The Bad Boys of Summer (5 page)

I pressed Iris’ contact button, listening to it ring all of once before I heard her putting the cell phone to her ear.

“Slade? What happened?” she asked, hope tingeing her voice. “Do you have Kellan?”

“No,” I growled, slamming the door to my car shut and turning the ignition. “Your idiot of a brother isn’t coming with me, even if I paid him. He hates me with every fiber of his being, Iris.”

“But why? What happened?”

“He knows, Iris,” I said, resting my head on the steering wheel. “He knows everything.”

There was silence for a moment, the only hint that Iris was still there being her soft, rapid breathing. Everything that I had feared would happen was coming true, and it was all my fault. I should never have come here.

“I’m going to go get a drink at Flannigan’s,” I told her as I moved to end the call. “Don’t wait up for me.”

“Slade, wait,” she said, making me pause for just a moment. “I’ll come with you. You shouldn’t be drinking alone.”

“Don’t worry about me, Iris,” I said. “I can find my own company.”

W
ell
, here we were—Slade had done exactly what I’d wanted him to do, what I’d
asked
him to do. He’d found Kellan. The only problem was that Kellan, evidently, hadn’t wanted to be found. Not by Slade, at least. Was this really the fruit of my master plan—the knowledge that I would never get my baby brother back?

Everybody changes,
I thought, slipping my arms beneath my head.
Everybody changes on you.

I sprawled across my bed in the dark, thoughts of all the men in my life dancing through my head. There was my father, who’d treated us like shit and walked out on us. There was my stepfather, the proud, stubborn man who refused to see reason and still envisioned me as some kind of child. There was my little brother, Kellan, who was obviously never going to be the man I’d always thought he would be, one who was happy and well-adjusted and living up to his potential and
not on drugs.
And then there was Slade, my opportunistic stepbrother who once pumped and dumped me just to settle the grudge he had against my mom.

How much was I to blame in all this? What was that saying—that if you meet a few bad apples a day, they’re the assholes, but if bad apples are all you ever meet, the asshole is you? Maybe I was the weak link in this equation. Maybe I was the reason that all the men in my life kept abandoning me and letting me down.

I turned over on my side and curled up with my trusty pillow, the one I always ended up wrapped around this late at night. What the hell was wrong with me? And how could I fix it so Kellan wouldn’t end up dead in a ditch somewhere?

What about me and Slade? Was the damage there irreparable, too? He was God-knows-where tonight, probably fucking some bar slut in an effort to clear his mind of all things Iris Walker.

Goddammit. Why did I care so much?

I couldn’t bear the thought of him bringing some girl back to my apartment. I tried to tell myself it was just common courtesy—you didn’t do that to your stepsister, no matter what the case—but the truth was it ran deeper than that. No girl wants to see their ex balls-deep in their replacement. And like it or not, Slade
was
my ex. It hadn’t been about sex with him.

Well, not
just
about the sex.

I took a deep breath, trying to clear my thoughts. The reality of the situation was that Slade had gone through a lot of replacements since we’d been together, and whoever he brought home wouldn’t be the first, nor the last, girl he stuck his dick into. Hell, maybe I was overreacting even worse than that—maybe he wouldn’t come back here at all. If he was three sheets to the wind, he’d probably end up back at her place and save me the embarrassment of listening to them fuck, probably in someplace entirely inappropriate, like my living room.

Jealousy is an ugly thing,
some distant part of me said. It made me uncomfortable. Was I jealous of whatever girl Slade had his sights set on for tonight, possibly even right now?

I startled as the sound of my front door slamming open echoed through my otherwise silent apartment. I heard a snort, then a chuckle, and then the door clumsily shut and lock from the inside. Slade was home. And judging by his staggering gait, he was drunk. And alone. Thank god for that, at least.

I sat up in bed and was greeted by an, “ow, fuck!” a moment later. Pulling a short, silk robe over my cami and boy shorts, I padded barefoot out into the living room where my stepbrother was swiftly destroying my décor.

“Jesus, Slade,” I murmured, watching as he toppled over the coffee table and onto my couch. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” he answered, grinning sloppily. His eyes shone in the darkness, wet and smoldering. “Spent all day getting my ass kicked. What could be better?”

I flipped the light switch up as my gaze fell to the cut on his lip. Instinctively, I reached out. “Let me get you something for that…”

Slade brushed my hand away. “Relax. I’m a doctor. Jesus.” He glared at one of the end tables, now askew, that he’d bumped into on his way through the living room. “The hell you got all this furniture for? Your apartment doesn’t even look like it belongs to a twenty-five-year-old. It looks…” Slade wrinkled his nose. “Nice.”

