Break Me: A Stepbrother Romance

C
opyright
© 2015 by Julie Kriss

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S
ix Years Ago

S
ummer

I
wasn’t supposed
to lose my virginity the summer I turned eighteen. I was lonely and shy, a girl who liked to read and study and daydream, and I didn’t meet many guys. So it was unexpected, to say the least. But here I was, lying on the sand in a secluded spot on the shore of Lake Michigan, my head fizzy with the three beers I’d had, my bikini bottoms pulled off, and Bram Riordan between my legs.

I looked up at the hot blue sky. My entire body was on fire with lust. It wasn’t just that this was forbidden, that my parents would kill me if they knew. It wasn’t that I couldn’t believe that Bram—hot, sexy, and at twenty, two years older than me—had even looked my way after a long summer of crushing on him. It was that Bram’s mother had married my dad a year ago, and we weren’t supposed to be doing this at all.

Oh, God.

I barely knew Bram. I mean, not really. I lived with my mom, and though I was close to my dad, I didn’t see him often. My dad had done prison time around the time I was born, and my mom had never forgiven him. She left him when I was little, and she still thought he was a bad influence. Now, my dad had married a woman named Brenda, who was over forty and thin as a coat hanger, and I’d met Bram at the wedding. He had been uncomfortable in his suit, the kind of guy who was obviously more at home in a garage like Dad ran. I’d glimpsed the edge of a tattoo on his neck, crawling out of his collar, and I’d stared at it fascinated when he wasn’t looking, wondering what it was.

He hadn’t even spoken to me, beyond
hi.
There was no reason a guy like that would talk to a girl like me—he was tough and tattooed, his expression dark and jaded, and I was blonde and seventeen. He probably liked bad girls. But I looked at him and wondered what it was that would make a guy like that look at me. What a guy like that would be like.

This year, I’d decided I wanted to see more of my dad. I’d come to see that Dad had turned his life around since his mistakes, that he didn’t live that kind of life anymore, and I wanted to know him better. My mom argued with me, and we had a lot of screaming fights, but I wore her down. In the end, I won an entire summer here in Michigan with him, living in his big rambling old house.

It had been great, getting closer to him. It turned out we were alike. Though he was still married to Brenda, she didn’t seem to be around much. She didn’t like living in the countryside, she said. She went shopping with her friends a lot and did a lot of “girls’ weekends.” That was fine with me, because it left more time with my dad. And then, just after the Fourth of July, Bram had come to stay.

He looked different than he had at the wedding. Older, even tougher, though he was only twenty. He had strong biceps under his t-shirts and narrow hips, and once again I glimpsed the tattoo on his neck. I could see that it was a dragon, and it seemed to go across the backs of his shoulders. I wanted badly to see it, but I was too tongue-tied around Bram to ask.

I’d never had a boyfriend before, and I’d never had sex. I was away from my mother for the first time, living under my dad’s lax supervision, running wild and free in the Michigan backwoods. The first hour Bram was home, when he looked at me in the kitchen and said, “Summer, right? Summer, you want a beer?” I pretty much fell for him. I was ripe, he was gorgeous, and it didn’t take much. I spent the rest of the summer under a crush so hard it was practically painful, watching him come and go to parties—he seemed to be invited to every party within five miles—and roll out of his bed in the bedroom over the garage at two o’clock in the afternoon. Brenda would yell at him, and my dad would give him serious heart to heart talkings-to, but in the end it was always the same. Bram would walk out the door into the summer night to do whatever the hell he wanted.

He ran with a bad crowd, I knew. Brenda and Dad were worried about him. I heard secondhand rumors about bush parties where the cops were called, and kids driving drunk on the back roads, and even a few break-ins in the summer houses along the lake. Bram wasn’t implicated in any of these things, but he was always too close to them for comfort.

