Stepbrother WHOA! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #5) (5 page)

BOOK: Stepbrother WHOA! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #5)
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I was thrilled, I was absolutely full of adrenaline
and giddy with excitement as I stepped off of the podium with my three gold
medals and one silver, my big trophy in my hands, heading back to the team.
Everyone was cheering; we didn’t have any contenders in the other divisions to
worry about or listen for. I ran up to Jaxon, spotting him just apart from the
rest of our group.

I put up with everyone slapping me on the back and
saying that Jaxon and I were carrying the team; all I wanted though was to get
him alone for just a few minutes. “Congrats, Mia,” Jaxon said, his bright eyes full
of warmth and pride. “You nailed every last thing I taught you.”

“You’re a pretty damn good teacher,” I told him,
grinning up. “Come on; let’s go somewhere people aren’t screaming in our ears.”
No one paid us much attention as we wandered away from the group; they were so
busy shouting and cheering for our position as frontrunners in the overall
scheme of the system that they didn’t miss two people out of the team being
away. I knew they’d all head over to the lodge soon enough and probably there’d
be beers and hot chocolate, maybe a team dinner before we hit the road to go
back to campus for the weekend. But there wouldn’t be another golden
opportunity to get Jaxon to myself like there was right now.

“Seriously, Mia, you were great,” Jaxon told me, wrapping
his arms around my waist. I knew we were still technically in the middle of a
public place, but the only people who knew us at the tournament were our team
mates, and as comparatively quiet as it was over by the stands, out of the
areas where the teams and individual competitors were celebrating their wins,
it was easy to forget anyone else was there at all. I stood up on the balls of
my feet and wrapped my arms around Jaxon’s shoulders.

“I’ve been waiting all day for a chance to kiss
you,” I told him. Jaxon laughed and leaned in, closing the last distance
between us. I melted into him, kissing him back hungrily. I could taste the hot
chocolate on his lips still, feel the heat of his body underneath his gear. I
couldn’t wait until we were really, truly alone—in my dorm room or in his room
at the frat house, where we could celebrate our victories together.

But I knew that even with everyone driven distracted
by the victory we’d eked out for the day, they’d miss us soon enough and I
didn’t want to have to deal with the teasing that would come along with them
finding us making out over by the stands. I started to break away slowly; even
if I wanted to go back, Jaxon drew me in, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to
stop kissing him. I was just about to slither free of his arms when I heard my
name.

“Mia! Mia you were great!” I felt as if a bucket of
ice-cold water had been dumped on me when I recognized my mom’s voice calling
my name. An instant later, still wrapped up in the embrace, I heard a gasp. I
broke out of Jaxon’s arms and turned around to see my mom and Bob walking
towards us. They had stopped short in their tracks, and I could see the look of
revolted horror on Bob’s face as he stared at the two of us. For just a second,
I thought to myself that maybe we could play it off. Maybe I was imagining
things. But when I looked at my mom, I could see that she was just as
shocked—though not entirely as revolted—as Bob was, staring at me with her eyes
full of unpleasant surprise.

“Shit,” I muttered, standing there just inches away
from Jaxon and staring at our parents, staring at us. There was no way to hide
what we had just been doing. There was no way at all to deny what had happened.
The thing I had refused to think about for the last week or so had finally come
crashing down and there was no way out of it.

 

Chapter
Seven

For what seemed like an hour we all stood there,
staring at each other in abject horror, and I wondered if time had frozen in
the frigid temperatures. My mind was reeling—what were Jaxon and I going to do?
How were we going to make this okay? What the hell were our parents doing
there? I couldn’t even hear the crowd over the roaring of my blood in my ears
and the pounding of my heart in my chest.

The awards part of the tournament was winding down,
and looking around in my panic I saw that some of the people were starting to
leave the stands, heading to their cars or to the lodges in the area. I knew
that the members of our team would come looking for us at any moment—and sure
enough, even while we were all standing there, none of us speaking, all of us
buried in the most awkward moment of the last couple of months, the team came
by. “Oh, these are our parents,” I said quickly. “They’re…we’ll catch up.” I
caught a sympathetic glance from one of our teammates while they slunk away.

