Dirty Wicked Lust: A Stepbrother Romance (14 page)

That time I’d missed my period senior year and thought I might have been pregnant with Zack Crawford’s baby, I was seriously adamant about accepting his proposal and spending the rest of my life with him. So, then, why was I so relieved when it turned out to be a false alarm? But those were just fantasies, I now realized. Flights of fancy fueled mostly by hormones and an insatiable eagerness to please the boy—whatever boy—I was currently crushing on.

But Ryan? Ryan was different. While I realized that my sex life with my nubile older stepbrother was more than healthy (extraordinarily so, in fact), there was nothing normal, even traditional, about it. We couldn’t go out on dates like other couples, not even dinner and a movie, without arousing suspicion.

Imagine being at some quaint, cozy pizzeria when a classmate from school turned out to be waiting on us. What would I say when she asked me to introduce my dining companion? His name, sure, but… then what?

All the usual follow-up statements like, “We met in a yoga class” or “He’s literally the boy next door” were off the table. I hadn’t even admitted to April that I’d slept with Ryan yet. How could I introduce him as my stepbrother to some random acquaintance if we met in a restaurant?

It made me appreciate just why Ryan was so hesitant to start something with me, let alone keep something going. Was he just old enough to realize how hard it might be for us to do actual, real, live couple things being related? Or had his travels abroad and in the military just made him wiser in the ways of the world?

Either way, he’d been right about one thing…screwing each other was the easy part. Having a relationship was the real challenge. Then again, I’d been right, too, when I said there was no way we could
not
be together. After sneaking around for the better part of a week, stealing covert blow jobs or finger banging sessions in my overheated back seat in the abandoned factory parking lot had shown us that much.

It wasn’t exactly dinner and a movie but I realized, in that moment, a quiet dinner at home while the parents were out might suffice for our own version of a romantic evening.

Suddenly invigorated, I showered quickly, not wanting to waste a moment as I quickly threw on a soft, brown slip dress – no bra or panties beneath. Images of Ryan bending me over the kitchen counter and fucking me from behind filled my head even as I glanced out my bedroom window at the pretty rose garden beneath.

I rarely noticed it, but at the moment, it seemed the perfect source for a little romance to start off our night together.
Candlelight,
I thought as I raced down the stairs and toward the patio doors,
some smooth jazz, a bottle of wine or two, and a single long-stemmed rose in one of Mom’s dozen or more crystal vases could just be the embers we needed to ignite our first real date together.

Ryan wasn’t due back from the gym for another ten or twenty minutes. You could set his workout schedule like a clock. I crouched next to the nearest rose bush and with a pair of scissors from the random kitchen junk drawer, and I snipped at the first blooming rose I saw.

I held it up, so fragrant, rich, and beautiful—even I was getting sappy just staring at it. I could only imagine the effect it might have nestled amidst a few jar candles on top of the dining room table, peering back at Ryan from its long, thin, cut-glass vase.

Mom was a Grade-A gardener, but it wasn’t her garden. Jerry tended it, carefully, and had done so since the day we moved in. It was an odd hobby for a man who, as far as I knew, hated the outdoors and had never even taken a dip in the family pool. Yet, it was his one abiding hobby, and the garden was a source of great pride to him.

I took the rose inside and found a simple, yet elegant, vase. I filled it halfway with water and plopped the rose into the water. Admiring my efforts, I brought the vase into the dining room and set it down in the middle of the table.

I heard the front door open a few minutes later as I stood at the oven, broiling two rib eye steaks I’d found in the fridge until they were medium rare. I turned from my efforts, Ryan standing just inside the kitchen, glancing at me with a curious gaze as his eyes traveled up and down my body as they usually did. I never failed to enjoy the experience, but this time his gaze was…
different
.

Instead of his usual come-fuck-me admiration, Ryan’s expression was dark, hostile, even brooding. Then, instead of a greeting or even one of his trademark sexy one-liners, Ryan blurted, “Where… where’d you get that rose?”

My brows furrowed and my lips frowned. I’d done so many things since I harvested the single, red rose—marinated the steaks and made a salad, lit some candles and opened a bottle of dry red wine—that I’d almost forgotten it.

“What?” I asked, turning more directly from the steaks to face him across the kitchen counter.

