Dare: A Stepbrother Romance (12 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SOPHIE

It had been six days since I found out the real reason Drew had initially started being nice to me, and the sting hadn’t lessened at all. He’d claimed that everything we’d gone through was real, but how did I know that was true at all? He’d kept the whole car dare thing from me for long enough, and for all I knew, he’d also been keeping tons of other stuff from me. I had no way of truly knowing. The kiss in the forest. The way he’d gotten rid of Dan. The way he’d helped me when my Dad came back into the picture. Was any of that motivated by real feelings for me, or was it all part of his initial plan to get that stupid car?

I should have known not to trust an arrogant man-whore. I should have known not to fall for him.

I’d been avoiding him like the plague, only seeing him at dinner every night, and my Mom had noticed the tension between us. She’d pulled me aside and asked if we’d had a fight, and there was no way I could tell her what really happened. She’d been disappointed in our behavior because she’d been so pleased to see the two of us getting along so well recently, just like old times, and now we were barely speaking. I couldn’t imagine how she’d react if she found out that the only reason we’d been getting along was because we’d been screwing each other’s brains out like bunnies on steroids.

Tonight, Tony had decided to take us all out for dinner to celebrate us having gone three whole weeks without any further contact from my father. At least
that
whole situation had been resolved.

I was on my way out of my room when I bumped into Drew on the stairs. He’d just been working out, judging by his outfit. His skin glistened with sweat, and his chiseled features seemed to mock me with their perfection. Dammit, why did I still find him so attractive? If anything, the anger I felt towards him made me want to rip his clothes off even
more.
I guess the mind can really be a weird thing sometimes.

“Hey,” he said. “We have that dinner thing in a few minutes.”

“I know,” I said, my voice curt.

He hesitated for a second before speaking again. “Right. Well, I need to go and get changed outta this.”

“Yeah, why don’t you go and slip into something more comfortable?” I replied. “Like a coma,” I added under my breath.

He rolled his eyes. “I heard that. Can you just stop with this grouchy shit? I’ve done all I can to explain this to you. I care about you. I always have. I just didn’t realize it for a while. That dare meant nothing. I didn’t even accept the fucking car.”

“Uh-huh.”

I spun around and headed downstairs, and I heard him sigh behind me before going into his room and slamming his door.

When we all arrived at the restaurant half an hour later, Drew was seated directly next to me, and I almost jumped out of my skin when he accidentally dropped his napkin and brushed his hand past my leg to grab it.

“For god’s sake, Sophie, at least try to act normal,” he hissed. I almost laughed. Normal? What in the hell did that even mean? My life was so far removed from normal that the word was barely in my vocabulary. I had a crazy criminal of a father who’d just extorted over a million bucks from my Mom, and I’d spent the last few weeks sleeping with and falling for my stepbrother…hmm, yeah, neither of those things were normal.

The dinner seemed to crawl by, and even Tony seemed to have picked up on the frostiness between me and Drew.

“Is everything okay, kids?” he asked, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re both being very quiet.”

“Uh-huh,” I said with a nod.

“I’m just tired,” Drew said. “Really killed it in the gym today.”

“I suppose you do have to keep yourself looking fit. After all, you did just book that campaign in New York.”

I almost dropped my knife and fork. “What campaign?” I asked, my voice a little more shrill than I’d wanted it to be.

Tony smiled. “Some talent scouts spotted Drew in a club last week. Apparently they liked his style. They’ve booked him for some new sportswear line. For MMA fighters, or something like that. What’s it called, son? Bad Dog?”

“Bad Boy Sportswear,” Drew said.

Wow. When he’d punched Caleb the other night, I thought the scouts would have lost all interest in him for being an immature idiot. But no, apparently he’d been offered a contract instead. The fact that I hadn’t even heard about it made me realize just how far I’d removed myself from his life in the last few days, even though our bedrooms were only feet away from each other.

“I thought you would have told Sophie,” my Mom said with a frown. “Aren’t you leaving tomorrow?”

Drew smiled. “She didn’t ask. And yeah, tomorrow.”

I mustered up the best congratulatory smile I could, but on the inside, I was a mess. I was still so mad at him for everything he’d done, but hearing that he was leaving for New York for god knows how long suddenly made me feel a little ill.

“I don’t feel well,” I said, standing up and pushing my chair in. “Sorry, I think I should go.”

“But honey, we just ordered dessert,” Mom said.

“I know. It’s cool, I’ll catch a cab home.”

She and Tony looked disappointed, but they didn’t stop me, and by the time I was halfway home, I felt even more nauseated. The whole situation with Drew was eating up my insides like a gutful of piranhas. I wished I could just go home to my old house, but seeing as we’d already moved our things to Tony’s place, it made sense to stay there, seeing as it wasn’t all that long until I’d be moving again for college.

I locked myself in my bathroom as soon as I made it upstairs and crouched near the toilet, certain I was going to hurl any second.

“Sophie? Are you in there?”

Drew’s deep voice called out to me from my bedroom, and I mumbled a response.

“Are you okay?” he said. “I was worried, so I came home early too.”

“Mm. I’m fine. Probably just that carpaccio I ate.”

“Well, I’m gonna wait out here for a while. Call out if you want me to come in.”

I wasn’t fine, but I didn’t want his sympathy or help, as comforting as the thought of his big arms wrapped around me was right now. I heard him linger in my room for about twenty more minutes, and then he was gone. When I finally emerged from the cool tiles of the bathroom after what felt like an eternity, I tried lying down for a while, but that didn’t stop the churning in my guts at all. Sighing, I got up and headed over to my desk. If I couldn’t rest, then I might as well have another read through the draft manuscript of the story I’d written about the girl and her stepbrother. It was only a second draft, but when I’d printed it yesterday, I’d thought it had all come together quite nicely.

