 

I can’t sustain my pace. I slow down. I know I shouldn’t stop all at once, but I can’t help it. I sprinted too long. I’m toxic. I feel like I might collapse in the ratty weeds. Then the snakes will come.
 

But I manage to stay upright, bracing my hands on my knees, bent at the waist. A wave of nausea comes, and I retch at the path’s side. It happens again, but then I feel a bit better.
 

I wait for the feeling to pass. It takes longer than I’d expected.
 

I resume walking and eventually find the strength again to run. I’m no longer thinking anything, too sick to ponder much but the pressing need to collapse on my bed. I focus on forcing one foot in front of the other, no longer enjoying myself. The run’s goal isn’t to distract or give me time alone, it’s simply to get home.
 

The sooner I’m there, the sooner the pain can end.
 

But when I round the corner onto my street, I see that a long, shiny, expensive-looking black car has parked in front of our house.
 

I want to turn around and run away, but I’m too weak.
 

And Parker, exiting the car as I slow, has already seen me.

PARKER

A
NGELA
’
S
SWEETNESS
ALWAYS
ANNOYED
ME
. Back in high school, she was in the drama club, on the honor roll, and did volunteer work at an old folks’ home. All the boys at our school thought she was hot, but only when pressed. They had to really sit down and think hard before realizing that yes, the girl with the long, dark-brown hair was smoking. That truth was hidden beneath her boisterous exterior. She took part, helped with everything, and always did the right things.
 

It was obnoxious. To me, she seemed arrogant and full of herself. Angela didn’t think she was anything special to look at, but she sure as hell thought she was talented. She tried out for all the plays and always got a part, though never anything major. She sang but thought she was a lot better than she was. She had this over-the-top way of acting in those high school plays — and an over-the-top, put-on voice while singing that was all throat but no soul — that seemed to proclaim her greatness. You didn’t act that hard, smile that wide, or sing with that much lust if you thought you were average. You did it because you knew you were great and would be hurting the world by denying it.