Score - A Stepbrother Romance (33 page)

M
om
and I had just spent a relaxing day wandering from store to store at the mall, and we’d ended things by getting coffee at our favorite café.

“Did you get everything you needed?” she asked as she stirred a sugar into her latte.

“Uh-huh. Mom, there’s something important that I need to tell you,” I replied.

“What is it, honey?” she asked, her eyebrows drawing together in a concerned expression.

“Well, I really don’t know how to tell you this, but…”

My voice faltered and my sentence trailed off. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell her that I was in love with my stepbrother. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, not without him here by my side to support me. Dammit, he’d offered to come. I should have agreed.

Mom cocked her head to the side. “Well?” she said. “What is it?”

I had to come up with something, and fast.

“I…err…I’m not going to Caltech,” I finally replied. “I’ve been accepted into Hart-Guildford, and I’ve decided to go there instead and do a writing course.”

She hesitated for a moment, then looked slightly relieved. “Oh, honey. I was worried there for a minute. I thought you were going to tell me you were pregnant or something!”

“So you’re not mad?”

She sighed. “No, of course not. I know I’ve pushed Caltech and engineering on you pretty hard, but I’ve seen how much you enjoy writing when you think no one’s watching. If that’s what you really want to do and you think you can make it work, then I’m happy for you. God knows I’ve made some bad decisions in life...maybe I shouldn’t be giving you advice for yours at all.”

“No, don’t say that,” I said. “You were right to push me to study hard. And if the writing thing doesn’t pan out, I’ll enrol in engineering like we planned. I’m still young.”

She smiled and patted me on the hand. “I’m proud of you. And you’re right. You’ve still got your while life ahead of you.”

Well, that was a relief. That was another thing I’d been worried about telling her, and it had made the perfect cover for the situation I’d found myself in just now. She’d bought that it was the only thing I needed to tell her, and I was safe for now. Or so I hoped.

“Is there anything else you want to talk to me about?” she asked.

Uh-oh. For a split second, I thought she might actually know about me and Drew already.

“Um…no.”

“All right. Just remember, you can talk to me about anything.”

“Mm-hmm.”

I’d wussed out this time, but that didn’t change the fact that the truth was going to come out eventually.

My Mom was still watching me closely with an odd look in her eyes, and she stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

“
S
o you didn’t tell
her.”

Sophie lay in my arms as we lazily reclined in my bed, and I looked down at her ruffled hair.

“No,” she replied. “I chickened out.”

“I think we’ve built it up so much in our heads as some big taboo thing, and that’s what’s making it hard to tell our parents,” I said. “Look, my Dad will be back tonight. Why don’t we sit down with the two of them and tell them together? It’s really not that big of a deal. We aren’t actually related, so they can’t stop us.”

“Yeah. That’s a good idea.”

“I’m honestly surprised they don’t already know. I mean, this house is big and all, but you get pretty loud sometimes.”

“Hey! I do not,” she replied, giggling as I reached a hand down her top.

“Want me to prove it?” I said, squeezing her tits until her nipples stiffened into hard pebbles.

She sighed and squirmed under my touch. “Mmm…please do.”

With one quick movement, I pinned her under me on the bed and leaned down to kiss her, and she gasped with delight before my mouth silenced her. I started tearing her clothes off, my lips never leaving hers. Our tongues warred in a hot embrace, and my hands slid into the waistband of her panties, pulling them down before finding the warm wetness underneath. I slid a finger into her pussy and pumped it in and out, the pad of my thumb applying just the right amount of pressure to her clit.

“Oh god…” she murmured. “Drew…”

It felt so good to hear my name on her lips, and I slid another finger in her, delving deep and refusing to stop until she was bucking her hips up and down, each of her breaths coming fast and shallow. I pulled back for a moment and finally ripped her panties all the way off, tossing them on the floor before leaning over and pressing my lips to her tits and down to her soft belly.

She moaned loudly, her legs shaking uncontrollably as I grabbed her thighs and spread them wide, giving me all the room I needed to slide my tongue over her clit. I didn’t hold anything back. Her scent, her taste…everything about her drove me completely fucking wild. I groaned as I strummed her hard clit with my tongue, and as her legs began to shake even more, I took that as my cue to lick her even harder and faster.

