Forbidden: Ultimate Stepbrother Collection (13 page)

Chapter 6

Jessa

The dark gray haze over the horizon line meant the beach would be covered with a heavy shroud of fog in the morning. I’d gotten out to the sand just a bit too late. Hailey had taken longer than expected to pick out her new shoes. She’d gone into the office to make calls to the caterer and florist for the party. I’d carried my magazines and a beach chair down to the water to clear my head.

When we’d returned home, Beck’s gleaming motorcycle had been parked in front of the house. It sent those same damn butterflies back into overdrive. This time a slight hand tremble had accompanied my unwanted stomach flutters. And it had only been his bike. I hadn’t run into to the actual man yet, but even as big as the house was, our next meeting was inevitable.

A breeze kicked up over the bay, pushing the small crests into foamy whitecaps. Seagulls darted back and forth over the water searching for their last catch of the day before sunset. I pulled my sweatshirt on over my bathing suit. Suntan hours were over, but I remained in the beach chair.

I stared out at the water. A lone catamaran floated seamlessly over the surface, its sail bobbing majestically on the unsteady current. On quiet days, the water in the cove was like glass. But a storm surge could send it into a raging whirlpool. That I knew too well.

I watched as the tall white sail disappeared past the natural jetty, an outcropping of rocks that helped form one side of the cove. A shiver raced up my spine, a tremble caused not by the brisk wind but by the haunting memory. I closed my eyes and tried to push it from my head but the imagery only became more vivid. The white sail of the catamaran had sparked it. Canvas torn apart by vicious wind. Waves leapt like long, cold fingers over the bow of the boat. We capsized so fast neither of us had time to prepare for being thrown into the icy water. And then the same cold fingers of water dragged me down, holding me hostage beneath the violent current. My mind had tried to grasp the nightmarish reality that I was going to drown in the storm surge. Darkness came long before I’d had time to accept my imminent death. Miraculously, I woke on the deck of a fishing boat.

I opened my eyes and pulled the sweatshirt tight around my shoulders. The sun was dropping fast and the temperature with it. I stood from the chair. A figure running along the sand caught my eye. All this time I’d been sitting out on the beach like a coward, petrified at the notion of running into Beck, and he’d been out here all along.

Even in the dying sunlight, I could see the sheen of sweat covering his incredible chest. His long, muscular thighs stretched in front of him as he covered the sand at an impressive pace. He noticed me, and it threw off his stride. He slowed, as if hesitating, as if wondering whether he could just turn back around without me seeing him. But it was too late. There was no way to miss a man like him on an otherwise deserted stretch of sand.

He slowed and stopped about ten feet from me. The expression on his face made me look back over my shoulder. No one else was there.

“What are you looking at?” he asked between breaths.

“The way you’re looking at me I was expecting to turn around and see some two-headed monster behind me, ready to bite my head off.”

He combed his hair back, and it stuck in place with sweat. “No, uh, yeah sorry. Just didn’t expect to see you out here.” He made a point of looking down at my legs. His gaze lingered there for longer than what seemed necessary or appropriate for two people who hadn’t seen each other for years. “It’s kind of late for sunbathing.”

I zipped up my sweatshirt, trying hard to hide the fact that my fingers were shaking again. “Hailey had some stuff to do, and it had been so long since I’d been out on this beach.”

His pale green eyes stood out in contrast to his tanned skin and dark hair. Heavy black stubble covered his square jaw. Beckett Grady was no longer a boy. He was a man. All man.

“How have you been, Jessa?”

Small talk. Small talk was probably the safest route for us.

“Good, thanks. I’ve been busy with work and stuff. I hear you’re doing really well too.”

“I’m doing all right.” He looked out at the water. “Looks so calm sometimes, doesn’t it? Like someone’s backyard swimming pool.”

Small talk with an edge. I wasn’t ready for it. Especially after the last few moments where I’d drifted back to that horrible day. “Hailey is so excited about finishing law school.” A topic change was greatly needed.

He turned back to face me, and I took an involuntary breath. Beck always wore every emotion on his face, and that hadn’t changed. There seemed to be a flurry of thoughts going through his head, and I was feeling just as confused as I always had when I’d faced him as a flighty, self-conscious teenager.

