Hooked: A Stepbrother Romance (20 page)

After he left, I took a sip of my soup and moaned into my spoon with satisfaction.

“I think he’s trying to impress me because I’m European,” Simon laughed, cutting part of the juicy breakfast sausage.

“I’m not entirely sure that telling an Englishman that you’re French is the best way to impress him,” I shrugged.

“Maybe he’s unaware of a few centuries worth of military history?” Simon offered.

“I guess,” I answered, groaning with approval as the creamy soup hit my taste buds. It was phenomenal.
 

“Stop it, Em,” Simon said suddenly.

“Stop what?”

“Moaning like that.”

I quirked a confused eyebrow at him.

“I’m starving too, but seriously, you’re killing me here. If you keep that up, I’m going to be able to lift the table.”

“But you can already lift it,” I answered, taking another spoonful of soup.

“I meant without using my hands. Seriously, just watching you talk is hard enough. Hearing you moan like that, I swear my pants are about to rip,” he explained, grabbing my chin in his fingers and wiping a fleck of zucchini off the corner of my lip.

“Oh,” I whispered, suddenly a lot less interested in my breakfast.

“
C’est l’amour
,” Johnnie cooed as he popped back up from nowhere, his baritone voice so off-tune he managed to perfectly hit the exact opposite of every note.

My heart sank as the restaurateur grabbed a chair and pulled it up to our table, sitting on it backwards and crossing his arms along the backrest.

“So, Simon, tell me more about England! I hear the Queen is getting more and more relaxed lately, any truth to that?” he asked, continuing before Simon had a chance to reply. “It’s only fair, really. I mean,
we
killed all
our
royals a thousand years ago. The Revolution and all. I guess that sooner or later every country ends up in more-or-less the same place, right?”

I looked over at Simon, struggling not to laugh in my soup as he struggled to find the right answer to
that
question. Leaning back, I remembered the boyish look on his face when we came into the diner less than half an hour ago. As Johnnie’s questions became even more ludicrous, I watched a bead of cold sweat appear on Simon’s forehead as he tried to manage polite replies to everything.

Stifling a giggle, I realized that I felt
good
. Bubbly and energetic, immature and euphoric. Maybe it was the food, or maybe it was just because I’d gotten more than two hours of sleep.

Maybe it was because Simon’s smell was still lingering on my skin, sending a little thrill every time I took a deep breath.

Whatever it was, it felt amazing. Looking into Simon’s eyes as he struggled to explain why English judges still wore powdered wigs, a smile crept up my lips.

Taking another sip of soup, I moaned loudly into my spoon.

Her moans could have killed me.
 

Her laughter, too.

Not to mention the way she looks at me.

I want her, all of her.

I want her to be
mine
.

“Hi Simon!” Jessa shouted as she whizzed past me, climbing down the hill with a tray of food in her arms. The watermelon was decorated with the same little paper American flags that Johnnie had used in our breakfast, a tradition that stretched back to at least my own childhood. Nostalgia seemed to permeate the air, and nothing seemed to say
Fourth of July
quite like this park, those decorations, and the fireworks that would follow later.

“Hey Jessa,” I waved back, feeling a sense of community as I looked around West Field. It didn’t look much different today than it did when I was younger, coming here with my mother to eat, play, and have fun. It had never been the best neighborhood, but celebrations like these helped bring people together in a way that I had yet to truly experience again since becoming wealthy. Soon, everyone would be mingling and laughing, carefree if only for today.

Of course, I’d never appreciated that at the time. I’d been a stupid and misguided kid back then, and my decisions had led to awful consequences. Then, a couple of years later, I managed to make things even worse.

It really was high time to make amends.

In the distance, I spotted Emilia, busying herself around a booth that had decidedly
not
been there when I was younger. As interesting as that was, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her smile, too, had not changed over the years, even though the rest of her had. Today, her long hair was tied into a long braid that I’d watched her put together this morning, hiding the evidence of what we’d been up to in bed all night. Her skin was still just a little flushed, decadently reminding me of the way she’d turned dark red when I had made her come with my mouth for the first time.

“Is that her? The Emilia you’ve been talking about so much?” a small voice asked behind me, and I turned around to face the speaker. Bright red hair framing a frail face, my mother was smiling at me with the same half-regretful look she always had in my presence.