She let out a wild moan, and her legs suddenly clamped tight as she came, trapping me between her thighs. I tried to keep going, but she pushed me away.

“No more,” she gasped. “No more foreplay, Drew.”

She rolled over onto her stomach and then got up on all fours before looking over her shoulder with a wicked expression, inviting me to glide my cock right into her sweet center. I didn’t waste any time, and soon she was rocking back and forth on my cock while I gripped her hips tight, my breath hitching as I watched my dick disappear into her pussy. The fact that I was filling her to the hilt, the fact that her tight pussy was massaging me to perfection as my balls slapped against her thighs…neither of those things were the best part of this. No, the best part was simply being with her again.

She began to squeeze and release her muscles around me, and I groaned as she almost brought me to the brink.

“Oh, fuck,” I muttered.

I pulled out before I exploded everywhere and lay on my back, one eyebrow cocked. She smiled and straddled me, and then she was riding me, slowly and rhythmically, throwing her head back and biting her lip. I lifted my hips, thrusting deeper inside her as she rode me, grinding our bodies together until she began to lose control. Grabbing a handful of her hair, I growled a command.

“Come for me, baby.”

“Mmm…I’m so close,” she moaned, her breath hissing out in short bursts between whimpers.

“Now,” I ordered.

Her muscles squeezed my cock before I even finished the word, and my balls clenched as I let go, filling her up with my hot release as she panted and moaned. She collapsed onto my chest a second later, her face and hair dripping with sweat.

“Did I tell you that I love you?” I murmured into her ear.

“Not yet. But I know.”

“Gonna leave me hanging, woman?” I said, messing up her hair even more.

She leaned back and laughed softly, then affected a more serious gaze. “You know I love you too.”

Those were by far the sweetest words I’d ever heard.

S
ophie had accompanied
her Mom to surprise my Dad at his private airfield upon his return with his favorite cheeseburger and fries combo from a little café down the road from our old house in Redmond. It had always been his favorite spot for takeout meals when I was growing up, and even though he was accustomed to much finer dining now, we all knew he still appreciated the occasional carb and fat blowout.

While they were out, I was hunting through my Dad’s home office for a necklace that used to belong to my mother. I knew he kept it in one of his safes, and he’d always told me that when I found the right girl, I could give it to her. Seeing as Sophie and I were planning on telling our parents about our relationship tonight, I figured I may as well demonstrate to my father just how much I cared about her by giving her the necklace.

If only I knew the damn combos to either one of his safes. There were two of them, side by side behind his dark cherry-wood desk, and I racked my brain. I could have sworn he’d mentioned the codes to me once. Finally I remembered that the code for the left one was a combination of my birthday and my mother’s middle name. I had no idea what the combo for the right one was, but hopefully the necklace would be in the left one.

Shit. As the little door swung open, all I could see was a stack of files, papers and…hang on. What the fuck was this?

On top of all the files were two plastic Ziploc bags. One contained a comb with several strands of hair still in the teeth, and the other contained a half-empty bottle of cologne. It was an old Armani fragrance that they’d discontinued several years ago, and I wondered what the hell was so special about it that Dad had locked it away. As I held the bags in my hand and gazed at the dark strands of hair stuck on the comb, a horrifyingly cold sensation began to crawl up my spine.

Realization.

No. No fucking way. I must have been mistaken. I needed to investigate further before jumping to any wild conclusions.

I carefully put the bags on the floor and grabbed the first file. There were papers detailing the sale of Marie’s land to a small development company called Haynes, and underneath it were more papers detailing the acquisition of Haynes earlier this year. By my Dad’s company, no less.

I pulled out another file. When I opened it, the first thing I saw were petition to divorce papers along with another few sheets of paper with messy handwriting all over them. It looked like a child’s attempt to learn to write each letter of the alphabet, but as I looked closer, I saw that they were practice sheets. My father had been copying someone else’s writing style and attempting to emulate it, and I turned one of the papers over to see that he’d actually gotten really good at it towards the end.

Fuck.

