Dirty Wicked Lust: A Stepbrother Romance (18 page)

Her face looked pained as if she was being put up to all this by her bully of a husband. “I… I kept it to myself because, well…”

“She
trusted
you,” said Jerry, pacing the tiny living room like a caged animal. “I wasn’t so trusting, and while rummaging around through Ryan’s room after I got the call from his new landlord, put two and two together and… and…”

He sank into the chair at the breakfast nook, shaking his head.

“Dad,” Ryan said, inching closer to the table where, only moments earlier, he’d been straightening silverware in anticipation of a quiet, romantic breakfast for two. Now, suddenly, our entire world had fallen apart. The thing we both feared, the very thing we most dreaded, had happened.

They knew.

The people we cared about most in the world had discovered what we wanted to keep from them, and now we had to deal with the fallout. “This… this is all one big misunderstanding.”

“Is it?” Jerry barked, voice cracking with emotion. “You think we’re stupid, Ryan? You think we can’t put two and two together? You think we don’t know what you two were doing the whole time? Right under our very noses?”

“We never,” I blurted, inching closer until Mom gently held me back, a hand on my forearm and a soft, gentle shake of her head as I nodded and held my ground. “We never wanted anyone to find out this way,” I insisted.

“We never wanted to hurt anyone,” Ryan added, nodding. “We just… couldn’t help it.”

Jerry remained mum, a rare feat in itself. Shaking his head, looking down at the single powdered donut on his plate, Jerry murmured quietly to himself before finally speaking aloud. “What now?” he asked, a question we were all facing at the moment, but never thought he’d be the one to ask out loud. “How… how can this possibly work?”

“You mean…?” Ryan asked, sitting across from him as if all the wind had been knocked out of his chest. “You’re
not
banning us from seeing each other?”

“Jesus Christ, son, you’re a grown man. If the only woman who’s ever made you happy is your stepsister, well… I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… but…”

Jerry’s voice rose, then fell, his tirade over… apparently speechless. “What your father is trying to say, Ryan,” Mom said, silently clutching my hand behind her back. “Is that if you two really are in love, there’s nothing much the two of us can do to stop you. If that’s… what you really want?”

Mom had turned, subtly, starting by facing Ryan but ultimately facing me. “Is that… what you really want?” she asked.

I nodded, eagerly, like a little girl asking for a pony. “As much as you wanted to marry Jerry, Mom,” I insisted, making her gasp with emotion.

“And you?” Jerry asked, less diplomatically as he faced off against his son. “Is Heather worth the controversy you two will face whenever you go out and someone asks you how you met?”

Ryan chuckled, hesitating less than a second before nodding fiercely. “Dad, Heather is worth never going out again!”

“Well,” I mused, squeezing Mom’s hand as I felt the worst of the family intervention passing. “Let’s not go
that
far…”

They laughed. All of them. Jerry. Mom. Ryan, together, amidst a swirl of romantic candlelight and a pile of discarded clothes, my fucked up, crazy, weird family laughed and so began the healing that was so necessary if Ryan and I were ever to be together.

I mean, truly
together
…

Chapter Twenty-One

“Going out again?”

Mom’s voice was faint, almost distant, beckoning from outside the half-open sliding glass doors. I inched closer to find her, reclining on a deck chair, illuminated by an end table full of flickering votives.

“Well, not out exactly,” I hemmed, sinking down onto the edge of the nearest one and sitting sideways so that I faced her. “You know how it is.”

Mom sighed, clinking the ice in her gin and tonic. She looked relaxed, refreshed, hair slightly damp and curly from a recent swim. She wore a black one piece beneath a silver cover up, her face serene amidst the flickering votive candles.

“I do know, dear,” she said, slyly, eyes slow and loopy like maybe it wasn’t her first drink. “You’re going over to Ryan’s again, aren’t you?”

I’d left the little overnight bag I always brought to my stepbrother’s apartment just inside the sliding glass door, but Mom had spied it, nodding at it knowingly now. “Just for a little while,” I lied, both of us knowing I’d be there overnight—if not longer.

“I’m wondering when you’ll just... stop coming home one day.”

I sighed, anxious to get to Ryan’s but surprised at Mom’s forthcoming admission. Normally tight lipped about relationships, in general, and mine and Ryan’s in particular, I figured the sunset swim and second gin and tonic had loosened her up a bit.

“I suppose when it feels right I will,” I said, thinking as much myself.