“Yeah, it’s her.”

“She’s very pretty,” my mother said.

“She really is.”

“But you didn’t have to come all the way back here just for a pretty girl,” she added, always astute.

I winced, wishing I could spill my guts. I wanted to let go of the past that had haunted me for so long, to finally explain.

I’d been so envious of Emilia at first, acting like a stupid teenage thug with a chip on his shoulder.
 

Well, that’s exactly what I had been.

She’d had everything, and I resented her for that. Friends who liked her for who she was, love from the father who had abandoned me, a happy life that didn’t know tragedy or hunger. I’d expected an arrogant bitch, manipulative and easy to hate.

The reality had been much harder to take. She was actually nice to me, she seemed to sincerely care. Not out of obligation like my so-called father, not because I was good at sports like the other kids, and not because she wanted something out of me like Argus had.

No, she just cared about me because of who I was.

Like Jake had.

I hadn’t been able to handle that. At all. So I’d destroyed her, and then fallen in love with her.

Or, more likely, I’d fallen in love with her and then destroyed her.

By the time I figured it all out, it was too late. She hated me, rightly so, and all I could do was run back to England. I tried to forget her in every way I could, by working myself to death on the rugby pitch, sleeping with the countless beautiful women who gladly let me do anything I wanted, by helping out total strangers in ways that never quite made the guilt go away.

None of it had worked, of course. Emilia had stayed nestled in my soul and heart, haunting me with every breath I took.

I wanted to explain all that, but looking into the sad eyes of my mother, I couldn’t. At least not yet.

“Yeah, there’s more to her than how she looks. Life really has a funny way of working out, doesn’t it?”

“That it does, babe. That it really does,” she said, lighting up a clove cigarette.

I took a deep breath, choosing my words very carefully. My mom still didn’t know who Emilia really was, and given the way things had ended with my father, there was no easy way to say it. Not by a long shot.

“Emilia is…” I began, bracing myself for the hurt that was sure to come.

My mother just looked at me, an eyebrow raised as I trailed off mid-sentence.

“Emilia is the daughter of the woman Robert married,” I said finally.

She didn’t say anything, her eyes lost in the distance as she slowly sucked on the clove cigarette. I looked down at the field below, latching on to Emilia’s small silhouette as she dragged a long hose.

“You can’t hate her for it, Mom. Believe me. I already tried.” She looked at me for a second before withdrawing into her thoughts even more, her gaze joining mine as she watched Emilia in the distance.

“It only made things worse,” I added quietly.

I could see the pain on her face as she dropped the cigarette, crushing it under the sole of her leather sandal, only to pull out another within a few seconds.

“I’m not condoning what he did. It was very wrong of him to leave like that, but it was his choice. Not Emilia’s.”

A small, sardonic chuckle came from her throat as she wrapped her arms around her small body. “It was all his fault. I was keeping it all together, until he left without even so much as a goodbye. Then it all went downhill, and you were so hard…” she said in a raspy voice, a single fat tear rolling slowly down her wrinkled cheek.

I nodded in agreement. It
had
been his fault.

At least in part; at least initially.

We’d come back home one evening, and he simply wasn’t there. He’d gone without any explanation or clear warning, leaving us penniless. We’d struggled for years, and my mom eventually sent me away to Saint Vincent’s, an English boarding school. Her brother worked there as the janitor, and called in a few favors for me.

It had been the very start of my redemption, but then everything went wrong. My father popped back up from nowhere, his new wife insisting I stay with them over the summer. The rest was history.

Tragic, bullying history.

“Emilia has nothing to do with anything that happened,” I told my mother again. She shrugged, looking at me with empty eyes before turning to leave.

“I’m going home, Simon. Staying out in the heat isn’t really my thing.”

I grimaced, unsure of what to say. I knew she’d come out to meet the woman I’d been so hung up on, but reality and Robert’s specter had come to slap her in the face once more. I could give her all the gifts in the world, but I couldn’t do anything about the painful hole in our past.

“Mom? Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

“As always, Simon,” she said, slowly making her way down the hill.

I wanted to run after her, to comfort her and tell her that everything would be okay eventually. But time and pain had run their course, and the distance between us seemed impossible to bridge now. I watched as her small figure got even smaller, vanishing entirely when she turned a corner.

It was really high time to make amends.