Escape: A Stepbrother Romance (22 page)

He hadn’t been outside the house when I left. I’d only seen him twice so he wasn’t exactly persistent in his efforts. With any luck he was working for Naomi and ripping her off by pretending he was tailing me full-time.

Naomi had been in touch again, and this time she told me she was visiting Windsor to see me. Apparently the building manager at my former London home had told her my forwarding address. That sounded plausible enough to be true and if it were not for the man following me then I might have believed it. No, I suspected her source of information was this mystery man, and if I found him I planned to make him confess as much.

Thinking of Naomi put me in a foul mood, so I tried to focus on more pleasant thoughts while keeping an eye out for the car. Vicky. Thanks to Vicky, I had enough pleasant thoughts to last me a lifetime, and we’d only been screwing around for a month or so.

“Screwing around” probably wasn’t the right term to use here. It was more than that. We weren’t “making love” or anything soppy like that, but we were at it with a regularity and consistency that I’d never come close to with anyone else before.

Best of all, neither of us ever felt the need to hold back. If I wanted to do something then I asked Vicky if she was interested, and she usually said yes. She even had a few ideas of her own that had taken me completely by surprise. She’d gone from being a virgin to begging me to shoot my load on her face in a remarkably short amount of time.

A few days ago, after one of the best hours of my life at her old boarding school, we decided to go shopping for a few new toys to use in the bedroom. We played around with the vibrator a lot, but Vicky always ended up throwing it to one side and pleading for the real thing after just a few minutes. Who was I to deny her what she wanted?

When in the shop, I’d picked out a small vibrator that looked inferior compared to the larger toy that Vicky had purchased. She’d frowned and told me she already had one that size.

“You can control the vibration with an app on your phone,” I’d explained. “That’s why it’s so expensive.”

“That doesn’t sound very sexy,” she’d said. “I prefer it when you control it with your hand between my legs.”

She didn’t understand why I wanted it, but I bought the toy anyway and then explained my plan to her the next morning just before we were about to go out for lunch with Sheri and Roy.

“You’re going to put this in your panties,” I told her. “Now. Then I will control the vibration over lunch.”

“You’re kidding,” she’d exclaimed.

I assured her I was deadly serious and in the end she slipped the toy in her panties just before we hopped in the car. I took my phone out of my pocket and smiled at Vicky a few times to let her know I was considering activating the vibrations. She tensed up in anticipation, but I didn’t do anything. All through lunch I waited until she had likely forgotten about the small toy pressed against her clit.

Finally, when I noticed her father lecturing her on something that caused her eyes to glaze over, I unlocked my phone and set the vibrator to pulse at a low level. She jumped slightly when it started, but her father was too absorbed in his own words to notice.

Vicky couldn’t look at me, but I could see what her body was going through. Her hand clasped the table as I increased the intensity of the vibrations. She turned to face me when her father finished his lecture. She bit her lip, but made no sign that I should stop.

When Vicky excused herself to visit the bathroom, I waited a few minutes and then turned the vibrations up once more, then again, and then finally up to the maximum level. A few minutes later, the app on my phone told me the device had been disconnected, and Vicky returned looking flush and somewhat exhausted.

Vicky wasn’t the only one to have new experiences—I’d certainly never made a women come before just by using my phone.

Eventually the running app on my phone told me I had run five miles. I’d been running away from the house this entire time, so I immediately took a left turn and started heading back in the general direction of home. Ten miles was more than enough for me today.

I often ended up with sore muscles if I didn’t do a decent cool down, so I walked the last mile towards home. Two hundred yards from home I saw the red Ford Escort parked on the side of the road.

---

I approached the car from behind, walking slowly along the sidewalk and even stopping occasionally to stretch my muscles to look inconspicuous. The man was sat in the driver’s seat, and he would be able to see me if he looked in his passenger mirror. Fortunately, his gaze was focused on the house.

I pretended to send a message on my phone, but took a few photos of the car and license plates just in case. I wracked my brain for the best way to handle the situation. I’d hoped we would meet when he was out of the car; that way he wouldn’t be able to escape before I asked him some questions.

If the man had any sense, he would disappear as soon as I got close to the driver side door, but nothing the man had done so far led me to believe he had any experience with this.

The town was quiet, so there were few cars around. I waited until the coast was clear and quickly left the sidewalk and approached the car on the driver side. I stood close enough to the car that the man would not be able to see my face and then knocked on the door.

Instead of driving off, like any half decent investigator would’ve done, the man rolled down the window and asked if he could help me. At this point, I crouched down so that my face was level with his.

“Hello,” I said casually, “I’ve been meaning to have a word with you for some time.”

“Oh shit,” the man exclaimed. His hand went to the keys in the ignition, but I’d been expecting that and shoved my hand through the window to grab his wrist before he could turn on the engine. I leaned further inside and removed the keys from the ignition.

“You won’t be going anywhere without these,” I said, dangling the keys in front of his face. “Step out of the car. We’re going for a walk.”

The man kept cursing, but he did step out of the car. I could tell immediately he wasn’t going to cause me any problems. He was tall, but clearly not in good shape and his posture indicated a lack of self-confidence. I should be able to get information out of him easily enough, and he certainly wouldn’t dream of fighting back.