In the next few moments it was like the snow itself
started to melt. Bob’s shocked face became more and more disgusted and I felt
myself starting to shake. I looked at my mom; she wasn’t quite as disgusted as
Bob was, but I could tell as the shock started to fall away that she was far
from happy to have walked up on Jaxon and me making out right out in the open.
It was the worst possible outcome that any of us could have thought of. Bob
looked around and I saw he was making sure that there wasn’t anyone around—it
was at least a big step up from the lodge before.

Bob walked the last few steps separating Jaxon and
me from him and Mom, and I felt my heart beating even faster. “What the hell do
you think you’re doing?” His voice was tight and tense, his eyes full of rage.
He strode right up to Jaxon and I and I could feel the air vibrating with his
anger. Mom walked up in Bob’s wake, looking displeased but less revolted by the
fact that she’d discovered us—still more shocked than angry, though I could
tell that she was not happy.

I looked over at Jaxon. His face was red, his eyes
were narrowed. He was clearly getting more and more upset. Bob started going
off on Jaxon and me, saying things about how disgusting it was. I looked around
feeling more and more panicked. No one seemed to be paying attention to us, but
it was easy to see that Bob was winding himself up for a major tirade. I
swallowed against the tight, dry feeling in my throat and turned my attention
to Mom. “What are you guys even doing here?” Mom tore her attention away from
Bob and looked at me, her eyes still full of worry and shock.

“We came to surprise you,” she said, her voice tight
and more than a little angry. “We wanted to watch the two of you compete—we
thought it would be a good opportunity to get together as a family.”

“So you didn’t even call us this morning? It would
have been just as surprising then.” Mom scowled slightly.

“We were going to tell you after the meet, take you
out to dinner. It was supposed to be fun.” I felt a lurch in my chest—a mixture
of guilt and discomfort. I wanted to be angry at Mom and Bob both, but I could
see things from their perspective. They had thought that Jaxon and I had worked
it out so that we could just be brother and sister—so they hadn’t even
considered the possibility that they’d walk up on us making out.

Bob was still half-yelling at Jaxon, keeping his
voice low enough that at least the people still lingering in the stands nearby
might not hear him. He was berating Jaxon, saying things that were almost as
bad as what they had yelled at each other at the lodge during Thanksgiving
break. I watched as Jaxon got angrier and angrier, his scowl deepening, and his
lips getting tighter. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at Bob, not
breaking eye contact or speaking.

All at once, Jaxon seemed to have enough of it. He
shook his head quickly. “I’m out of here.” He turned on his heel and stormed
away and I was left to Mom and Bob, standing there, as the silence stretched
out awkwardly between the three of us. I swallowed. As bad as it had been to
watch Jaxon being ripped to shreds by his dad, it was somehow way worse to have
my mom and Bob staring at me, silent, looking disgusted.

“So,” I said, gathering up the last shreds of my
courage. “You were going to take us out for dinner?” Mom glanced at Bob, and
then back at me. I wanted more than anything to make things right with my mom.
Even with the way things had improved ever since the disaster that had come up
during Thanksgiving break, we were still not totally okay. There was still that
tension between us.

“We were,” Mom said, her voice still tight. I took a
deep breath.

“Give me a chance to change and get cleaned up and
let’s go.” I didn’t dare propose that Jaxon should come with us, or even that I
would try to find him. In the state of mind that Bob and Jaxon both were
obviously in, them being in a restaurant together was the last possible thing
that would help. I would just do my best to make things okay with our parents
and hopefully the whole situation would blow over in time for Spring Break. It
was obvious that Jaxon and Bob had enough issues as it was; from what he’d told
me when we finally got together, it wouldn’t have mattered one way or another
that Jaxon and I were seeing each other. Bob was determined to find fault with
his son, though I had no idea why.

