Stepbrother Claims (His Twisted Game, Book Four) (3 page)

But he stayed quiet.
 
He didn’t yell or freak out, or do
anything that gave even the slightest indication he was angry or upset.
 

His face went completely blank.
 
His jaw twitched and his eyes burned,
but then the light burned out and his eyes, too, went blank.

And then, after a moment, he turned and
walked out of the police station.

I ran after him, pushing open the door
and spilling out onto the sidewalk.

He
was
already a few paces ahead of me,
his legs so long that each of his strides equaled two of mine.

“Cole!” I called.

I started after him, the crowd swallowing
me up as I went.
 
When I finally
caught up to him, I reached out and touched his back.
 

He turned to look at me.

“What?’ he demanded.

“What?” I repeated.

“Yes,” he said.
 
“What?
 
What
could you possibly say that is going to make the fact that you left my office
in the middle of the day to hang out with Jeffrey after I specifically forbid
you from doing either of those
things,
be okay?
 
Because I’m really interested to hear.”

His voice was laced with heat, his tone
daring me to come up with an excuse that would please him.
 
I imagined this was how he’d gotten to
be so successful, how he’d been able to build his company from the ground
up.
 
I thought about him yelling at
his employees in the boardroom, demanding the impossible from them, what the consequences
would be if they didn’t do what he asked.

I thought about him looking at Kalia like
this, demanding she please him, and bitter envy singed my body.
 
I hated that I was jealous of her,
hated that I didn’t like Cole demanding things of anyone but me.
 
It was completely twisted and fucked
up.
 
And yet, his expectations of me,
as crazy as they were, felt somehow comforting, almost like he believed in me
and thought I could be something more than what I was.

“I’m not your prisoner, Cole,” I said.

“No one said you were.”

“You didn’t have to!
 
You told me I had to stay in the building,
even during lunch.”

“That’s what you agreed to.”

“To be your prisoner?”

“No,” he growled.
 
“To do what I say and live by my
rules.”

“But you won’t answer any of my
questions.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m not okay with
that.”
 
I crossed my arms over my
chest.

“Then you shouldn’t have agreed to it.”

“I didn’t know what I was agreeing to
when I agreed!”
 
I sounded like a
child, but I didn’t care.

Cole closed his eyes and took in a deep
breath through his nose.
  
“Avery,” he said.
 
“Do you
understand what it feels like to be worried about you? The burden it is to keep
you safe every second of every day?”

“I never asked you to do that,” I said.

A woman passing by jostled into me, and I
tottered on the heels I was wearing and stumbled a bit, trying to regain my
footing.
 
Cole reached out and
grabbed me around the waist, his big hands making me feel tiny.
 
He pulled me toward him, his chest
crushing into mine.
 
He smelled
like mint toothpaste and expensive cologne and a laundry detergent that I
recognized as the one I used at home.
 
I breathed in his scent, my body on fire.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded.
 
He’d pulled away from me a tiny bit, but his face was still only
inches from
mine, his lips soft and full
.
 

Kiss
me,
I thought.
 
I want
to taste you.
 
If you kiss me, if
you slide your tongue into my mouth and take me, I’ll do whatever you
want.
 
I promise.

For a moment, I thought he actually
was
going to kiss me.
 
Desire flashed across his face, and I
saw him fighting it, saw him trying to tamp down what he was feeling.
 
I wanted to tell him not to, that I was
feeling it too, that I didn’t care that we were out on the street in front of
everyone, that he should do whatever he wanted to me.

His hand tightened around my waist, his
grip strong, almost as if he was holding on to me as an anchor, waiting for his
urge to pass before it pulled him under.

After a minute, he released me.

He began walking down the street.

“Where are you going?” I asked, once
again trying to keep up with him.

“To my car,” he said.

Sure enough, his car was parked against
the curb a few feet away.
 
He
unlocked the car and opened the passenger side door.

“Get in,” he commanded.

I got in.

A second later, he slid into the driver’s
seat next to me.
 
He started the
car and the engine purred, just loud and smooth enough to drown out the street
noise around us.

We just sat there for a moment, not
saying anything.

Then, finally, his hand moved from the
gearshift and onto my knee.
 
His
touch was unexpected, and I almost gasped out loud as his fingers pushed the
bottom of my dress up just the tiniest fraction, his index finger tracing a
lazy pattern on my skin.

I felt myself instantly start to get wet,
and I thought about how he’d taken me in that closet at the party, shoved his
fingers up inside of me and made me come.

“Do you know what it does to me when you
don’t do as I say?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you know how it feels when I can’t
find you, when I have to worry about you?”

“No.”

“It drives me fucking insane,
Avery.”
 
His fingers inched up
slower, his hand at the top of my thigh now.
 
“It drives me insane thinking about you with him, where I
can’t protect you.”

“You can’t be with me all the time,
Cole.
 
It’s not realistic.”

“I have to try,” he said.
 
