Defender: A Stepbrother Romance (3 page)

W
hy was
I on that plane?

I crossed my arms and stared out the window, despite the pretty flight attendant who kept bending low to show me her tits every time she asked me if I needed anything. She must have thought I was pretty needy. She came by every five minutes or so.

The deposition for Stones’ nephew went well, thank God. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have come anywhere near that flight. But it did, and my mother called again just as I walked into my apartment. If she had called five minutes earlier, or five minutes later, I might not have answered. But she happened to call just seconds after my date for the night called to cancel. Something about an early call in the morning on a modeling job. And, five minutes later, I would have been sprawled across the couch with the menu from my favorite Italian delivery in my hand. So her timing was perfect, unfortunately.

“Eden’s being sued,” she said.

“By who?”

“The driver of the other car.”

Typical. Somehow it didn’t surprise me that another thing Eden did had consequences. It seemed like everything she did had consequences, and usually for other people. I could remember a time in high school when she–despite the fact that she was only eleven–managed to sneak into a friend’s house with a group of older girls she’d been hanging out with and broke a window. It took all of the money I’d earned mowing lawns that summer to bail her out of that one. Of course, she promised to pay me back, but I never saw a penny of it.

That’s the way it was with Eden. She did something wrong, people rushed to her defense, and usually it was her rescuers who paid the price.

“So, tell her to pay the cost of the repairs on his car.”

“It’s a Bentley, and the guy wants a huge amount of money. He insists that he was injured and that he suffers psychological effects from the accident.”

“The accident happened six week ago. How could he possibly know he’s got psychological issues?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what he’s saying.”

I sighed at that point, looking longingly at the menu I knew I wasn’t going to get to use on that particular night.

“You realize this is just a civil matter, right? That you could hire some local guy and he’d probably do just as good a job as I could?”

“You’re family, Crawford. Eden’s your sister.”

“I’m aware of that, Mom.”

“Family is everything. You can’t turn your back on family.”

And that was why I was on the plane. My mother–you couldn’t say no to her once she’d made up her mind about something. She had an argument for everything anyone ever thought to say. I was a great debater. I won awards in high school and college. But my mother could out-debate anyone, even the greatest politician God ever saw fit to put on earth.

I really couldn’t do anything for Eden that a local lawyer couldn’t do. It felt like a waste of fucking time. I should’ve been in the office, working on the half dozen open cases I had at the moment, and the other dozen that would cross my desk in one form or another over the next few days. I should’ve been eating my gourmet Italian delivery or fucking a hot model. I should’ve been anywhere but flying clear across the country to bail Eden out again.

I hadn’t seen her for several years. It felt like a lifetime yet at the same time just like yesterday. Eden…she was so beautiful. Even as a kid, she’d been the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. She had dark hair that she’d always wear long, the softest angles to her jaw, her cheekbones that gave her face a sort of grace that was impossible to replicate. And her eyes were the palest blue with little flecks of brown and green that just made them look more like jewels than they already did. As a child, she was teeny, tiny. As a seventeen-year-old girl, she had a woman’s body in a fragile frame that just begged to be guarded over. Protected.

I’d always felt that way. I didn’t know how to explain it. When I was a kid–five or six, maybe–and I’d hear my father beating my mother, I felt a physical pain. I wanted to stop it, to make it okay for my mother. The next morning, when the evidence was on her swollen cheek, in her blackened eyes, or in the cut on her lip, all I could do was kiss her hurts and try to be as good as possible. That feeling…that’s how I felt when I looked at Eden. Only it was intensified, if that was possible.

And when I thought of her, that feeling was mixed with anger and pain and so many things I didn’t even know how to analyze. I took those feelings and packed them away a very long time ago, determined to never look at them again, determined to never put myself in a position where I had to confront her, confront the residue of that damned summer.

And now this. Fuck.

I didn’t know what I was going to do when I saw her.

“Bourbon,” I said to the flight attendant when she came by again, not even waiting for her to ask any questions. “A bourbon, straight up.”

W
hen the plane
landed a few hours later, I grabbed my carry-on and made my way to the car rental desk. I had purposely avoided giving my mother my flight information because I wanted to have my own wheels, some independence. It was bad enough being back in town without having to ask my mother for a ride when I wanted to go for a drink.

