Stepbrother HOT! (The Stepbrother Romance Series - Book #3) (2 page)

Bob had no idea what had happened. Mom hadn’t told
him, and apparently Jaxon had kept quiet on the subject as well, so as far as
he was concerned, we were all still a happy family, getting to know each other.
He was laughing, teasing my mom about how many calories were in the mashed
potatoes, joking about turkey comas. “We’re all going to be totally useless after
a meal like this,” he said.
“Just crash out on the couches
watching the Dog Show.”

“Oh, you don’t watch football?” Mom asked. “Weird
how I didn’t know that about you.” Bob laughed.

“I watch football sometimes; but the Westminster
Kennel Club Show is only on Thanksgiving—I can catch a game any time during the
season.” I glanced at Jaxon. He loved sports; suddenly I remembered that the
first time we’d had sex was during a football game. I remembered it all in a
flash that sent a jolt of heat through my body; all at once I remembered the
feeling of his hands on my body, the way he’d looked, the way his cock had felt
thrusting into me. I definitely was not interested in watching another game—not
with Jaxon only feet away from me, not with my mom watching us. Just sitting at
the same table with her made me feel dirty for what I had done.

Whenever Mom wasn’t watching me, she was talking to
Bob, chattering on like usual—but her voice was too high-pitched, she was
talking too fast. Bob apparently didn’t notice the difference; when I wasn’t
full of misery over how I had ruined the whole thing for her, I thought
bitterly to myself that Bob’s complete obviousness was a sign that he totally
wasn’t right for Mom. If he didn’t even know that Mom was acting like a freak,
completely out of her mind and stressed out, how was he ever going to last in a
marriage with her? But that was just because I was bitter enough to want her
relationship to fail, so it wouldn’t be that bad that I’d slept with my
step-brother. If they got divorced in a few months, it wouldn’t even be a big
deal. Maybe I could even start seeing Jaxon again, once things stopped being
weird. If they ever stopped being weird.

Somehow I managed to put food in my mouth, chew it,
and swallow it. Bob tried to get me to talk, and when my mom scowled at me
without him seeing, I felt like I had to; I blathered on, trying to just say
something—anything—without saying what was on the top of my mind. I tried to
pretend
like
everything was just fine, but my heart
was pounding in my chest. I was miserable. I wanted nothing more than to just
go back to my room and hole up there for the next twenty-four hours until Mom
had gotten over the whole mess. Assuming she got over it in that time. “One
good thing,” Bob was saying. “Neither of you have to worry about putting away
leftovers.”

“Oh, we’ll clear the table,” Mom said with a tight
little smile at me. Normally clearing up after Thanksgiving dinner was fun—Mom
put her music on again and we’d dance around, doing the dishes together, taking
our time and getting things done while we fooled around. I knew it wasn’t going
to be anything like that. It was going to be more awkwardness, more strain and
stress. But I would have to deal with it. I’d made the choice to sleep with
Jaxon. I’d overslept and Mom had barged in on my room instead of waiting for me
to tell her to come in—but there would have been nothing for her to walk in on
if I hadn’t decided to sleep with Jaxon.

“You know,” Bob said as we finally finished the last
several bites of our meal; Jaxon was mopping up gravy with one of the
heat-and-eat rolls Mom had made. “Now that we have Thanksgiving out of the way,
I think the next two days of your guys’ holiday should be family days.” I
looked at Mom; this was a terrible, terrible idea.

“Family days?”
Mom asked, a little too brightly, her voice chirpy.

“Yeah!
We’ll all hang out together instead of doing our own thing; really get to know
each other as one, big family.” Mom said she thought it was a great idea, and I
felt my food turning over in my stomach at the thought. Looking across the
table at Jaxon, for a second it was pretty obvious that he felt the same way I
did. He’d managed to spend the entire meal shoveling food into his mouth to
avoid having to talk—I’d wished that I’d been able to do that too, but it would
have been suspicious; not to mention Mom would have gone on and on about my bad
table manners. It was easy to see Jaxon was regretting his second and third
helpings of turkey and cranberries.