He was nice to me—when he noticed me, that was. There were the rare nights that Bram actually stayed home, and we’d sit in the living room watching TV for hours, Bram making a running commentary on the old detective shows we watched until I was crying with laughter. He gave me driving lessons in the church parking lot, letting me tentatively steer his car—despite my begging, my mom had strictly forbidden my getting a driver’s licence, the basis for one of our many arguments—as he leaned over me, patiently teaching me the controls, the spicy smell of his skin in my nose. He gave me a ride home one day when I got caught in a thunderstorm on my way home from a bike ride, putting my bike in the back of his car and lending me his sweatshirt to use as a towel. I’d pretended to be cold and I’d put the sweatshirt on, and then I’d never given it back to him. If he noticed, he never said.

Now summer was almost over. It was one of the hottest weeks we’d had so far, and my dad was taking Brenda on an overnight trip to a B and B in Ann Arbor as a romantic getaway for the two of them. I waved them off that morning, then put on my bikini under my sundress and loaded up a picnic basket with some of the food I found in the fridge.

“What’s up?” came a deep voice behind me. I whirled and saw Bram coming through the side door from the garage. There was a spare bedroom over the garage, and he always used it when he was here. “They gone?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking away. He was wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else, and I could see every ripple, every outline of his chest. His stomach was flat, a thin line of hair arrowing down into his jeans. I shoved my face further into the fridge, waiting for the cool air to fan my cheeks.

Bram was quiet for a long moment as I drew out the action of finding food. I wondered if he was looking at my ass as I bent into the fridge, then decided he probably wasn’t. “You going out?” he finally asked in a quiet voice.

Oh, God. I’d hoped to be gone before he got up so I wouldn’t have to explain myself. He usually slept much later than this. “Just to the lake,” I said to the butter shelf.

“Oh yeah?” he said. “Who’s going?”

I sighed. Better to get this over with. “Just me,” I said, straightening, dumping some bread and cheese into the basket, and closing the fridge. “I’m taking a book and some food and going for a swim.”

He sounded incredulous. “By yourself?”

“Yes, Bram,” I said, my cheeks hot. “Not everyone gets invited everywhere like you do, okay? I don’t. I have no friends, and no one has invited me anywhere, so I invited myself. I’m taking myself to the beach for a swim and a picnic. I’m taking myself on a date. Okay?”

I got up the courage to look at him. I thought he’d be amused, or even laughing, but he was staring at me with an expression that was dead serious and almost worried. “Shit, Summer,” he said. “I didn’t know you wanted to come along. I would have brought you with me. You should have said.”

That just made me more irritated. I didn’t actually want to go along to Bram’s wild bush parties. What I wanted was for him to
want
me to go, which wasn’t the same thing, and there was no way I was going to say that in a million years. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “My dad would have killed you if you brought me anyway. But today he isn’t here, and I’m going to catch the last of the summer.” I dropped a few Diet Cokes into my picnic bag. “See you later.”

“Wait.”

I stopped. I felt like running out of there, like taking my embarrassment and hiding. But the sound of his low, sexy voice always stopped me in my tracks.

“Look, I’ve got nothing to do today,” he said. “Why don’t I come with you?”

What? I stared at him. “Are you kidding?”

He frowned. “No.”

“No way,” I practically shouted. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was angry at him, my entire summer of frustration, of watching him and helplessly wanting something I couldn’t have, boiling over. “God, you’re really something, you know that? You actually think that just because you’re you and I’m me, that I want you to hang out with me out of pity? Forget it.”

“What are you talking about?” He came closer and looked down at me, angry himself now, his eyes dark. “There’s one thing you should learn about me, Summer, and it’s that I never hang out with anyone out of fucking pity. And what does that mean, that I’m me and you’re you?”

I rolled my eyes. “It means that you get to go to all your parties, and have all your little girlfriends drool over you, while I get to stay home and be boring. I’m not an idiot, so don’t pretend it’s any different.”

“I never said you were boring,” Bram shot back. “If you were boring, trust me, I wouldn’t fucking offer.”

I stared up at him, still disbelieving, and trying not to look at the warm, tanned skin of his chest, the dragon tattoo that wound its way down his neck and his shoulder. I’d never seen the full tattoo before. “So you actually want to go swimming and read a book and eat sandwiches? Like actually read? I don’t believe you.”

His eyes narrowed. “You think I don’t read?”

“Sure you do,” I said. I had no idea what had come over me, but I couldn’t stop it now. “Beer cans, vodka bottle labels, condom wrappers. You read plenty.”