I hunted around on my desk, and my eyebrows creased in confusion. Strange. I could have sworn I’d left the manuscript sitting right next to the ceramic vase that sat on the left side, but it was gone. After searching through every part of the desk and even on the floor around it and behind it, a horrifying thought occurred to me. Drew had just been in here. He’d been dying to read my writing ever since I told him about it, but I’d been too embarrassed.

The whole time he’d been sitting out here, waiting for me while I was in the bathroom…he could have started reading it. He could have taken it with him when he left. Crap, crap, crap. If he had, I was going to murder him. I was proud of the story, but that didn’t mean I thought it was good enough for other people to read. At the same time, I was cringing with shame. It was obvious that the main characters in the story were based on us, so if he had read it, then he’d know exactly how I felt about him. He’d know everything that I’d been trying to deny to myself.

He’d never said he loved me in the time we were together, and now he probably knew what I’d never told him either – I’d loved him, and goddammit, a huge part of me still did.

Ignoring my nausea, I dashed out of my room and across the hall.

“Drew!”

I hammered on his door, but he didn’t answer. I tried turning the handle of his door to see if he’d locked himself in, and it swung right open. The room was empty. Shit. He’d gone, and he’d taken my story with him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

DREW

Sophie was gonna be pissed as hell when she realized I’d stolen her manuscript.

But hear me out – I had a good reason. When I’d been sitting in her room waiting to see if she’d come out of the bathroom, it had caught my eye. I won’t lie; I’d been wanting to read it for weeks, just to see if she was as talented as I thought she was, and hell…she was more than talented. The first chapter of her book alone was enough to make me see how amazing she was. She had a real gift for stringing words together in the kind of way that sucked a person right in and kept them engaged in the storyline from the word go.

I knew writing was her true passion, not engineering. She’d only enrolled in Caltech because she wanted to please her Mom, and I understood that, but at the same time I thought it was unfair. Sophie was her own person, and the way I saw it, she should be encouraged to chase her own dreams. Now I wanted to help her realize those dreams.

She’d been avoiding me since our fight outside the club the other night, and I couldn’t blame her. Finding out about the stupid dare Caleb and I had come up with had been a real shock for her, and it had called into question every little thing I’d said and done in the last month or so. She had every right to be pissed at me. I’d tried talking to her multiple times since then to try and get her to hear me out, but she wasn’t having a bar of it.

I had a hell of a lot of making up to do, and I knew I had to do something drastic to prove just how much I loved her. I’d never said it to her, and now I was kicking myself for that. Why the hell hadn’t I? I’d damn well felt it.

After snatching the manuscript from her room like a literal thief in the night, I’d called my friend Ana, who had been accepted into the best college writing course in the country. It was at Hart-Guildford University, which was right here in Seattle, and even though college applications had probably been due weeks or months ago, I figured they probably had some sort of late application process. I was right – Ana told me that it was possible to send in a late application. All I had to do was fill out a bunch of paperwork that I could print off at home and stuff it in an envelope along with the manuscript and a check for the exorbitant late fee. See, I knew that Hart-Guildford didn’t require an essay with their applications. All they asked for was an original manuscript along with the requisite forms.

The problem? The cutoff time for late applications was midnight tonight, and it was already after ten.

So now I was speeding down the road to the main campus, praying that I’d make it in time. I’d told Sophie a while back that one day I was going to prove to her just how talented she was, and if I could pull off this application, then maybe she’d believe me. Maybe she’d believe how much I truly cared about her. In the end, even if she never forgave me, at least I’d still be helping her have the option of pursuing a career she was really passionate about.

I parked in one of the main university parking lots when I arrived and then shined the light from my cell phone on the first campus map I came across. The Arts and Literature department was to my right, so I dashed over there as quick as I could. The building was dark, and I cursed as I tried the door to the admin office.

“Shit!”

“Can I help you, son?”

I whirled around to see a middle-aged security guard standing behind me, a torch in one hand and a suspicious look on his face.

“Uh, yeah. I need to drop in my college application. The cutoff is midnight tonight.”

“Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t we?” he said, glancing at his watch.

“Yeah, I’ve been busy,” I said impatiently. “Look, is there somewhere where I can hand this in? If applications don’t close until midnight, then there’s gotta be somewhere I can put it.”

“I think most people who submit applications after hours do it online and pay with a card,” he said. “Why don’t you do that?”

Shit. I only had the print copy of her story.

“Um…this is the only copy of my manuscript that I have. My computer died after I printed it, and I didn’t back it up,” I lied.

He sighed. “That wasn’t very bright of you. And yet you’re applying to college. Well, I do have the keys…I suppose I could go in there and drop it in the office for you.”

“Really? Thanks, man, that’d be great.”

I handed him the envelope with the application, and he glanced at the name on it.

“Your name is Sophie Ramirez?”

“Uh…yeah. My parents are really progressive hippies. They decided to give me a girl’s name to…err…subvert gender stereotypes.”

He narrowed his eyes. I could tell he didn’t believe my ridiculous lie, but he must have figured it wasn’t really part of his job description to care, because he nodded a second later.

“Right. Well, I’ll drop this in there now. Good luck,
Sophie.
Hope you make it in.”

By the time I’d walked back to my car and left the campus, it was already well past midnight. I wanted to go back home and tell Sophie what I’d done for her, but it could wait. She’d probably be asleep by now, and my flight to New York was at five A.M. I needed to get to the airport an hour early to check in, so instead of heading home, I turned around and headed for the airport. My stuff was already in the car, and I wasn’t even tired. I could just hang around an airport café for a few hours before checking in.

I just hoped Sophie wasn’t
too
mad at me when she realized what I’d done.