Read RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) Online
Authors: Mia Carson
RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)
RICH BOY BRIT
(A Billionaire
Romance)
By
Mia Carson
COPYRIGHT © 2016
All Rights Reserved
Jessica
I had decided to go as a wolf. I had always loved wolves, ever since I was a girl, when I had seen them in a nature documentary. My eyes were sharp and sky-blue, my fur snow-white. I felt dangerous. Silly, maybe, but that’s how I felt. I had to lift the mask ever-so-slightly to sip at my glass of red wine. The hall was full of owls and smiling faces and foxes and zebras and fancy, decorated miscellaneous visages and all manner of strange faces. It felt good to be anonymous. Not that I was usually recognized by a lot of people in England, anyway. I
did
live in America. But still, it was good to walk through the room and have nobody recognize me, and not be able to recognize anybody, either.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the lion. On his right hand he had a tattoo that drew my eye again and again. It was of a winged dagger. The dagger stabbed down between the knuckles of his ring and middle finger, and the wings spread from the hilt of the dagger to the sides of his hand. He wore a suit, but it was close-fitting, and showed his muscular body. I wished I wasn’t do shy. All I had to do was walk up to him, say hello, and then . . .
But I wouldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t the walk-up-to-him-and-say-hello kind of girl. A feeling of shame rose in me, reminding me of the thousand times I had wanted to do something but hadn’t, starting with first grade when I had wanted to join the dance club but some girl (I can’t even remember her name) had said my ankles were too fat. I mention this only because that was how I felt now. I was the wolf who wanted to talk to the lion, but my ankles were too fat.
Instead, I walked to the bar and ordered another glass of wine. I was supposed to be meeting some girl named Tiffany. She was the daughter of one of Dad’s old school friends. But she hadn’t turned up, unless she had changed her mask. She was supposed to come as a unicorn, so that I could find her. But I couldn’t see any unicorns in this place.
I sipped my wine, and my head began to feel a little woozy. I half-walked, half-stumbled to the edge of the large ballroom and slumped down in a seat. I closed my eyes, hard, and tried to find a center. After a few minutes, I succeeded. My breath came quick, but I forced it to be slow. Putting the drink aside, I told myself to lay off the wine for the rest of the night. I was drunk enough. I found myself sighing as I watched the masked ball. I wasn’t a part of it. I didn’t feel like a part of it at all. I was just watching. Maybe if Tiffany (whoever she was) was here, I could join in. But alone—
“You look lonely.” The voice was not like Dad’s. Dad was from the southwest, and had an English ‘farmer’s accent’. The voice that spoke now reminded me of James Bond. It was the classic ‘cool English’. Immediately, I thought:
Shaken, not stirred
. I loved James Bond. He was only the coolest. I looked up and saw that the voice was coming from the lion. He adjusted his bow tie. I got the sense that he was smiling down at me, though I couldn’t see his lips. I smiled back up at him through my mask.
He stood there, looking down. My heartbeat picked up, and my hands gripped the arms of my chair like talons. My teeth gnashed together so hard I thought they might shatter.
Get a grip on yourself
, I thought.
Come on, Jess. Stop it
. But I had never been a social genius. I looked at the way other girls swooped into a party and were instantly a hit, a social success, with people milling around them and a comfortable smile upon their lips, and I wondered how the hell they managed it. It was as much as I could do to stop from screaming:
“James!”
I opened my mouth. Thankfully, words came out, even if they were a tad on the shaky side. “Lonely? Maybe.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“Sure.”
He sat beside me, and together we watched the party. The animals and the faces danced around the ballroom. The fox fell backward, her dress around her knees, and laughed madly when her two friends tried to help her up. The lion was so close to me I could feel the heat from his body. It was summer, a warm June evening, the sun slanting through the high-set windows in the ballroom, but compared to the heat that emanated off this anonymous lion, the sun was nothing. I found my breath coming fast again.
“Why are you sitting over here on your own?” the lion asked. “Don’t you have a man to take care of you?”
Almost by accident—I don’t remember doing it—I had picked up my glass of wine. My earlier promise cast aside, I lifted my mask and took a large swig, and another, until the glass was drained. The wine swam in my head, and slowed my heart, and made the situation just a touch less daunting. I turned to the lion, my mask now back in place, and shook my head slowly. “What makes you think I need a man to take care of me?” I asked. It would have sounded sassy coming from someone else, but my voice trembled, as it always did when talking to strangers. Jessica Wright, Socialite Extraordinaire! (Not.)
The lion laughed softly. He jumped to his feet and offered me his hand, the hand with the dagger tattoo on it. This close, I saw that the blade of the dagger was dark red, the hilt light blue, and the wings white fringed with black. Drops of blood dripped from the dagger; no, the entire blade
was
blood. I looked up from the tattoo into his lion’s face, waiting for him to speak.
“Dance with me,” he said. “Dance with me, wolf.”
“Dance, lion?” I answered, rising to my feet as though I were a thousand miles away. I felt distant, like I was watching this happen, like I wasn’t there at all. This was so far away from my usual life that I struggled to reconcile it with the Jess I knew. I thought this was how ordinary people felt when extraordinary things happened to them: disoriented.
My hand quivered when I reached out to take his hand, but if the lion noticed, he didn’t say anything. I placed my hand in his, and he tightened his arm on mine, closing it with the dagger.