She arched one eyebrow over the lip of her glass as she took another sip. “It doesn’t feel right yet?” she asked, putting the half-empty rocks glass down.

“I dunno,” I hemmed. “It does, and it doesn’t.”

She smirked, like she knew something I didn’t. “You’re afraid it’ll get boring, aren’t you?”

I chuckled. “That, and well, I’ve never lived with anyone before.”

“Good point,” she said.

I peered back at her, curious about something since our impromptu family meeting at Ryan’s apartment a few days before. “Why are you two being so cool about all this?” I asked. “I mean, we thought you’d be mad.”

“We were, at first,” she said, nodding toward the second floor of the house where, as always, a light burned steadily in Jerry’s den. “But the more Jerry and I talked about it, the more we realized that keeping you two apart was only going to make the whole thing more… exciting.”

I smirked. “So you figure we’ll spend so much time with each other that the only option will be to get tired of one another?”

She laughed, long and loud, a sound I hadn’t heard in far too long. “Something like that, dear. Something like that.”

“What if we don’t?” I asked as she picked her drink back up. “Get tired of each other, I mean?”

“Then I guess I’ll be happy that you found someone who makes life interesting, dear.”

She sipped her drink and sank back into her chair, gazing up at the moonlight as I watched her take in her new surroundings. It had been a long, hard road for Mom after Dad left, and I reckon I’d treated her unfairly for most of those years. Where I thought she’d been a floozy, perhaps she was just chasing some security for herself—a feeling she’d never had when my real father was around.

“I don’t know what will happen between Ryan and me,” I told her, reaching forward to squeeze her hand. “But I want to thank you for at least giving us the chance.”

She sighed with contentment, a sound so rare I didn’t want it to end. So, rather than race off to Ryan’s and begin another long, strenuous night of nonstop sexy times, I turned slightly, slid my legs up onto the chair and stared up at the view Mom had been admiring so joyously.

“Don’t you have a date to keep dear?” she asked, turning her head slightly.

“He can wait,” I chuckled, crossing my arms over my chest.

“It’s good to make them wait sometimes,” Mom said, imparting a little dating advice.

I chuckled. “I think it’s harder for me to wait until we see each other again than it is for him,” I confessed.

“All the more reason to wait a little, dear,” she mused, reaching for a pitcher on the table next to her and pouring me a drink, as if she’d been planning to lure me outside all along. I sipped it, slowly, finding the alcoholic concoction refreshing.

“But it’s so hard sometimes,” I sighed, enjoying the moonlight swimming just above, to say nothing of the reassuring presence of my mother on the chair beside me.

“Love can be hard, dear,” she mused, turning toward me just as I turned to her.

“Do you… do you think it’s love, Mom?” I asked, reaching out to squeeze her hand.

She squeezed it back, winking merrily. “Only you can decide that for yourself, Heather,” she assured me, our hands swinging gently in the space between our deck chairs.

“Well,” I corrected her, the night suddenly taking a rather different—and pleasant—turn. “And Ryan, of course…”

Epilogue

“What’s with you tonight?”

Ryan squeezed my hand, nearly toppling the oversized parmesan cheese shaker on our cozy table for two at Papa Puccini’s Pizza Parlor. It was right across from the Twin Town 6, where we’d just seen a horror movie so bad we’d walked out halfway through, more interested in not wasting another hour of our lives than getting our money back.

Now, seated at a corner table in the small, quaint eatery, I sat gazing at Ryan in a new, uncertain way. “I don’t know,” I murmured, quietly, to match the setting. The place was full of other couples, some old, some young, similarly dining on hand-crafted pizzas and homemade sangria, like us. “Why do you ask?”

“I dunno,” he said, shrugging and nibbling on a piece of pepperoni snatched off his pizza slice. His fingertips glistened with the leftover grease before he licked them off, subconsciously sexy. “You’ve been weird all night.”

When I didn’t respond right away he leaned closer, waving his half-empty glass of fruit wine. “I thought you’d be happy, going out in public like this…”

“Our first date,” I mused, clutching his free hand tightly as I tried to make him feel better. The truth was I didn’t know why I was feeling so out of sorts.

“I
am
excited,” I insisted, if only to reassure him. “I just… it feels weird you know?”

He shook his head, clearly not knowing. Or, at least, not admitting that he knew. “What, walking out of the movie like that?” he asked, missing the point completely. “I tried to tell you we should have gone to see Vampire Lesbians from Mars, but you wouldn’t listen!”