He leaned back, and his expression softened. He laughed a little, a low rumble in his chest. “That’s not bad,” he said.

My eyes dropped to the dip of skin between his collarbones, the play of muscles over his shoulders as he put his hands on his hips. My mouth went dry.
Stop it, Summer, he’s your stepbrother, for God’s sake. And after this week you won’t see him again.
I was uncomfortably aware that I was wet between my legs, against my bikini bottom. “I have to go,” I said.

“You didn’t answer me,” he said. “Can I come with you?”

He actually meant it. He wanted to spend the day by the lake with me. I shrugged, my shoulders tight under the straps of my sundress. “If you want.”

Bram smiled, and my heart turned over in my chest. Those high cheekbones, the waves in his dark hair that he wore just a little bit long, those midnight-black eyes—he was deadly when he smiled. “I’ll bring the beer,” he said.

None of which explains how I ended up here, my legs spread, my book forgotten on the sand. He’d brought a six pack of beer, as promised, and he’d driven me here in his car—this secluded spot that was my own little secret, a place I came to when I wanted to be alone. I directed him over the back roads through the woods, and finally we’d had to park the car and walk through the trees, to the spot where they opened up to a patch of sand on the lakeshore. Except for a few pleasure boats far off on the horizon, there was no one around.

We’d gone swimming first. Bram was a powerful swimmer, his body knifing through the water seemingly without any effort. I swam a bit, too, but not as fast as him, and I was busy making sure the water stayed up to my neck so I didn’t expose myself in my bikini. Bram had no such self-consciousness, and I watched him move in fascination. Every once in a while he’d swim over to where he’d left the six pack submerged in the colder water, detach a can for himself and a can for me, and toss me one. I drank them, letting the beer fizz over my tongue.

Eventually he waded into the shallow water, the droplets shimmying off his skin. “Let’s eat,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, still up to my neck. I was hungry. “In a minute.”

He looked back at me, and in a split second he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Summer,” he said, his voice going dark and teasing. “Come here.”

“Sure,” I said, wondering how I could make him turn around. I wasn’t fat, but I wasn’t skinny, and normally I pretty much liked my body. But the thought of him looking at it, comparing it to all the girls who were at his parties, was excruciating.

He waded back into the water toward me, his look dark and intent. I had no idea what to do, and I had no time to think about it, because in one motion he hefted me out of the water and flung me over his shoulder, carrying me toward the beach, screeching.

“Put me down!” I thought I would die of embarrassment.

“Be quiet,” he said, and he slapped my ass through my wet bikini bottom.

My mind went white and blank. Bram had just slapped my ass! Suddenly my blood was on fire. He dropped me on the towel I’d left in the sand, then retrieved the picnic bag as if nothing had happened.

I looked down at myself. I’d put on my two-piece bathing suit this morning when I thought I’d be all alone. Now I felt practically naked. I had curvy hips, a curvy ass, and my boobs were spilling out of the cups of the top. I pulled my knees up to hide my belly and hugged them to my chest, my bare toes digging into the sand.

I watched Bram’s feet come back toward me, sand dusted over the tops of them, the strong muscles in his legs working. He was wearing swim trunks that hit him at mid-thigh, and I could see fine swirls of hair on his legs. I throbbed between my legs again, glad my bikini was already wet so he couldn’t tell.

He paused next to me, and I knew he was looking down at me. I tossed my blond hair back from my face and let it fall down my back. I hugged myself harder, feeling the hot sun on my skin.

“Hey,” Bram said.

“Yeah?” I managed.

“Lie back.”

I jerked and stared up at him. He was looking down at me, and I couldn’t read the expression in his dark eyes. I couldn’t speak.

He dropped the bag of food in the sand, as if he’d forgotten about it. “Lie back,” he said again.

And I did. I let go of my legs and lay back on my towel, letting my shoulders settle back, looking up at him. I put my hands self-consciously over my stomach.

“No,” he said. He came around me and pushed my knees apart, dropping to his knees between them. A crazy shock went through me, mixed with a thrill, but I didn’t pull away. He picked up my hands and pulled them off my stomach, gently pinning them into the sand at my sides. “No covering up.”