RICHARD (A BAD BOY ROMANCE) (43 page)

Morning was… different.

Neither of us had expected to pass out. I
could tell that much from the way we were still on top of the covers, the
summer breeze licking our dried sweat. I turned over beside Preston, making
sure that what I’d dreamt of had actually been real. There he was, flesh and
blood and muscle beside me. It was strange, but I didn’t know how to feel.

The passion we’d succumbed to last night had
been… intense. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t enjoyed myself. But now, in the
broad light of day, I couldn’t help but feel a creeping sense of shame. I was
waking up in bed next to my naked, spent stepbrother. Who does that?

Swallowing the conflict for now, I sat up and
looked around, trying to find a clock that could tell me the time. I’d have to
settle for Preston’s cell phone instead, but that was easier said than done
when I had no idea where he’d put it.

I crawled over his sleeping form, reached
over the end of the bed, and searched the pants he’d been wearing the night
before. As I looked at the crumpled heap, all I could think about was how he’d
dropped them in the heat of the moment, what it had felt like to endure his
twisting, tantalizing tongue…

I lifted his phone from his pocket. It was
seven a.m. The morning light must have woken us. At least we hadn’t slept the
whole day.

Just as I was raising back up, Preston asked
me, “What are you doing?”

I turned to look at him. He was awake, though
he hadn’t yet moved. He was looking at me strangely, probably in the same way
I’d looked at him when I’d woken up in his arms. Last night had been
incredible, but it had happened under the cover of darkness. Morning was an
entirely different animal, and it seemed neither of us knew precisely what to
do with it.

I decided to try to avoid it for now. “Your
phone,” I told him, holding it up. “I wanted to know what time it was.”

“It’s ringing,” he told me, and I looked at
it. Indeed, since I’d picked it up, his phone had received a call.

It wasn’t making any noise, though, and it
wasn’t vibrating. I looked over at him. “Do you want me to answer it?”

“No,” he said. He sat up, and I watched his
muscles coil under his skin like snakes winding their way through the desert.
“I’ll handle it.”

He moved past me down to the foot of the bed,
retrieving his Bluetooth earpiece and pushing it in. He plucked his phone out
of my hand, but didn’t look at me as he answered the call. “Hello?”

He was quiet for a moment, listening to the
other end. I pulled some of the sheets around me, shielding myself from his
view, though he didn’t even bother to look over. We had a lot to talk about,
that was for sure, but it seemed like neither of us felt like this was the time
or the place. Not while he was on the phone, at least.

“What time?” he said, startling me from my
thoughts. I tried to look at anything but the planes of his muscles as he
added, “Fine. We’ll be there.”

He hung up the call and looked at me, taking
his earpiece out again. “We’re having dinner tonight,” he said.

I frowned at him, watching as he got up off
the bed and walked to the dresser for a pair of underwear. “And why, pray tell,
do you need your personal assistant to come along? Is there a children’s
hospital to tear down?”

“
Maddy
…”

“Or maybe you could turn a city
park into a landfill?”

“
Maddy
!”

“I’m still angry with you
Preston.” I said firmly.

“You can stop now. Lets just say I’m having
second thoughts about the whole homeless shelter deal,” he replied.

“Because I talked you out of it, or are you
saying that because of what happened last night?” I asked, almost wishing he
wouldn’t answer.

Preston didn’t answer, the silence biting as
he was clearly trying to pick his words carefully.

“Well if it’s not some cutthroat business
deal with one of your rotten clients,” I asked, “what are we doing? Who’d want
to have dinner with the both of us?”

Preston slipped his boxer briefs over his
legs, pulling them up and letting the waistband snap around his hips. When he
looked at me, the smile on his face was strained. “Our parents.”

I felt my stomach plummet to my feet. Never
had two words devastated me in the way that these had.

We
were
so fucked.

My father wasn’t the type of guy who’d just
call up his son and his soon-to-be stepdaughter and invite them over for dinner
and drinks. Hell, my father wasn’t the type of guy who did that for anyone but
his favorite clients, and even that was an awfully short list. If he wanted to
see both me and
Maddy
, that meant that something was
wrong, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it had anything to do with what we’d
done last night.

But that was crazy. He’d have no way of
knowing that I slept with her. We’d been completely alone. It wasn’t like he’d
bug my office, or anything. Right?

My father was a resourceful man, but as far
as I knew, I’d given him no cause to feel that drastic measure like that were
necessary. Yet the fact remained: he wanted something from both of us. If that
wasn’t the reason, then what was?

“Maybe it’s my mom,”
Maddy
said. She was still sitting on my bed, though she’d wrapped herself in the
sheets now to cover up. I guessed that in my own way, I was doing the same
thing. We were both distancing ourselves and we knew it, but neither of us
seemed ready to talk about why. “Maybe they want to go over the wedding or
honeymoon plans.”

I felt my insides untwist a little. I nodded
slowly. “That’s possible.” But the wedding was months away. What could they
possibly want to consult us about at this stage?