My assistant had arranged for a Cadillac, so of course, I ended up with a tiny Prius. Who’d have thought they’d even know what a Prius was out here in the boondocks? But it handled surprisingly well. I pulled out of the airport and made my way around the loop that surrounded Lubbock, the one big city near my little hometown of Ralls. Just as dusty and barren as I remembered it. It felt strange having so much open space all around me.

I stopped at a diner and had some breakfast, since it was just after sunrise. I knew Dad would be up, but Eden and my mother were late sleepers. It was awkward when Mom first married Alistair, waking in the morning and finding him in the kitchen, usually lingering over a cup of coffee before going out to his workshop. I was so used to having our tiny apartment to myself in the morning when it was just me and my mother. Alistair was kind about the whole thing, never saying a word to me about the way I lurked just outside the kitchen door those first few days. And then, when I finally got up the nerve to go into the kitchen, he simply gestured to the cupboard where the cereal was kept.

“We’re pretty casual around here,” he said. “Help yourself.”

That was the most he said to me all the mornings we spent together. After a while, we fell into a routine that continued until I went to college–him drinking his coffee and staring out at the morning sun, thinking about what he would be doing in his workshop that day, I suppose. And me eating my cereal, then rushing off to watch cartoons those first few years, rushing off to play basketball the later years. It was a routine I sometimes missed. Just having someone else there, someone who understood that you don’t need words to make a person feel like part of something important.

Alistair was so different from what I knew about men at that point in my life. I’d watched my real father beat my mother on a regular basis. Then I watched landlords bully my mother, bosses guilt her into working hours she really didn’t want to work, boyfriends belittle her and take advantage of her timidity. I had never known a good man until Alistair. And he knew that. Yet, he never tried to talk to me about it, never tried to make excuses for all those bad men, never tried to explain how different he was. He simply showed me. And that spoke volumes that words never could have done.

My stepdad saved my life by marrying my mother and loving her the way she deserved to be loved. He saved my life by showing me that violence and anger and hatred didn’t have to be everything. He saved my life by simply being a part of it.

He would be so ashamed of me if he knew what had happened that summer, so long ago.

I finished my meal and turned the Prius toward home.

I
was walking home
. I walked pretty much everywhere since my car was a hunk of scrap metal. When I needed to get somewhere, I usually borrowed my Dad’s Chevy pickup. But that was only when I needed to go to the city to buy groceries. The rest of the time…well, at least I’d lost a few pounds in the process.

My cellphone rang as I passed the Baptist church, giving me an excuse to ignore Pastor Brown’s enthusiastic greeting that usually meant a fifteen minute recitation on how great the teachers at the school were doing with the young minds of our fair town.

“Hey Eden, are you on your way home?” my Dad asked quite chipper in my ear.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Vera would like you to come by for dinner.”

I glanced at the time on my phone: 4:30. A little early for dinner, even for my parents.

“I can come over in an hour or two. I have a few things to do.”

“Why don’t you come now?”

And that’s when I knew something was up. My Dad was usually pretty respectful of other people’s space. To insist meant something was going on.

Oh, no! Was that guy suing them, too?

“Yeah. I can be there in a few minutes.”

“Great,” he said. “Love you, kid.”

He hung up, still sounding fairly happy. But my Dad would sound upbeat in the middle of a tornado. Was that what it was? Had that guy figured out I didn’t have any money and decided to go after my parents? I mean, my Dad had money. Most people who knew who he was knew that. His art was pretty amazing, and it’d sold well all over the country but mostly there in Texas. There were buildings in Dallas, Austin, and Houston that had his sculptures in their lobbies and out in their plazas. Private homes that designed their interiors around his work. There were even a few art galleries that always had his creations on display in one format or another. It wouldn’t take much for someone to find out the details about my Dad.

I’d feel really shitty if that was the case. It was all my fault. It was my accident. I didn’t want anyone else to pay the price for it. And it was already bad enough my Dad had to foot the lawyer’s bill.

Maybe that was what it was about. Maybe my Dad finally called that lawyer Sherman recommended. The idea made me feel better. It made more sense.