I snorted. “It ought to. I’m an interior designer. Having a shitty apartment would be a waste of my degree.”

“You are?” He blinked at me, eyes thinning.

I nodded. “Run my own business and everything.”

“You never told me that,” Slade murmured.

I shrugged. “You never asked.”

For a second, Slade looked like he was going to argue with me. He parted his lips, brow creased, and let out a strangled noise that almost, but not quite, sounded like a word. Then he looked at me, hard, with a kind of stoniness in his eyes. I almost could have mistaken him for completely sober.

“Kellan doesn’t just know about us, Iris,” he said, jarring me from any pretext of a pleasant conversation. “He thinks I raped you.” He wet his lips, the corners of his eyes creasing. “Is that what you think happened between us?”

My stomach turned. “No!” I said, shaking my head vehemently. “No, Slade. That’s not what I think at all. Jesus, why the hell would I say something like that, make up a lie about what happened between us?”

“Revenge,” he suggested with a shrug. “Payback for me leaving. For what I did to you.” He reached down and started taking off his shoes. “Make me get on a plane, make me go to the worst part of town to talk to a kid I haven’t seen in years, make me feel all responsible for his downward spiral—and then let him punch me in the face.” Slade’s eyes met mine again as he peeled his socks off. “Iris, if you’d ever wanted to stop…”

“I didn’t,” I said, maybe for the first time out loud. My heart was racing. I’d never meant to bring all this down on Slade’s head. All I’d wanted was my little brother back. The way Slade’s pulse throbbed in his neck, the way his eyes shone—I could tell he was upset. And not just in an “I’m angry and drunk and a dickhead” way. What Kellan had accused him of—what his own father thought of him—had hit him like a ton of bricks.

I thought back to our tryst. From the very first moment to the very last, I’d wanted Slade Jarvis more than anything in the world. He was a sweet, sexy, smart as hell twenty-one-year-old, and I was the eighteen-year-old virgin who fell in love with him. For years, I’d told myself it was all an act, that Slade never felt anything for me, that I’d been a pawn, a tool to get back at his father for whatever sin Slade thought he’d committed.

Looking into his eyes now, I realized I was wrong. Slade did care. He cared a whole hell of a lot.

“I didn’t want you to stop,” I said softly, afraid of those words and what they meant. “I never wanted you to stop, Slade. Because I trusted you. I…” My throat was suddenly hoarse. I swallowed, hard. “I loved you. And I thought you loved me, too. You betrayed that, and yeah, I’ve thought once or twice about revenge…” More than that, but that was beside the point. “…but not like this. I never wanted to—”

“Iris,” Slade said much more gently than I’d imagined he could. He stood up off the couch, beginning to undo the buttons on his shirt. “I believe you.”

I blinked. Tonight, Slade was just full of surprises. My gaze fell to his fingers working at his shirt. “Wait, what are you doing?”

“Getting comfortable,” Slade said, shrugging out of his shirt. He had a little trouble with the sleeves, but once he’d gotten them off, he was naked from the waist up. “What’s it look like?”

I bit my lip, hard, to keep from answering him.
It looks good. Damn good.

Slade’s chest was perfectly chiseled. He’d kept in shape—hell, he was probably more ripped than he was when we were teenagers. The tattoos he’d gotten back then were as striking as ever, the black ink playing perfectly against his sun-kissed, ivory skin. I remembered them like yesterday, like I was still up on the counter in our parents’ pool house, digging my nails into Slade’s flesh. My feminine core throbbed and I shifted just a little to accommodate the hot drop of lust that stained my inner thighs.

“I… I dunno,” I finally stammered when Slade didn’t release me from his glare. “Just… shouldn’t you be in your room with whatever girl you decided to hook up with?”

“Do you
see
any other girl here, Iris?” he asked, slowly rising from the couch. God, I loved the way his muscles bunched and flexed. “It’s just us, sis. Just me and you.”

I swallowed thickly, looking up into Slade’s eyes. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, or what I was supposed to feel. Relief that he hadn’t brought anyone home—the sting of old wounds opening once again—and even a thrill as my stepbrother, the first man who’d ever touched me
in that way,
was standing shirtless in my living room. It was so confusing, so overwhelming, but I didn’t want it to stop. I
liked
the thrill.

I was so transfixed by Slade’s stare and my own dizzying emotions that I hadn’t noticed he’d dropped his hands to his belt buckle until I heard the sound of it coming undone. I gasped, taking a step backward as he toyed with the button on his pants.
Holy shit. What is he doing?