“Because the thought of anything
happening to you…” His hand moved higher on my thigh.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Cole,”
I said.

“You’re right,” he said as his fingers
found my panties.
 
I was already
wet, and I only got wetter as he traced the outline of my pussy through the
thin strip of material.
 
“Because
I’m going to do whatever it takes to protect you.
 
Even if you think it’s crazy.”

He grabbed my panties and pushed them
over to the side.
 
The cool
air-conditioned air of the car hit my bare skin.
 
Cole forked his fingers and spread my pussy expertly with
one hand.

His other hand reached up and took my
chin, turned my head until I was looking at him.

“But you have to let me,” he said.
 
“You have to let me keep you
safe.”
 
The pad of his thumb
brushed against my clit, and a soft moan escaped my lips.
 

“You like that, baby?” he breathed into
my ear, his breath hot on my skin.
 
“You like when I touch you there?”

“Yes,” I moaned as he finger went inside
of me just a tiny bit.

“Then you have to do what I say, do you
understand, Avery?”

“Yes.”
 
I leaned back on the seat and closed my eyes, aware of the people
passing on the street.
 
Cole’s car
windows were tinted, but the thought of what he was doing to me when there were
so many people just on the other side of the glass filled me with excitement.

“You should have called me right away,”
he said, his finger pushing further inside of me.
 
He was leaned over the seat, his lips just millimeters from
my skin.
 
“I was going out of my
mind, thinking of all the horrible things that could have happened to you.”

His finger was all the way inside me now,
his thumb still swirling lazily around my clit.
 
My breath came in short gasps as he varied the pressure from
light to heavy and back again.

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it was what
I needed to say if I wanted him to keep touching me the way he was.
 
“I wanted to call you.
 
But my phone was gone.
 
It won’t happen again, Cole.
 
I promise.”

His fingers stopped moving.
 
“What do you mean your phone was gone?”
he demanded.

“It got stolen.”

“I thought your
purse
got stolen.”

“And my phone.”

“Your phone was in your purse?”

I frowned, thinking about it.
 
Had I put my phone back in my purse
after Cole had texted me?
 
Or had I
just turned it off?
 
“I’m not
sure.
 
It might have just been
sitting on the table.”

He pulled away from me, his body language
changing from one of sensuality to one of frustration and anger.
 
He started the car, and then pulled out
onto the street, joining the flow of traffic.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.
 
I yanked my dress back down and
readjusted my panties.
 
A throbbing
need was still humming through my body, like an itch that needed to be
scratched.

“What’s wrong,” Cole said, “is that
Jeffrey Adams stole your phone so that he could try to get information about my
company.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said,
shaking my head.
 
“Why would he
steal my phone to get information about you?”

“Because your phone is hooked up to my
server,” he said.
 
“And now he’s
had access to it.”
 
We were stopped
at a red light now, and he slammed his fist against the steering wheel.
 
“
Dammit
,
Avery,” he said.
 
“You need to
listen to me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the tears
fill my eyes.
 
“But can’t you just
call and have my phone turned off?”

“I’ve already done that,” he said.
 
“But who knows how long they had the
phone before that happened.”

I swallowed, leaning my head back against
the car and taking a deep breath.
 
How could I have been so stupid?
 
Of course Jeffrey would have had some ulterior motive, some gross plan
for how he could take advantage of me.
 
It had been ridiculously naïve to think I could go to lunch with Jeffrey
in order get information about my stepbrother.
 
Cole was right.
 
I should have listened to him.

I thought about the fight those guys had
gotten into, how they were
well-dressed
and eating at
a trendy restaurant.
 
Men like that
would have never gotten into an argument over something as stupid as who was
going to pay for lunch.
 
Most
likely it had all been staged ahead of time, just so they could create chaos
and make off with my phone.

I thought about Jeffrey leaning down,
whispering in the ear of the cabbie.
 
He was probably telling him to take the long way to the police station.
 
Jeffrey knew once Cole found out
my phone was gone
,
he would turn it off
.
 
But he’d made sure he’d had just enough
time to get whatever it was he was looking for.

I’d been stupid.

But still.

It didn’t give Cole the right to treat me
the way he was treating me, giving me the cold shoulder just because I’d made a
mistake.

A few minutes later, Cole pulled up in
front of a large building.
 
All the
buildings in Manhattan were large, but this was a tall skyscraper with mirrored
windows that stretched seemingly endlessly into the sky before tapering off
into a point.

We both got out of the car and I followed
Cole into the lobby of the building.

“Cole Buchanan,” Cole told the security
guard at the front desk.
 
“Here for
Slipp
Studios.”

The security guard didn’t even bother to
check Cole’s ID, didn’t even bother to give either one of us a visitor’s badge.
 
He just immediately let him
through.
 
I realized, once again,
that Cole didn’t live in the same world as everyone else.
 
He got special treatment, special
privileges, because he was rich and famous and gorgeous.