I led him to the path Vicky had shown me on our way to the pub. We’d taken this route a few times and I’d never seen anyone else, so we would have a degree of privacy. I pushed the man up against the wall and stood close enough to smell his breath. It was unpleasant, but I needed to appear threatening to him, and that meant getting up in his face.

“You’ve been following me,” I said. I spoke at a normal volume and with a calm tone. It was best to save the shouting and aggression for later.

“No,” he replied quickly. He was already panicking. This is going to be easy. “I haven’t, I swear.”

“Don’t lie to me. What’s your name?”

“Patrick McDade,” he replied instantly. He was telling me the truth. Idiot.

“Well Patrick, I’ve seen you around quite a bit in the last few months. You’ve followed me to the pub and have kept an eye on the house. I want to know why.”

“I promise, I haven’t been following you. I don’t even know who you are.”

“Who put you up to it?” I asked. “I’m going to start needing some answers from you Patrick. I’m going to need the truth or I’m liable to get angry. It’s nothing personal Patrick, but I don’t like people following me around. I’m sure you can understand.”

“You’re her boyfriend, right? You’re Victoria’s boyfriend?”

“I’m a friend,” I replied. Suddenly it dawned on me.
Every time I’d seen this man I’d been with…
“You’re following Vicky.”

Patrick nodded. “I’m not really following her. I just watch her occasionally. That sounds bad; it’s not that bad really. I promise.”

“So you’re some creepy stalker? Are you obsessed with her? You must be twice her age at least.”

“It’s not like that. I just want to talk to her.”

“It’s taking a great deal of resolve not to punch your lights out right now,” I growled. “Vicky means a lot to me and I don’t like what I’m hearing from you. Give me a reason not to hit you or your going to wake up a few hours from now with a bad headache and a couple of black eyes.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. I’ve just been released from prison,” Patrick said.

“This isn’t getting any better,” I said.

“It was me. I was the man who hit her.”

“You hit Victoria?” I asked. Strangely, I felt more confusion than rage. The man looked meek and feeble. He didn’t look like he had an aggressive bone in his body and Vicky had never shown any signs of being abused. I was missing something.

“No, I hit
Stephanie
Marshall. Not Victoria. I was the man driving the car that hit Vicky’s mom.”

“Jesus,” I muttered. “You’re the creep who thought his text message was more important than the safety of everyone else on the road.”

Patrick nodded. “I’ll never forgive myself. I spent every day and night in prison thinking about it. Of course, I’ll never do it again, but it’s too late now.”

“You’re not speaking to Victoria,” I said. “She’s never mentioned any desire to see you or speak to you. I suggest you leave her alone.”

“I’m going to get myself back on my feet,” Patrick said. “It’s hard to get a job as an ex-con, but I used to make lots of money and I know I can do so again.”

“Well good for you,” I said through gritted teeth. I was back to wanting to punch the man.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant… maybe I can help. Financially that is. If she needs it. I don’t care if I have to give every pound I earn to her.”

“The family is okay for money. Look, I appreciate that you want to clear your guilty conscience, but you’re just going to have to live with it. Vicky has moved on and her mom’s recovering slowly. You don’t go near Vicky. Do you understand?”

“I don’t understand,” Patrick said. “I mean I do understand, but…” He trailed off. He looked nervous and agitated. His eyes glanced everywhere apart from at me.

“I’ve been very patient with you, Patrick,” I said slowly. “But I’m going to need you to tell me the whole story now. You’re keeping something from me. Tell me the truth or I’m going to take all my passion for Vicky and convert it into a punch to your face. You don’t want that Patrick.”

Patrick took a few seconds to compose himself. I didn’t rush him. When he finally spoke he told me something so ridiculous I almost didn’t believe it. If it weren’t for the look of fear and horror in his eyes I would have assumed he was lying. He’d told me the truth, but I didn’t like it so I punched him anyway.

I regretted leaking the information about Sheri as soon as I left the pub. It wasn’t that I felt bad for potentially ruining her career; quite the opposite, I felt excited about the thought of her life crashing down around her.

The regrets centred around the fear of being caught. I wasn’t like Caiden. I wasn’t good at being a rebel and by leaking that information I’d probably broken the law. At the very least, I’d leaked confidential information between a solicitor and his client.

Fear gripped my stomach the entire way home and wouldn’t let go. I’d used a throwaway email account and had specifically sent the email from a Wi-Fi network that lot of different people used and should provide me some anonymity, but in the end I knew little about computers and had no idea whether the information could ever be tracked back to me.

Rationally, my brain told me I would be okay. It wasn’t like the police would bother tracking it down, and my dad’s law firm wasn’t well-versed in security. If it were then he wouldn’t have been printing emails and taking them home in the first place.

Caiden was in the shower when I got home. I tried to join him in there, but the door was locked and he didn’t respond to my knocks. He finally came downstairs after getting dressed, but something seemed to be troubling him. Instead of sitting next to me on the sofa, he sat on a seat at the far end of the living room.

“How was your run?” I asked.

“Good. Ran about ten miles.”