“That sounds—great,” I managed to
say,
even as my food threatened to come up the way it had gone down. “Great.
Really!”
I looked at my mom, silently begging her to put the
kibosh on the stupid idea; but I could tell as mad at me as she was, she liked
having me and Jaxon both right out in front of her, where we couldn’t possibly
repeat our mistake of the night before.

After Mom and I cleared the table and put covers on
everything for the household staff to put away and clean, Bob made us all go
into the living room together and turned on the dog show. “We should get some
board games out,” he suggested. I wanted to roll my eyes. Mr. Oblivious was
making everything about this ridiculous situation worse—I almost wanted to
shout at him that I’d fucked his son before I even knew he was going to be my
step-dad and that I’d fucked him again even after I’d known, that the whole
thing was a ridiculous mess and all I wanted to do was go back to the dorms.
But of course I couldn’t do that; it would make what Mom was going through even
worse. I had to play along with the whole “big happy family” premise no matter
how nauseated the idea of Jaxon as my brother made me.

“What have you got?” Mom and Bob dug through the
living room closet and pulled out a bunch of games. I wanted to cry when they
decided on Monopoly—a game that would last forever. But I couldn’t fight it; it
would bring everything out into the open, and Mom had already decided that we
weren’t going to talk about it and that she wasn’t even going to think about
what she had seen. So the Monopoly board was set up and I just let everyone
pick their pieces before me, taking the stupid wheelbarrow token because Jaxon
wanted the dog, Mom wanted the hat, and Bob wanted the race car. It might have
actually been a little bit fun—but Bob had brought the wine from the table with
him and we were all drinking it, pretending to watch the dog show and
pretending to care about the stupid game; who knows—maybe Bob actually did care
about the game.

He kept trying to get us all involved, to get us to
talk about things, and I was getting more and more tired by the moment. “Oh!
Look at that Scottie—it’s just like your piece, Jaxon!” Bob said, pointing at
the TV. We all looked and pretended to be amused at the fact that the Scottie
piece looked like the Scottie on TV.

“If they somehow had a breed that looked like a
wheelbarrow, I’d be really impressed,” I said, trying to do
something—anything—to do my part in holding up the stupid situation Mom had
forced us all into. Bob laughed too hard at my joke, and Mom tried to pretend
like
it was funnier than it was. I glanced at Jaxon; he
didn’t look any more comfortable with the whole ridiculous production than I
was, but of course neither of us could say anything about it. This was our
punishment for being attracted to each other and acting on it. This was what we
had to deal with.

After a while, even Mom must have gotten tired of
pretending to be full of joy at what a happy family we all were; she started to
lose the thread of conversation, to stop holding up her end, focusing on the
game with an intensity that bordered on the insane. She insisted on me buying
every last property I landed on; she badgered Jaxon to pay attention. Bob must
have noticed that something was going down fast—he got more and more desperate
to get a good conversation going.

Eventually, he started talking about Jaxon. “You
know,” he said to my Mom, “I can see you’re really proud of how Mia’s turned
out, and I’m proud of my son too—but I am shocked he’s done this well for
himself. If it weren’t for snowboarding and sports…” Mom raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean? Jaxon seems like a smart boy.”

“Yeah, sure, talk about me like I’m not even here,
same as always,” Jaxon muttered. Bob either didn’t hear him or didn’t care.

“Jaxon went through what they call ‘troubled’ teen
years—his mom gone and all, you know. For a while there I was worried I’d end
up only seeing him a couple times a year on prison visiting days.” Jaxon turned
bright red, and I stopped shaking the die in my hand.

“What?” I looked from Jaxon to Bob.

Jaxon was obviously completely mortified by what his
dad was saying about him, but even as he cleared his throat and muttered
something like, “Dad, do we
have
to do
this?” Bob was plunging into the topic.

“Yeah, Jaxon was kind of a bad kid for a while.
Still, I’m glad he managed to pull out of that downward spiral before I had to
send him to boot camp or something. Snowboarding; who’d have thought?” Jaxon
stood up. His face was bright red and his blue eyes were hard, his hands
clenched in fists.