I walked with renewed vigor in my step, wishing after another half mile or so that I’d worn more comfortable shoes to work that morning. My flats were versatile and looked good with my long skirt, but they weren’t the best thing for walking in the hot May sunshine. It was easily in the nineties that day, and would likely be in the triple digits before school got out in three weeks. I had more sand and rocks in my shoes than toes, and sweat was making them slip and slide, threatening to produce a few blisters on my heels.

Should have asked my Dad to come get me.

But I made it, walking up the driveway to my Dad’s house less than an hour after he called. And there he was, standing in the doorway of his workshop. It always made me smile to see him there. My earliest memories were of watching my Dad work in that old barn. He taught me how to sketch when most kids were just learning how to color inside the lines, taught me how to work a blowtorch before I knew how to sew a straight seam or crochet a single stitch. I still couldn’t sew or crochet, but I could weld a perfect seam on just about any piece of metal. And I could draw better than the art teacher at the high school. Not that art was my passion like it was my father’s. Neither was office work. What I wanted was about as farfetched as the idea of me becoming a seamstress.

I wanted to write novels. Or read them. Or edit them. Or anything that had to do with words.

I’d written a dozen short stories that mostly sat in a desk drawer back at my apartment. I sent a few out to random publications, but they always came back with basically the same sparsely worded letter: not right for us. My writing was…well, I liked to think of it as creatively random, but an editor told me once that it was filled with undeveloped plots that were populated by flat characters. I had to disagree with her assessment, but my meticulous objections weren’t getting me published.

Still, I was working on it.

I raised a hand to wave at my father and he waved back. Then someone else joined him there in the doorway. I would have known that profile almost anywhere.

Crawford.

It had been years, yet he still looked exactly the same. Tall. Dark. Devastatingly handsome.

All of my girlfriends in middle school and high school had such a crush on my brother. I got so tired of hearing them talk about him, inviting themselves to spend the night at my house in the hopes that they might cross paths in the hallway in the middle of the night. There was one girl who was so obvious in her fascination with Crawford that I had to actively distance myself from her, despite the fact that she was one of the most popular girls in the school and by doing that, I pretty much set myself up to be part of the loser crowd all through high school.

Looking at him now, I could imagine the wake of broken hearts he left behind him in New York, California, and everywhere else he’d lived these past nine years. Dozens, I’m sure.

Why did that bother me so much?

Because I felt sorry for the girls, I guess. At least, that’s what I told myself.

“Hi,” I said, walking up to my Dad and offering him a kiss on his cheek. “How did the meeting go with the new client?”

My Dad’s eyes narrowed. He knew what I was doing. I was trying to avoid what was right in front of me–that proverbial elephant. I didn’t even look at Crawford and he didn’t do much of anything to catch my attention, either. He smiled softly, but that was his only reaction.

“Good,” Dad said. “He liked the designs, so we’re ready to begin the cutouts.”

“I can come by on Saturday and help, if you want.”

He nodded, his eyes jumping to Crawford as he did.

“So, you got yourself into some trouble,” Crawford said in that deep, chest rumbling baritone he’d always had.

“Don’t I always?” I focused on him, noting the thin lines around his eyes that were new. Some would call them laugh lines, but I knew it couldn’t be laughter that caused those to appear on Crawford’s face. He was too mean to laugh that much.

“I thought you would have outgrown it by now.”

I shook my head, even as my eyes moved over his wide jaw, his thick eyelashes, those caramel colored eyes that had always seemed too perfect to belong to a guy. The only time in my life that I wanted brown eyes was when I realized just how perfect his were.

High school was a difficult time for me.

“I guess you were wrong...”

Amusement danced in those eyes for a second, but it disappeared so quickly I couldn’t be sure I really saw it.

“Be nice,” Dad said, tugging me against his chest. “Crawford came all the way from New York City to check into your case and see if he can help you.”

“I know.” I faced Crawford, trying to put a calm, consolatory look on my face. “Thank you for your help.”

Crawford inclined his head. “Didn’t do it for you.”

There was no point in responding, because I knew anything I said would just cause my Dad to disapprove. So I turned and headed toward the house. “I’m gonna go help Mom with dinner.”

Let him stay out there in the heat. Wasn’t that where imps were most comfortable?