“Yeah, my sister is something else.” Then he took a few steps and closed the wide gap between us. I was close enough to see the beads of sweat that rolled across his shoulders and down his chest and the ridges of his stomach muscles. Both his arms and half his chest were covered with tattoos, a stark black collage of designs, words and symbols. The ink along with the massive musculature made him look positively menacing. And yet, I felt anything but afraid.

We locked gazes and stood there in complete silence for a long moment as if we were the only people left on a watery planet. Then he broke the spell and pulled his eyes away. “I’ve got to head in and shower. See you later, Ducky.”

Long, confident strides carried him back to the house. He disappeared inside.

Chapter 7

Beck

The house was dark, not surprising at two o’clock in the morning. After a quick catch-up session with Hailey, I’d managed to avoid everyone for the rest of the evening. I skipped dinner, which had been a mistake. The whiskey had gone that much quicker to my head. I’d pay for it in the morning, but a good buzz was just what I’d needed.

I crept down the hallway, a hallway that seemed to stretch on forever tonight. A door opened just as I passed it. A small figure stepped out, and a gasp followed as she slammed into me.

Her small hands pressed against my chest as she pushed back from me. “Shit, Beck, what are you doing? And why do you smell as if you bathed in alcohol?”

“Too many fucking questions.” My lids were heavy as I stared down at her. She was wearing a t-shirt that clung to her beautiful, plump breasts. She had on a pair of long pajama bottoms rolled down low over her hips, just like the ones she used to wear with the duck print. The ones that had earned her the nickname. This pair had dolphins on them. “I can’t call you dolphin. It just doesn’t work.” My words sounded long and stretched.

She smiled. “Thank god for that.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, a gesture that seemed to send blood straight to my cock. As she moved her arm, her nipples pressed against the thin cotton t-shirt.

I braced my hand against the wall to keep myself upright. “You’re not wearing a bra.”

Even in the dark hallway, I could see her blush. She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Yeah, well, I was sleeping, and I don’t generally wear a bra to bed. I hadn’t really expected to run into anyone on my way to get a drink of water.”

I dropped my gaze to the small space of exposed skin between the bottom of her short t-shirt and the top of her low slung pajama bottoms. Silky, smooth skin stretched across her flat belly. Every inch of her was perfect.

“Well, I’ll go get that drink.” She moved to walk past me. My arm shot out. I hadn’t even thought about what I was doing. My whiskey soaked brain just made it happen. My forearm pressed against the satiny skin on her bare stomach. She didn’t look at me or touch me, but she didn’t pull away either. The only contact was my forearm against her stomach. Electricity charged between us so strongly, I half expected it to light the hallway.

“Fucking hell, Jessa, why did you come?”

She pushed my arm down and rushed away from me. I plodded to my room and slammed the door sharply shut behind me.

Chapter 8

Jessa

The sip of water hadn’t helped me sleep. Several shots of tequila would have been a better sleep aid after the tense meeting with a drunken Beckett in the hallway. He’d even gotten cruel at the end, letting me know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want me here. I’d shed a few tears and then assured myself it didn’t matter. I was here for Hailey, and I could give a damn about Beck’s feelings. Or at least that was the way I’d felt as I finally drifted off. This morning, everything seemed bleak again. I did care about his feelings, and I wanted to kick myself for it.

Hailey had texted me, something that was quite necessary in a house this size, to meet her in the hallway at nine. Be ready to work out, she’d written. Then there was a string of texts about the number of calories in a BLT sandwich and that didn’t even include avocado and butter. We needed a calorie deficit, she’d insisted, so we could start all over again today with our BLT marathon.

She knocked. “Hey, let’s go. Those extra pounds are just waiting to creep onto our butts,” she called through the door. I’d worried that law school would squash her quirky, lively personality, but it hadn’t in the least. She was still wonderful Hailey.

I opened the door. We burst out laughing. We’d both pulled on pink running shorts, white tanks and knee-high socks. I’d pulled my hair up in a rubber band, and she’d pulled hers up in a fancy leather hair band.

“We’re like twins,” she laughed.

“Except that I have dark hair and brown eyes and you have blonde hair with blue eyes and we, of course, look nothing alike. But otherwise, twins all the way.” We headed to the stairs. The Grady personal gym was a massive room below the first level. I hadn’t been in it for several years, but even back then, it had been set up with walls of mirrors, an incredible sound system and state of the art equipment.