“Dad.
Can I be excused? I don’t need to be here for you to tell everyone what a
screw-up I am. You can do that just fine by yourself.” Bob looked at Jaxon
like
he had no idea why his son was so angry.

“Yes, you can be excused,” Mom said quickly. Bob
started to frown, started to say something to contradict her, but Mom turned
his attention back onto the game and I watched as Jaxon stormed out of the
room, down the hall, away from the whole situation.

More than anything I wanted to follow him out; I
didn’t want to go with him, but I definitely didn’t want to be stuck in the
living room playing Monopoly with my mom and her new husband. But if I left,
it’d only start a bunch of questions, and Mom looked at me intently—I knew
she’d never let me leave the room, not to go after Jaxon. So I gritted my teeth
and stayed with them playing the stupid game as it got more and more boring,
trying not to fidget and trying to pretend
like
I was
having a great time, until Mom and Bob decided that it was time for them to
head up to their room for the night. I cleared up the board and put it away in
the closet, turned off the TV, and headed back to my room.

I’d left my phone in my room; when I finally got in,
already exhausted, I unplugged it from the charger cable and saw that I had
about a half-dozen text messages—all of them from Jaxon.
Hey. You don’t have your phone, but I wanted to talk to you.
I
scrolled through each one.
I’m sorry I
ran out like that this morning…when your mom showed up all I could think of was
I had to get back to my room before Dad woke up. I know what we did was
probably wrong, but God, Mia. I can’t handle it. We’re supposed to be some
stupid family or something.
God.
You know I still want
you, right?
My heart was beating faster in my chest.
I don’t know what to do about it. What do you want? We can try just
being brother and sister I guess.
The last one read
,
I don’t know what to do. I want you
still.

I stared at my screen for a while, not exactly sure
of what to say. Jaxon wanted me. I couldn’t deny I wanted him. But with the
situation with Mom—I couldn’t ruin this for her. She’d given up so many things
for me, and she was obviously totally in love with Bob. We had to figure it
out. I finally sent him a message.
I know
how you feel. Don’t worry about this morning…if I could have run I would have.
Jaxon sent back a laughing emoji.
I
think…we should just stay away from each other. This whole situation is so
fucked up. Let’s just give each other some space until we figure it out.
It
wasn’t what I really wanted to do—what I really wanted to do, deep down in my
bones, was to go to Jaxon’s room and climb into his bed, instead of spending
the night tossing and turning in my own bed alone. But I could only imagine how
ballistic Mom would go if she went to wake me up in the morning and I wasn’t
even here. After a few moments of agony, Jaxon texted me back.
Okay. I don’t like it but it’s the only
thing we can do, right? See you tomorrow.

I put my phone down and curled up under the covers;
I turned over and found myself on the side of the bed where Jaxon had fallen
asleep—it still smelled like him, just a little bit. I knew I shouldn’t, but I
breathed in the smell of his shampoo and after a few minutes I finally fell
asleep.

Chapter
Three

I tossed and turned a few times in the night, but I
didn’t fully wake up until the next morning, when Mom knocked on my door. I had
been dreaming—of Jaxon. In the dream, we weren’t step-siblings anymore, we were
just people who knew each other; the dream suggested that Mom and Bob had just
decided it wouldn’t work between them, and broke it off without everything
being awful. I ran into Jaxon at school, out on the basketball court; no one
was there but us. “You know,” he said, “Now that you’re not my sister anymore…”
he put his arms around me and then we were kissing, touching each other
everywhere. In real life, I wouldn’t think of a basketball court as the best
place to get down and dirty—anyone might walk up, and there isn’t anywhere
comfortable to go. But in the dream it seemed like the best idea ever. Jaxon
and I were suddenly naked on the surprisingly comfortable floor, and Jaxon’s
hand was between my legs, stroking my labia, pressing in deeper to rub my clit.
I gasped, twisting and writhing underneath him, pushing my hips down to get
better contact. I was getting closer and closer to orgasm every moment, getting
wetter and wetter as he stroked me.