“I don’t mind if I do,” I whispered, as he led me to the dance floor.
Jessica
Though the little vicious animal in first grade had dissuaded me from joining dance club, I still knew my way around a dance floor. When Dad’s firm had become more popular, he had been able to pay for private lessons, where no little vicious first-graders could do anything about it. The lion, too, knew what he was doing. They played some fast jazz, and the lion and I both knew the Lindy Hop, where you move like there’s something wicked in your body trying to jump out, and you basically swivel until you can’t swivel any more. The music rose around us, and before I really knew what was going on (the wine still swirling in my mind) a small crowd had gathered around us.
My limbs were aching, and my ribcage was thumping. I leaned into the lion. “What’s going on?” I asked him.
“How drunk are you?” he laughed.
“Pretty drunk!”
“We’re Lindy Hopping and half the hall is watching.”
“Oh.”
It was happening. I could feel my body going through the moves. I could feel the wide grin on my face. But it was so unlike me that I still struggled to believe it. I was not the kind of girl who danced with a crowd around her. I was not the type of girl who was dragged onto the dance floor by a lion and started Lindy Hopping for everybody to see. Again I had that disorienting feeling, like I was watching instead of doing. I saw a muscular lion-masked man in a tuxedo who was very graceful for his height and size, and a slight, wolf-masked woman with shoulder-length sun-colored hair and thin white legs jiving around the dance floor.
That’s me,
I thought.
That woman is me
.
Ha! Yeah right! Jessica Wright doing the Lindy Hop in the middle of a ballroom!
The lion led me to the edge of the dance floor. His chest rose and fell quickly. Mine rose and fell in unison. I leaned forward and put my hands on my knees, breathing heavily, and then looked up when I’d caught my breath. My heart still beat fast, but it was from dancing as well as nerves now. The lion tilted his head at me. I looked up at him, waiting. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I sensed that something was going to happen. There was an atmosphere, like something almost physical. My bare arms goose-bumped as I looked up and down his muscular body, and to his hand. That tattoo got me. I don’t know what it was exactly that attracted me so much about it. Maybe it was because it made him look dangerous. Or because it was so unusual.
“Come for a walk with me,” the lion said. He stepped forward and touched my arm with his fingertips, brushing his hand up and down my skin. The goose bumps grew larger, and a tingling sensation moved over my body. I shivered. The tingling sensation reached down my belly to my pussy, to my clit. He touched my arm, and yet my clit ached. What was this guy, some kind of wizard? He trailed his finger along my skin some more. “Come on,” he said, calmly. “Come with me.”
I would never, ever do that. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Jessica Wright, no, ma’am. Jessica Wright was a good ol’ Texan girl with a heart of gold and a strong sense of right and wrong. She would never wander off into the night with some random lion.
And yet, I did exactly that. The goose bumps grew and grew until their tingly kisses covered my entire body. With shakings hands, I clasped the lion’s dagger-tattooed hand. “Lead the way, then,” I said, a nervous tremor in my voice. I was nervous, sure. This wasn’t like me at all. I didn’t know this man. Anything could happen. My inhibitions were screaming at me to stop. But I was excited, too, precisely for the same reasons. This wasn’t like me, and anything could happen.
It was time, I thought, for good ol’ Texan Jessica to live a little.
Jessica
We didn’t talk, but we both knew where this was leading. Sometimes there is a wordless connection between two people, even strangers. It is something in the hormones, the unseen chemicals that pass between man and woman when they’re horny, and they’re going to fuck. I knew that in my bones. This lion was going to fuck me tonight, and I was going to let him, more than let him. I was going to ride him like he’d never been ridden.
The masks spurred us on. We weren’t people. We were a wolf and a lion. Even when we reached the lobby of the hotel, we didn’t take the masks off. I think we both understood the necessity of them. If we removed them, the magic would disappear. I knew something in this night had changed me—if only temporarily—because when a dozen sets of eyes in the lobby turned to stare at me and the lion, I didn’t blush, I didn’t flinch, I didn’t look down. I just followed him.
He led me to the elevator, pressed the button, and waited. He turned to me as the elevator descended. “I have a room,” he explained.
“Good,” I answered.
He nodded, and I nodded back. We hadn’t kissed. We had only danced. We hadn’t discussed going back up to his room to fuck madly. We hadn’t even hinted at it. And yet we both knew exactly what was about to happen. We knew it like we knew our own names; we knew it like we didn’t know each other’s. I was growing calmer, more unlike myself with each passing second. My heartbeat slowed to a steady rhythm. My hands and legs stopped trembling so much. My mouth was dry, but that was only the wine. I didn’t feel as drunk as before. I felt remarkably clear-headed.
The elevator dinged, and we climbed in.
The mask was magic. Girls at home would call me a slut for this—girls all over the world, probably, would call me a slut for this—and usually that would hold me back. Nobody liked to admit it, but what other people thought could hurt sometimes. I didn’t like to let other people’s opinion hold me back, but it has, and it would again. But tonight the mask covered all of that. I wasn’t Jessica. I was Wolf. And Wolf didn’t care what people though. Wolf didn’t have to look people in the eye. Wolf could do whatever she wanted, including riding Lion.