Whatever it was, I knew there was no avoiding
it.
Maddy
and I would have to show up, which meant
that we were also going to have to discuss what had happened between us last
night.

I looked over at her on my bed. God, she was
beautiful. She had one of the most incredible bodies I’d ever seen. She was
naturally gorgeous, organic in ways I’d not experienced in a woman… well, ever.
All the girls I dated were always plastic Barbie dolls shaped by the most skilled
surgeons on the planet into the ideal image men desired most. They were like
modern art while
Maddy
was a classic. Even the
freckles across the bridge of her nose gave me the shivers.

And yet she was my stepsister, or she would
be soon enough. That meant she ought to be off-limits. We’d already been
playing the part of siblings… or had we? Had I misread both our emotions all
this time? Had my closeness to
Maddy
been fueled not
by familial affection, but by raw, primal, sexual attraction?

I’d never felt this way about a woman before,
so it was hard to tell. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted her,
no matter what. But if our parents got married, that would be impossible, or at
the very least something we’d forever have to hide. What if she wanted a
family? What if I did? Then where would we be? Could I ask her to give up the
future she deserved just to be with me?

I hesitated, rubbing the back of my neck as I
stood before her in nothing but my underwear. “You should get dressed,” I told
her softly. I didn’t want to come off cruel, but for the time being, I wasn’t
sure what else I could say. “We’ve got work to do before we head over there
this evening.”

“Sure,”
Maddy
said,
though her voice sounded chilled and hollow. “I’ll get right on it, Mr.
Harvey.”

It felt like a slap in the face, but at this
point, I wasn’t completely sure that I didn’t deserve it.

The rest of the day passed by in total
silence.
Maddy
busied herself with the tasks that
kept her far away from me, and I hid in my office trying to forget the taste of
my stepsister’s skin, the warmth of her as I sank in, the way she’d gasped and
moaned and writhed beneath my weight. Every time I blinked I saw a flash of the
way I’d slid my dick up to the hilt inside of her, and that only made
distracting myself from those thoughts a more arduous task than it had been
before.

When she’d gone to lunch, I had tried a
little self-soothing meditation, and when that’d failed, I spent half an hour
running hard on the treadmill in the corner of my office. Nothing worked. All I
could think about was her, and that was making it hard to walk around without
making that fact exceptionally obvious in my dress slacks.

By the time we had to leave for our family
dinner, I was struggling to keep from getting hard every time she walked in
front of me. The rhythmic sway of her ass sheathed only in the thin material of
the skirt she’d picked up from her apartment had me completely entranced.

I opened the car door for her. When she swept
under my arm with a soft, “Thanks,” the scent of her perfume antagonized me. I
couldn’t take it anymore.

With a grunt, I grabbed
Maddy
by the arm and turned her, pinning her between my body and the car. I searched
her eyes and found only wanting there. Helplessly I pressed my mouth against
hers, ravaging her with my tongue, drawing her against me by the small of her
back.

Maddy
resisted only a moment. Then she
moaned. She fit so perfectly in my arms, and I never wanted to let her go.

“I can’t do this,” I told her. “I can’t pretend
like last night never happened. I need you, Madison, and not in the way that a
brother needs his sister.”

I pressed my thrumming cock against her
through her skirt. She gasped. I began lifting up the hem, revealing the creamy
white tops of her thighs inch by inch until finally, I caught a glimpse of her
underwear.

I pulled my dick out and nestled it against
her crotch. I felt my balls seize and I snarled in her ear. “I could blow my
load right here,
Maddy
. I could soak these panties
before dinner, and your mother and my father wouldn’t know a thing. You’d spend
the whole night with
my
cum staining your panties.
That’s what you do to me. You make me want to do the nastiest things to you.”

Maddy
shivered and looked up at me
with hooded eyes. “Preston… Jesus, we can’t. What we did last night was wrong.
I wanted it… We wanted it… But you know it can’t happen again.”

I pulled her panties open,
letting the tip of my dick violate the space between them and her sweet,
soaking wet lips. I thrust, overwhelmed by the sensation of being so near to
her, of feeling my bulging head slip around in her honeyed nectar. “It has to,”
I whispered. “Every time I look at
you,
all I want to
do is get inside you again.”

I was so close. But Madison
gently, yet firmly took me by the wrist. I could see lust in her eyes, but
there was something else too. Maybe it was self-restraint, but it sure as hell
looked like regret.

“We can’t,” she repeated, and
this time there was no “maybe” in her tone. I withdrew and she let her fingers
brush mine. “I’m sorry, Preston, but think of what could happen if we got
caught…”

I nodded. As frustrated as I was,
she made sense. But dammit, I didn’t want her to. All I wanted was to throw
caution to the wind and bury myself in my darling little stepsister.

She fixed her skirt as I stuffed
my dick back inside my pants. “Let’s hope there’s wine tonight,” I said as she
slid into her seat. “I think I’m going to need it.”

“You and me both,”
Maddy
agreed as I closed her door.