Ryan had moved, standing next to the vase now, peering at it coldly, even cruelly. I’d never seen him glare at something so intensely before, and immediately, despite the steaks broiling in the oven at my back, the temperature in the kitchen had dropped a good ten degrees.

“I said,” he repeated himself, voice even harsher this time – just shy of a growl. “Where the
fuck
did you get this rose?”

I stood, frozen in fear. No longer content to merely glare, Ryan’s eyes were filled with rage, the veins tense on either side of his rapidly swallowing throat. “Uhm…from the garden outside,” I said, my voice filled with confusion and pain. “Why? Did I… did I do something wrong?”

Our eyes met, and in that moment, I felt fear – real, hard, sudden fear. In an instant the vase launched across the kitchen like a missile, hitting the cabinet a few feet away from me and shattering so completely that water and rose petals splashed my face.

“Ryan!” I gasped, cowering in fear as he advanced, muscles growing with rage.

“Don’t
ever
touch that garden
again
!” he railed, leaning over the counter as if to strangle me, eyes literally bulging with danger.

“Don’t ever touch. That. Garden. Again!”

“Fuck you!” I spat, throwing the salad bowl in his face as lettuce cascaded everywhere and wooden salad tongs clattered to the marble countertop. “No one talks to me like that! I’ll go wherever the fuck I want in this house. I live here too, asshole!”

“You’re a guest here!” he shouted, all but spitting at my feet as he raced toward the stairs. “And don’t ever forget it.”

He bounded up the steps, leaving me almost relieved that he was leaving. At least with him in his room, or wherever he went, I could feel safe again. Then he paused, turning toward me as I stood, heart pounding and mouth wide with shock, terror, and disgust. “Don’t ever go into the garden again!”

Chapter Seventeen

“Heather?”

I was kneeling, still in my slip dress, tears dragging mascara across my face, when Jerry walked in an hour later. Ryan had already left, storming past me without a word as I stood, lost and trembling, in the shattered, ruined kitchen.

I had sucked down a glass of wine to steady my nerves and now—half the bottle gone—finally felt strong enough to clean up the kitchen before our parents got home.

Or so I thought, relieved it was Jerry walking through the door and not his violent, raging son. Then it dawned on me that he was supposed to be on a date with my mother.

“What… what are you doing here?” I managed to ask, standing with a torn rose petal in one hand and too far gone to even bother with cleaning up my face.

He smirked, almost playfully. “I live here, remember?”

I chuckled joylessly, shaking my head. “No, I mean… Mom went to surprise you at your office. For your second anniversary, remember?”

He smiled. “I know, she’s out in the car. I wanted to come home and grab our overnight bag, just… in case, you know?”

I sighed, sagging with my back against the pantry door. “I… I’m sorry about the kitchen,” I said, rambling and stammering as I unloaded on him instantly. “I was trying to do something nice for Ryan, you know? Like you guys said, play nice with your stepbrother. Tone down the sibling rivalry. So, I thought I’d make him dinner, you know? Something nice and simple. And I went to all this trouble and…”

He reached out a hand, gently squeezing my forearm as if to remind me someone else was in the kitchen. “Just calm down, Heather,” he said reassuringly. “Just take a breath and tell me what happened.”

“I’m trying to,” I gulped, afraid that if I calmed down, I might collapse again. “I just…I was in the middle of cooking dinner and setting the table when Ryan came home from the gym and just… freaked out. Totally. Just… went berserk!”

Jerry nodded, gently taking the crushed rose petal from my palm and examining it with sad, tired eyes. “Was this… from my garden?” he asked, his voice low.

“Yes, Jesus!” I hissed, pacing again as my fear and sadness blossomed into anger. “What is it about the fucking garden and you two? You’d think it was… was… some kind of shrine or something!”

Jerry ignored me, peering down at the rose petal in his hand. Or so I thought.

“It… it kind of is,” he murmured, so softly I thought I might have misheard him.

I stopped pacing, realizing I’d never seen his eyes so sad, so damaged, so… real… before. “Ryan and his mother, Evelyn, planted that rose garden,” he finally explained, sinking down on top of a barstool on the other side of the kitchen counter and placing the petal almost tenderly on top of the placemat resting there.

“It was for Mother’s Day,” he continued, peering down at the petal as if staring into his late wife’s face. “I bought him the seeds, and they spent all day out there in the backyard, tilling and making straight lines, planting the seeds, and watering them, patting down the soil and admiring their handiwork until it was dinnertime and I had to call them in to eat.”