I hurried to the bus while everyone else on the team
was in the lodge, drinking hot chocolate, coffee, beers, or whatever they felt
like having. Normally, I would have been thrilled to go out to dinner with my
mom after a meet—but I was tense all over. I had no idea where Jaxon was. I
knew the dinner would be tense, but I thought that if I could spend some time
alone with the parents, maybe things could get better. Maybe at least I could
get them to stop thinking about the situation between Jaxon and me. We were
both adults; it was our business, whether they liked it or not.

I grabbed a quick, hot shower and blow-dried my
hair. I wondered what Mom was saying to Bob, where Jaxon was and what he was
doing. I tried to tell myself over and over that it would be okay, that Bob
would calm down and that we’d have a civilized dinner, and then later on we
could discuss the situation like rational people. I got dressed and grabbed a
ride to the restaurant where Mom said they would meet me. At least, I thought, Bob
seemed to have gained enough self-restraint not to try and humiliate people
publicly—he had kept his voice down when we’d been by the stands. Maybe it
wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe Bob would want to talk about anything else but the
situation—maybe Mom would have gotten him to think about something else
already.

 

Chapter
Eight

I had hoped that things would be okay, even if they
were monstrously tense. But even though I still had the situation at the lodge
during Thanksgiving break and the horrific tension of winter break still very
clear in my mind, I was not at all ready for the way that Bob was behaving when
I got to the restaurant to meet him and Mom.

As soon as I sat down, he started in on me, and I
could see from the flush in his face and the glazed look in his eyes that he’d
had more than one cocktail. “It is completely disgusting, what you and Jaxon
are doing. It’s unnatural. You’re freaks!” He turned to my mom. “Your daughter
and my son are freaks.” I blushed bright red and looked around at the tables
close to us; people were trying hard not to listen as Bob’s voice rose over the
chatter and the clink of silverware.

“Why don’t we talk about the competition,” I
suggested, taking a deep breath. “I’ve been working really hard—did you notice
how clean I landed that last aerial? It was awesome.” Mom jumped in, agreeing
with me, asking about my training routines, and in the interests of keeping
things as calm as possible I kept from mentioning Jaxon’s help, talking about
other members of my team. I told them about Lucy spraining her ankle in practice
or about Eric mastering a particularly tricky grab.

Bob came back to the topic of Jaxon and me. “What
the hell are you guys even thinking with that shit?” he asked, his voice just a
little too loud. The restaurant wasn’t exactly bank-breaking, but it was still
not the kind of place that anyone would have chosen to be put on the spot like
that, and I could remember all too vividly the scene Bob had made in the lodge.
I looked at my mom and wondered just what the hell she could possibly see in a
guy like Bob, who would take the opportunity of getting to know his new
stepdaughter better, of mending fences and trying to work through the tension
of the situation and turn it into public humiliation.
Does he do this to her?
I wondered, thinking about Jaxon. If he
could humiliate his own son and yell at him in public, what was to stop him
from being an asshole to my mom?

Mom and I both did everything we could to distract
him and change the subject. We talked about my classes, about the pickup games
I played, about working out and going out and doing things. I avoided
mentioning Jaxon at all, even though he’d been involved in my life at the
campus long before we’d ever even hooked up. We tried everything we could, but
Bob kept coming back around to the subject of how gross, disgusting, revolting,
unnatural it was that Jaxon and I were “hooking up like two animals.” If I had thought
that the little bit of self-awareness he’d had at the mountain was any kind of
sign that he was going to do anything to control his anger, I was totally wrong
about it. Nothing that Mom or I said or did—even when we started throwing out
comments about the food itself in desperation—seemed to make a dent in Bob’s
determination to talk shit about his son, and to drag me through the mud with
Jaxon.

At one point it was so bad that even Mom quietly
told Bob “Darling, don’t you think this is a conversation for a different time?
I mean, this is really public—I think everyone else would like to enjoy their
meals without having all of our dirty laundry on their table.” Bob turned and
scowled at her and lit into me again.

BOOK: Stepbrother WHOA! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #5)
11.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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