I chuckled at his earnestness, even as I shook my head at his cluelessness. “It’s not the movie, dork,” I teased, twirling a piece of dangling cheese around my finger to scoop it into my mouth after downing another bite of scrumptious pie. “Although anything would have been better than Giant Spiders from Uranus 6!”

We both chuckled at the ridiculous title, Ryan reaching over to top off our stemless wine glasses with a little more sangria from the giant carafe between us. “I think we were both just struggling to do what other couples do, and that’s… just not us.”

I arched one eyebrow. Maybe my sexy stepbrother wasn’t
quite
so clueless after all? “Exactly,” I grunted. “It’s like we’re play acting and neither of us has read the script.”

“I dunno about that,” he mused. “I mean, we’ve both been on plenty of dates before, right? It’s not like we’ve been shut-ins all this time.”

“But haven’t we?” I asked. “I mean, we’ve been sneaking around so long, it’s like we’ve forgotten what to do with other people around.”

“That’s the point,” he said, reaching for my hand and squeezing it reassuringly. “We wanted to get out of the apartment and out, with real, live people.”

He seemed to glance around the dimly lit pizzeria as if realizing where we were. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” he asked, squeezing my hand once more before the inevitable call of another bite of pizza took his hand away back toward his plate.

“I thought so,” I sighed, realizing I was being whiny, and bitchy, and restless and spoiled. “I know it’s what we both wanted, Ryan, it’s just that, now that we’re here, I feel…”

“What, babe?” he asked, eyes wide and seeking. “Tell me what you feel and I’ll try to understand it.”

“I wish I knew!” I huffed, snorting dramatically. “That’s just it, I can’t quite put a finger on it…”

He shrugged. “I’ll wait,” he murmured, sipping his sangria and making the artsy wine glass look tiny in his oversized grip. “The night is young and we’ve got all the time in the world.”

We sat there, chewing and sipping, as the world chewed and sipped noisily around us. I glanced quietly at the other patrons, holding hands and smiling, talking animatedly with each other—or to their servers. And that’s when it hit me—why I was feeling so restless, and wrong, about something I’d wanted—or at least thought I’d wanted—since Ryan and I made it official.

I shrugged, breaking the comfortable silence with a sudden confession. “Maybe… maybe your father was right, after all.”

Ryan recoiled as if I’d slapped him, dropping his slice of pizza as if it had just come out of the oven and waving his hands dramatically, garnering the attention of several diners closest to us. “My dad? Right? About what?”

“I dunno,” I said, pinching off a piece of pizza crust and nibbling it while I formed a proper, thoughtful reply. “What he said about how we met, and what it would mean for our future.”

“We met in a kitchen,” he said, recalling the first time we’d ever laid eyes on each other. “What’s so crazy about that?”

“Yeah, Ryan,” I reminded him, rolling my eyes as if he’d forgotten the intense connection we’d formed that day meeting each other for the first time. “Our
parents’
kitchen. It’s just… weird… you know?”

When he shrugged, signaling he either didn’t think it was so weird or had no comment on the matter, I pressed onward. “Just saying it is weird: our parents. I guess the weirdness is catching up to me that’s all.”

“What weirdness, Heather?”

“This,” I said, pointing from myself to him. “You. Me.
This
…”

“You didn’t think it was so weird in the shower before the movies tonight, Heather,” he reminded me, making me blush to think of what we’d done to each other less than an hour earlier, soap slithering down our bodies and shower water splashing our “O” faces as we shook and trembled beneath the spray with insatiable desire. “Or the way you woke me up this morning, or tucked me into bed last night…”

“Okay, okay,” I grumbled good-naturedly, blushing again at the thought of Ryan’s morning wood, wet and juicy inside my grip as another sunrise graced his flat, quivering stomach—or the way neither of us could roll over at the end of the day without tumbling into and eventually, on top of each other. “I just… maybe I’m getting cold feet, is all.”

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” he asked, making a point. After all, in addition to the overnight bag I kept bringing to his place most nights of the week, I’d started leaving little items behind—a toothbrush, my own brand of toothpaste, a few pairs of panties, just in case. Then there was the bikini I kept on the back of his bathroom door, in case we went swimming. And the flip flops, and the beach towel, and the sundress and well… maybe it
was
too late for cold feet, after all.