He chuckled, finally, peering back at me fleetingly across the kitchen counter before glancing back down at the wounded rose petal. “It was the year before she died, and since then, Ryan hasn’t been able to look at that garden, let alone harvest a rose. I tend it because, well… it’s all he has left of his mother, you know?”

I nodded, hands covering my mouth in horror. “Wow. I’m so sorry, Jerry,” I said, the words muffled by my trembling hands, fresh tears ruining my mascara again. “I had no idea. He never…
nobody
ever said anything to me about the garden, or why it was so important to you both. If they had… if they had… I would have never….”

Jerry nodded, sliding a hand across the kitchen counter to gently grip my own. “It’s my fault, Heather,” he said, our eyes meeting, tearfully. “I guess, it’s a part of the house we wanted to keep private, and frankly, that’s not fair to you or your mother. We’re family now, Heather, and although I’m not perfect, and I probably don’t show it as often as I should, I’m glad you’re here.”

I snorted, crying again as he gave me a fumbling, awkward—but more than welcome—hug. “Ryan, my God,” he said, pushing me away so he could tell me to my face. “I thought he’d have a rough transition coming home from Afghanistan, but thanks to you, Heather, he’s downright blossomed.”

As if to dispute his theory, I looked around at the ruined kitchen, lettuce all over the counter, glass shards from the shattered vase on the tile floor, rose petals like blood splatters all over the cabinet. “Well, until tonight, that is…”

I snorted, drying my eyes with the use of a nearby dishtowel.

“Honestly,” Jerry said. “Part of the reason Ryan dropped out of high school to join the Marines was to leave this house and all of its… memories.”

His eyes drifted toward the living room window and beyond, to the carefully tended rose garden. “Partly, I know, it was to leave me behind as well.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said, wringing the damp dishtowel quietly in one hand.

“Oh, you think I’m uptight now,” he grumbled, running a thick hand through his even thicker hair. “You should have seen me back then. At the very time Ryan was rebelling against society, I was cracking down on the only world I could control—my home. I begged him to get a haircut, ragged on him to pick a college, anything to get his act together. Then, one day, he did.”

“By leaving you?” I replied.

He nodded, then shook his head, fingering the damaged rose petal gently. “By leaving
us
,” he said sadly, as if the ghost of his late wife hovered just above the rose garden outside.

“I’m glad he’s back,” I said, still shivering from the encounter I’d just had with my sexy but occasionally scary stepbrother. “But clearly, he’s not through running away just yet…”

Jerry chuckled dryly, shaking his head. “I’ll… I’ll have a talk with him when he gets back,” he said, surveying the damage around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time. “He owes you an apology.”

I sighed, looking down at the work I still had to do. “I should probably clean this up first.”

“Here,” he said, shrugging out of his suit jacket and tossing it over a barstool before rolling up his pinstriped shirt sleeves. “Let me help you. It’s the least I can do.”

“But what about Mom?” I asked, grateful for the help but not wanting to rain on their anniversary-date-parade, even if cleaning up Ryan’s mess was turning into a bigger chore than it should have been. “Isn’t she waiting in the car?”

Jerry winked, kneeling beside me as we began to pick the broken pieces of the vase up carefully with our hands, little chunks of glass clattering along the way. “You know your mother,” he said, reaching for a sponge to wipe up the water still dripping down the cabinets. “She started playing some game on Facebook on the way home so that should keep her occupied for the next half hour or so.”

We snickered, stepfather and stepdaughter, bending to pick up the pieces of a stepbrother’s violent outburst, one that saddened me more than scared me. At least, now that I knew what it was all about…

Chapter Eighteen

“Hey.”

I read the text, sagging with relief as I slumped in my bed, snuggling into my cozy homework pillow as I tapped out an overdue assignment on my laptop.

It was from Ryan, the first word I’d heard from him—scratch that,
any
of us had heard from him—in nearly three whole days. seventy-two straight hours of going off the radar and his first word was “hey”. Still, it was a word, and it was from Ryan. At this point I’d take whatever I could get. I slid the laptop aside, cradling the cell phone that had been my constant companion ever since I’d started texting him in the wake of his outburst earlier that week.