Risk: A Military Stepbrother Bad Boy Romance (19 page)

“Well, you could do that, or… You could get a college degree, and then come work for me. I could use someone like you. Someone with balls of steel who gets the job done.”

I found myself speechless. I mouthed a few things, unable to say anything.

“I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” I murmured finally.

“You do, kiddo. I’d hate to see a smart operator like you rot in the infantry the rest of his life.”

SARAH

The next few weeks stretched into months, and then everything moved faster and faster and faster.

I was applying to college and I had to write a long addendum about what all had happened—to explain my incomplete grades, to explain why I had missed about six weeks of school, and also why I would be needing all the financial aid they could possibly offer because my family was damn near bankrupt.

Douglas Wong, the FBI agent that Christina had met, managed to find enough incriminating evidence on the USB drive to get both Harry and Oliver arrested and charged with murder, not to mention embezzlement. The case went to trial and it was over practically before it began: they both pleaded guilty, no contest. Harry was given fifteen years for the murder, and another ten for the embezzlement. Oliver got off fairly light—only fifteen years for the same.

I was released from the hospital a week after my suicide attempt. It was tricky, though, because Christina and Maria were in the process of selling the estate to pay down our bills. Harry, to his credit, defended himself in court, and so we didn’t have any legal bills to pay. But, on the flipside, that meant that there would be no money for college.

Dakota, meanwhile, had totally re-invented herself through all of this. Suddenly, she was getting good grades, had stopped hanging out with bad influences, was even working an evening shift at Maria’s restaurant, which was good, since that was about the only income we had.

The day I was released, Damien came to pick me up.

“And what’s your relation to Sarah?” the nurse asked Damien as he filled out the paperwork to get me released. She was fairly young and I could tell she was eyeing his build, his tattoos, the haunted look on his beautiful face and in his dark eyes. “Are you here husband—boyfriend—“

“Brother. Stepbrother. That’s why we have different last names.”

“Oh, of course,” she said, relaxing noticeably. “Well, in that case, would you be interested in…”

But Damien brushed past her, collected me out of bed, and loaded me into a wheel chair.

“I can probably walk…” I scowled as he wheeled me through the parking lot.

“You probably can. But this is your punishment—you have to be babied and pampered for a while.”

“Fine.”

We climbed into his car—he let me do that by myself, though he did shut the door for me—and then, we were off.

“I’m sorry,” I said, finding it hard to look at him, though I forced myself to. “About everything.”

“It’s fine,” he said, his voice quiet, emotionless. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

We rode in silence most of the way back to the house. A big “FOR SALE” sign now graced the front entrance.

“Man, I can’t believe it,” I sighed. “I guess it’s for the best.”

“I guess,” he replied, voice still quiet, still betraying no emotion.

He helped me inside and upstairs. Back in my room, the house somehow felt lighter, like the chains weighing it down had been lifted.

“It’s weird that this won’t be my room much longer,” I commented. “But then again, I would have been going to college at the end of the year anyway, and so it wouldn’t really have been my room after that anyway.”

“Oh, speaking of that,” Damien said suddenly. “I’m going to need you to help me with my college applications. You can consider it pay back.”

My eyes widened.

“What? You’re applying to college? That’s great!”

“Sure, I guess,” he said stiffly.

“Where are you applying?”

“I have no idea.” He paused. “Where are you applying?”

“I’ll show you my list.”

I bit my lip.

“Why? Do you want to go to the same school as me?”

“Maybe. That depends.”

“On what?” I asked.

“On you.”

I pulled him close and kissed him. He kissed me back and we tumbled into my bed.

Later, as we lay, naked, the sun going down over head, my fingers playing and dancing over his chest, I heard him saying the words that I would have thought, a week ago, he’d never say: “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I replied, as I pressed my lips into his. Our hands locked, fingers intertwined, and we fell asleep there—there, on the precipice of a new and uncertain future together…

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Risk
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KAREN

This was where I really belonged. This was better than sex.

“Harriet Jacobs escaped her life of slavery by using the only resources she had as a woman of color in pre-Civil War America…”

My voice rang out over the lecture hall. The students were quiet, for once, their phones down, practically no eyes focused on their computer screens. For once—for one, brief, shining moment, I couldn’t see the pale blue glow of facebook in the reflections on their glasses, couldn’t see their young, otherwise life-filled eyes glaze over.

It was these moments that I live for. It was these moments that made me glad I had become a professor, made all the years of studying, research, and writing worth it.

Yes, this was my career, my calling. It was worth it.

“So, she slept with not one, but two white men? She manipulated them sexually. And she wrote about it. The significant thing about Jacobs is not that she slept with white men to save her children, to save her own life, but that she wrote about it, in her own voice. In her own words.”

The lecture was almost over but no one was moving to leave. And it was one of the last lectures of the semester before Thanksgiving break. All across the university, students were getting antsy, antsy to be leaving, to be going home and seeing high school friends, to be trading stories and gossip, to kiss the boys they had always wanted to kiss in high school, to see favorite dogs and cats back in their childhood bedrooms.

But still, they stayed with me, through to the end.