I dug deeper and found an old letter written by Sophie’s father some eight years ago, before he’d disappeared. The handwriting was exactly the same. So my father had been learning to write exactly like him, using the old letter as a guide. It was
him
who’d written all those threatening letters in the last several weeks, going so far as to stick old hair in the envelope and even spray cologne on it to make it as convincing as possible. He’d known Marie kept her ex’s old stuff up in the attic…it wouldn’t have taken him too long to get his hands on it all.

That fucking duplicitous bastard. Sophie’s father hadn’t come back to demand they sell the land at all. He had died in that boating accident. My Dad had been emulating him and pretending he was alive just to terrify Marie and Sophie enough to convince Marie that she had no choice but to sell the land. The land might have only been worth a million or so on its own, but developing it would make my father way more than that. Maybe even a hundred million. He must have been planning this whole scheme for months, and I was willing to bet the chance encounter that got Marie and him together in San Francisco in the first place hadn’t been a coincidence at all. No wonder he’d married her so fucking fast.

I knew my father was capable of some sneaky shit, but this was beyond the pale. He’d literally married a woman just so he could scam her out of her land and make bank on it. He knew Marie would never have sold the land otherwise, so he’d come up with what he obviously thought was an ingenious plan to force her to sell it off. He’d only offered to pay her ex off to make himself look good, and he knew she’d be too proud to accept. When she’d asked him to handle the land sale as he anticipated she would, he’d sold the land to one of his own smaller companies that she wasn’t aware of. He’d even swindled her out of the money she’d made from selling the land by pretending to send it to a secret offshore account to ‘pay off’ her ex, who of course had actually most likely been dead this whole time. Lastly, all he had to do was divorce her, and considering he’d probably made her sign an ironclad pre-nup, she wouldn’t get a cent of the money his company eventually made from developing the land, seeing as she’d signed over all her rights to it when she sold it.

All this for a few more million in the bank.

The worst part was that he didn’t even
need
more money. His company had been increasing its profits by a substantial margin every year since it had started. I seethed, unable to believe my own father was such a fucking prick. He’d gone to so much trouble to deceive Marie, and yet he’d been stupid enough to keep some of the evidence in his own safe at home, where I’d easily found it. That was the main weakness of rich, powerful men like him. They thought they were totally invincible and couldn’t even imagine a world in which they might actually get caught, so they weren’t always careful like you’d assume they would be.

I was still kneeling on the floor in shock when Sophie and Marie walked in.

“There you are! We’ve been looking for you all over. Your Dad’s back. He accidentally spilled his fries all over his lap, so he’s gone to take a quick…wait, what are you doing?”

Sophie gazed at me, uncertainty marring her features as she saw the Ziploc bags next to me.

“Is that…is that my Dad’s cologne?”

Before I could stop her, she kneeled beside me and gazed at all the papers. She came to the same conclusion as me a lot quicker than I had, and she abruptly stood up, a horrified expression on her face.

“None of this was real. He
is
dead. Holy
fuck!
”

She gathered up all the evidence and put it on the desk for her Mom to see, and Marie’s face turned pale as a sheet. I didn’t know what to say, and I simply stood there, my heart hammering in my chest like crazy.

“Did you know about this? Did you know your Dad was only using us to get the land?” Sophie demanded, her eyes flashing as she turned to me.

I didn’t reply for a long moment, unsure of how to respond. I
had
thought that my Dad and Marie’s marriage had been very sudden, and I had suspected a while ago that he might want to get his hands on her land…but I’d had absolutely no idea just how far he would go with the whole thing. Fuck. I should’ve told Sophie of my suspicions weeks ago. Then I wouldn’t be standing here looking so damned guilty right now.

That moment of hesitation was what sealed my fate. There was no way she’d believe that I hadn’t been in on the whole scam now. A totally innocent person would have professed their innocence immediately, rather than standing there looking as guilty as a thief like I was currently doing. They’d literally caught me red-handed with all the evidence, which did nothing to help matters.

The hurt look on her face pierced my soul. “Hurting me is one thing. But my Mom...”

“Wait…” I tried to stop her, but words suddenly failed me. What could I say? ‘
I didn’t know, but I’m sorry my Dad scammed your Mom’
? Yeah, that’d go down well.

Her voice trailed off, and she knew she’d made her point. “Come on,” she said, grabbing her Mom’s hand and throwing an icy glare in my direction. “Let’s go home. Our
real
home.”