“Slade,” I began, but it was too late. My stepbrother already had his pants unzipped. They dropped to the floor, just like my stomach, and despite my best efforts, my gaze focused in on what lay between my stepbrother’s legs.

Oh, God.
In addition to his ego, his dick had gotten bigger, too.

Even though Slade was wearing boxer briefs, the outline of his swollen member was enough for me to make a judgment call. Its girth pushed through the form-fitting fabric, stretching it so that it was almost see-through. It lay up against his hip, so long that the tip of it was pushed up beneath his waistband. As I stared at it, I saw it throb, and I answered that single pulse with one of my own.

I wet my lips. It had been so long…

“My eyes are up here, Iris,” Slade said, taking a slow, steady step toward me. I dragged my gaze up his body to see him smirking. That curl of his lips, that knowing flash in his eyes—I wanted to call it presumptuous. Cocky. But I couldn’t. Not when I couldn’t keep the rhythm of my heart in check. Not when I was feeling exactly the way Slade anticipated I would.

“I never apologized for what I did to you,” he said, the shadows playing over the swells of his abs, the hard planes of his hips, his chest, his
cock.
“And if you’d asked me to years earlier, I probably wouldn’t have. I was young and stupid and got it into my head that the most important thing in the world was to break our little family apart. I was angry at my dad for forgetting my mom. I was angry at your mom for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. But you? I was never angry at you, Iris.” He licked his lips and continued his pursuit.

“You know why there’s no sexy little bar slut in your apartment tonight, sis?” he asked as I backed up into the wall. I was reminded suddenly of the room we’d found ourselves in at the hospital, how I’d very nearly given into a twinge of dark desire there. Slade put one hand on either side of my head, effectively boxing me in, forcing me to stare into his blazing eyes. “She’s not here because she couldn’t give me what I need. What I’ve been craving ever since your tight, goody two-shoes ass walked into my hospital.”

His
hospital.
Goody two-shoes.
Anger flared in my chest and I inhaled it, welcomed it, used it to clear my vision and see my stepbrother for what he really was. He was an arrogant prick. He always had been, and he always would be.

But was that all Slade was? Didn’t I have fond, vivid memories of all the other things he could be? His tender caresses. The heat of his mouth when it found my throat. The way he used to steal kisses on my cheeks and forehead in the halls. Those were the memories that gave me pause, that made me believe that Slade Jarvis wasn’t just my dickhead stepbrother. I wanted to believe, so desperately, that what he’d once felt for me was real, even if at the end, it had been tainted by anger at his father.

If I was being honest with myself, that was what made Slade so hot—that cockiness. It was what made him successful. And I tolerated it because I knew it was just the tip of the iceberg. It made my panties wet, but what had always kept me coming back to his bed was everything else I knew about him.

I’d seen straight through his shit-eating grin and Devil-may-care attitude when I was eighteen. Seven years later, I could see through it again. Because when push came to shove—when there was something really, actually important on the line—Slade dropped the act. Just like a few minutes ago, when he’d looked into my eyes with all that worry, all that concern, and told me he didn’t mean to hurt me, that he was sorry, that he would have stopped if I’d asked him to. That was the real Slade Jarvis. That was the guy I’d fallen in love with.

Could I do that again?

“Don’t,” I breathed, the conflict in my mind raging on beneath a veil of desire. I shook my head at Slade. “We can’t…”

“We can,” he answered, the words thick like sweet molasses in his mouth. “We’ve done it before.”

My eyelashes fluttered without my consent. “And look where that got us.”

Slade pressed into me, his erection strong against my taut lower tummy, and I gasped. I had never quite gotten over his cock—its fullness, its length, the heavy scent of it. Suddenly I was thinking about the way I’d wake him up with secret blow jobs or how he’d drive it into me when it rained, my screams rivaling the claps of thunder outside our home. He drove me to madness with that cock once, and he could do it again. I was sure of it.

My breasts hitched beneath my robe and Slade pulled it away, revealing my pebbled nipples peeking through the thin fabric of my cami. He said, “You always left my bed satisfied, Iris. And the couch. And the table. And anywhere else I fucked that sweet pussy.” With a barely-there touch, he dropped his hand to the silk belt shielding my lower body from his view and tugged. I should have stopped him. I should have wrenched away and fled to my room. But the truth was that I was aching to know how his fingers would feel between my legs, how the sweep of his thumb on my pussy lips would give me goosebumps.