“White people tried to stop her, tried to silence her. ‘We’ll write the story for you, Harriet,’ they said. Harriet Beecher Stowe—if you remember, she was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which we will not be reading for this course—“ I hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I had already written far too many papers about it. It’s an important book that people should still read, but I wanted my students to like me, not hate me after slogging through six hundred pages of overwritten 19
th
century prose. “—even told Harriet Jacobs, a black woman of her own name, that she wouldn’t help her get published—but she would take Jacobs’s story and incorporate it into her own work.”

Grim chuckles danced through the lecture hall as I reached for a sip of water.

“But Jacobs persevered. She was a survivor, and she was published. So, as you read her book, her ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,’ remember her story and her background—how difficult is was for her to get this story into your hands, now, today, over a hundred and fifty years after it was originally written.”

I paused, allowing those final words to sink in.

“See you all on Monday,” I said with a smile, allowing myself a deep breath as the class collectively exhaled and began to rustle around, began to collect their things and trickle out. I took a seat, sighing. Lecturing always took it out of me.

You see, I’m honestly pretty introverted. That’s what you get, I guess, growing up the daughter of a fierce lawyer. My mother is far more the gung-ho, take charge type. She demanded that I be allowed to skip a grade in grammar school when my standardized tests showed that I was reading at more than three grade levels above where I should have been at. She demanded that I be allowed to take seven AP classes at a time in high school, and that I be allowed to take time off to travel to Europe to compete in violin competitions. She’s always been my biggest booster and maybe, as a result, I haven’t had to advocate much for myself.

But no. I’m a woman in academia. Virtually every one of my colleagues is a man, or a woman nearly fifteen years older than me. I have to advocate for myself, for the very worthiness of my existence, every single day.

“That was incredible,” Masha, one of my graduate students and teaching assistants, murmured to me, leaning over from her desk at the head of the class. “You managed to keep them in their seats for five minutes after the end of class—I didn’t see a single lacrosse players sneak out.”

I allowed myself a grin.

“High praise when even the lacrosse players want to hear what you have to say.”

“I’ll let you know if anything comes up in the discussion section,” Masha said, rising. “Have you heard anything more about the budget for next year?”

I froze. The department budget for next year. God.

What a shit show.

“No. Have you?”

Masha shook her head sadly. “No. Just, you know, rumors. But from other graduate students. Not from anyone… In the know.”

I raised an eyebrow. I was, supposedly, in the know—even if I were only a twenty-nine year old junior professor barely beginning my second year of teaching—and I hadn’t even heard the rumors.

“What kind of rumors?”

“Oh… Nothing… I mean…” Masha sighed. “Rumors that we might be combined with Modern Languages and Literatures. Or that the university might hire a team of consultants to come in and ‘restructure’ us.”

At the sound of the word ‘restructure,’ my heart stopped and my stomach churned. Restructure. I hated the influx of disgusting, corporate terminology into education—education should be about students, about students learning and discovering themselves and great writing, great reservoirs of knowledge. Not about profit margins. Not about… Structures and restructuring.

“I haven’t heard anything like that,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t pay it any mind. This is still one of the largest, one of the best English literature departments in the country, even with the lawsuit. These things happen. The longer you spend in academia, the more you’ll see that this is just a phase.”

A pained smile took hold on Masha’s sweet, young face. She was only twenty-four, which made her only five years younger than me. I was charmed and little frightened that she was able to look at me with such trust and confidence, her eyes wide—literally, wide!—with admiration.

“Karen, you’re totally right. I won’t worry about it. I’ll email you before Monday.”

She gathered her things and glided out of class, leaving me alone with my empty lecture hall.

My name is Karen O’Lowry, PhD. I got my degree a year and a half ago, at Harvard, in American Studies with a focus on American literature. Since graduating, I’ve been teaching here at Silliman University, one of the finest in the country—a rival to Havard in so many ways, and a school that even surpasses my alma mater in others. I’m in the English department, one of the few professors who focus on American women’s literature and, in my personal and very humble opinion, a welcome addition to a world of mostly male academics determined to talk themselves to death about Shakespeare.

The big reason I’m here, the reason I even got the job in the first place, is that my mentor, Anthony Kennedy, another scholar of American literature, was just appointed Chair of the Department. As one of his first orders of business, he began a faculty search, looking for fresh new voices focusing on areas of literature that weren’t old, weren’t traditional, weren’t boring.

He had been a fan of my work ever since I first began going to conferences and doing presentations. When I took harsh criticism from the male scholars I found myself engaging with, he offered me advice, taught me how to outthink them, out-argue them. Everything I have today—my job, my career, the book deal I just signed with Oxford University Press last week, everything—it’s all due to him.

But it could all fall apart, if the university fell apart. If the department fell apart. God. Scandals.

I began to pack up my things. I noticed on my phone that it was almost four-thirty. There was a departmental meeting at five I was scheduled to go to. Maybe I would find out more about the budget, about the bankruptcy. Maybe.

There was also a text message from Tyrone, my ex. A picture of his abs: chiseled, and dark, like chocolate melted over a marble statue sculpted so perfectly by one of the Renaissance Italian greats. I found myself hesitating for a moment.

He did have a great body.

I could just…

No. No, I needed to focus on my own life. On my own interests. On my career. I couldn’t be Tyrone’s babysitter anymore. I wouldn’t stand for his cheating, for his immature bullshit anymore.

“I want u back” the text said. I replied. “It’s still over.”

And then I blocked his number. Boy, that felt good. Almost as good as lecturing.

Almost as good as sex.