We got to the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the hallway with the door that went below the first floor. “Uh, I don’t want to sound like a wimp, but ten minutes on a treadmill and I’m usually ready for a coffee latte,” I said.

Hailey’s shoulders fell forward. “Thank god. I was worried that you were going to want to do a hardcore workout, and I was going to look like a pansy stopping for water every two minutes.”

I held out my hands. “What about me says hardcore workout, Hail, really?”

She flicked an annoyed glance my direction. “Are you kidding? That body? You know how many girls spend hours at the gym and thousands on plastic surgery to get that kind of a shape?”

“That’s sweet of you to say, but I do believe that’s an exaggeration.”

We tromped down the stairwell leading to the subterranean floor of the mansion. There was a movie theater at one end and the gym at the other. In between were a lot of utility closets and storage rooms. Loud music rumbled along the smooth plaster walls of the corridor leading to the gym.

“Shit, Beck beat us to the room. Now we’ll have to listen to his heavy metal garbage.”

It was beyond naive, but I kept thinking I’d be able to avoid the man. Instead, it seemed I kept landing in his path. I was rethinking the workout.

I stopped a few feet from the door. The bass guitar and drums vibrated the small space.

Hailey looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

I wasn’t sure how to make this not about Beck, so I stumbled onto a lie. “You know, I think I’d feel better if we ate first.”

“Before a workout?” Hailey wasn’t stupid. She was studying to be a lawyer. She knew I was lying. Her expression softened. “You two really should talk, you know? Get it all out in the open.”

“What do you mean?”

She raised a blonde brow. “You know what I mean.”

“I was sixteen. I didn’t realize it would bother Beck so much that I went out on the boat with his friend. Well, maybe I knew a little—” My voice rose some. “I was sixteen,” I said again, a defense that was even starting to sound stupid to my ears.

I’d rambled on and hadn’t noticed the puzzled look on Hailey’s face until I stopped blathering on. “Jessa, I’m not talking about your little thing with Jake. I’m talking about what happened out there on the wat—”

The music shut off suddenly, and we were bathed in silence. “Oh good, he turned off his music,” Hailey said, completely forgetting the conversation we were having. She swung open the door and walked inside.

“I’m picking the next music,” she called across the cavernous room. The steel of the weight machines glistened beneath the recessed lights.

“The hell you are,” a deep voice called back from somewhere behind the forest of machines and treadmills. Even the sound of his voice sent a tremble through me. After the ugly scene in the hallway, I’d been hoping not to see him again soon.

He walked around the black heavy bag dangling from a chain in the farthest corner of the room. Just as I hadn’t wanted to run into him, it was obvious from his cool green gaze and the firm set of his jaw that he hadn’t wanted to run into me either.

“It’s my weekend, Butthead. Besides, your music sucks.” Hailey sidled past him, chin in the air.

No longer wanting to be the focus of his icy expression, I headed to a treadmill. Unfortunately, all the machines faced toward the center of the gym. I climbed on and focused on the fancy digital display and various speed and incline choices in front of me.

Hailey cranked some music that was a little less thunderous and climbed onto the treadmill next to me. I’d settled on a low incline and a speed of only a few miles per hour. The last thing I needed was to get tossed off the back of the treadmill right in front of Beck. I also didn’t want to draw attention to myself by trying a level where I would be gasping for air. I decided he couldn’t see the display and would have no idea that I was using a granny setting for my workout.

“Wait until you see the student speaker at the graduation.” Hailey, who obviously had more experience on a treadmill and needed less focus to keep upright, started right in with a conversation. “She’s one of those snooty, east coast blue bloods,” she said in her most uppity tone. “Some third cousin thrice removed from the Kennedys or some bullshit like that. It always cracks me up when someone who has about as much blood connection to a famous person as to a rock tries to make everyone believe they are close relatives.”

I could only half-listen to Hailey. It was taking me longer than I’d expected to get a rhythm going. I was still holding tightly to the handlebars. Hailey, on the other hand, was speaking animatedly with her hands as she talked about the very distant Kennedy cousin.

“Why was she chosen to the do the speech?” I asked, between breaths and keeping up with the rubber track rolling beneath my feet.

“Her father and grandfather were both alumni or something like that. She’s so obnoxious, I can hardly stand to listen to her. Hopefully her speech will be short.”

Concentrating on the treadmill had temporarily made me forget the dark, brooding man in the corner, who was now pummeling the black bag. He’d faced away from us, purposely, no doubt.

As he continued to murder the poor leather bag, the muscles in his shoulders and back only seemed to grow in bulk. Sweat dripped down between his shoulder blades, creating a long, sensuous stream of moisture down to the small of his back. A warm rush of heat went through me, and it had nothing to do with the turtle’s pace I was walking at. It was that same all over blush that I’d felt back in my teens, whenever I watched Beck doing something that involved muscles and sweat and his altogether ridiculous amount of masculinity. His iron fists plowing into the bag over and over made him seem that much more dangerous, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to have him take roughly hold of me, pulling me beneath his hard body.

I pushed out my bottom lip and blew some air up toward my face, hoping to cool my skin. Once again, it seemed I hadn’t outgrown those physical feelings I’d had to combat that summer, that crazy BLT summer. Beck still stirred me, in that sense at least. But knowing how much he disliked me helped put things back into perspective. We were two people never meant to be near each other. I would never know what it was like to be in Beck’s arms, and that was for the best.

“I say, after this, we head out to the veranda for some sun.” Hailey’s suggestion popped me out of my reverie.

I dragged my gaze away from Beck. “That sounds good. I’m still too pale for my dress.”

I was still grasping the bar for support. Hailey managed to keep her much more impressive pace while pulling her phone from the hidden pocket on her running shorts. “Oh, I’ve got to answer this.” She slowed the machine, hopped off and walked out of the room.

Suddenly, I was standing alone in the gym with my nemesis, an antagonist who attracted me as much as he repelled me. The loud music drummed down from the surround sound, drowning out the sound of his grunts as he worked the heavy bag. I was thankful for that. Something told me, hearing him groan with the pain of hard work would only increase the flush I was feeling from watching him in action.

I tried desperately to occupy my thoughts and my focus with other things in the room. But it was a room full of mirrors. Everywhere I looked, Beck showed up as the focal point. His hair was extra black, soaked as it was with sweat. He finally slowed his assault on the bag. His hands had been wrapped tightly, and he unwound the white tape. The muscles in his arms bulged with the blood coursing through them.

He leaned down to pick his towel up off the floor. My nervous gaze flew toward the door. Hailey still hadn’t returned. He pressed the towel against his face and then curled his steel arm up to rub his hair vigorously with the same towel. What the hell was it about an intimidating-looking man that made him so damn appealing? It was really contradictory to everything that was rational. Wanting a man who could crush you, hold you, command you to bend to his will, all of it was so damn erotic. I hated that I felt that way, but I did.

He turned around, and my sensual musings quieted. Beck’s green eyes focused on me at first. He glanced around, I could only assume, to look for his sister. Then, before I could figure out how to jump from the machine and run, he walked over. He stood looking up at me, and I pretended to concentrate on the numbers in front of me.

“Where’s Hailey?”

“Went out to take a phone call.”

He continued to watch me. It was not helping my stride.

“Well, I think I’ve had enough.” I started pressing numbers hoping to slow the machine so that I could make a quick exit. Instead, the motor whirred louder and my feet had to run to keep up with the rubber conveyor belt. The speed increased, and I my lost grip on the bar. I screamed as I went rushing quickly backward. I was hurled off. I shut my eyes waiting to absorb the pain of landing on the tile floor. My body thudded against something hard, but it wasn’t ceramic tile. I peeled open my eyes. Beck’s massive arms cradled me as I fell against his hard, sweaty chest.

I peered up at him, feeling like a clown.

“That’s one way to leave a treadmill, Ducky. Most people just turn it off.”

My face heated, and I wriggled my body to get out of his arms.

“If you don’t mind, could you please lower my feet to the ground.” I writhed in his giant arms.

“I’m thinking about it, but I’m kind of enjoying have you squirm against me like that.” He grinned and let my legs drop to the floor. Once my feet made contact with tile, I made a beeline for the door. My workout was over. Damn if his arms hadn’t felt just as amazing as I’d imagined.