Break Me: A Stepbrother Romance (9 page)

I moaned. I was still raw from coming, and the friction was making me orgasm again. “Harder,” I said, pounding back into him on each thrust.

He met me slam for slam, his body arched over mine. I felt the flexing in his arms, his chest, his abs—I could feel every part of him, which only made me hotter. “Yes,” I said as his cock hit me just right, hard, over and over. “Yes—just like that—right there. Right there.
Harder
.”

He bit the side of my neck and slammed me harder. “Hurry the fuck up,” he growled. “I got some come for you.”

My second orgasm hit me and I cried out, my pussy squeezing him hard, my whole body tensing on him. He gave a mindless moan and I felt his cock jerk deep inside me as he came, his body so deep inside mine I didn’t know where he ended and I began.

We were both panting when we finished, both of us still gripping the headboard. Then he put his arms around my waist and gently lifted me up, leaning me back against him. He was still inside me, and I let my head fall back as he ran his hands over my belly, my ribs, my breasts. He squeezed them in his palms, as if feeling their weight. I felt light as a feather, and I closed my eyes, letting the thought come to me as fleeting as a butterfly:
I think I might just love this man.

He leaned down and kissed me on the side of my neck, in the spot he’d bitten, and let his hands drop from my breasts to my waist. “What do you have to eat?” he said. “I’m starving.”

B
ram

S
he put
on a pair of girls’ boxer shorts and a sleeveless top, and she made me a grilled cheese sandwich. I sat at her kitchen table in my boxer briefs and watched her, the way her ass moved in the shorts, the way her blond hair brushed her bare back over the straps of the shirt. A grilled cheese sandwich, for God’s sake. The Bram who sat in lockup, looking at the wall, would have gladly killed someone—would have done it without thinking—to sit in a kitchen and watch Summer make him a grilled cheese sandwich, her skin still glowing from sex. He would have called that the definition of happiness.

I was maybe starting to agree.

I felt better now, there was no doubt about it. Ever since I’d left the police station, I’d felt like I had a tiger on my back, digging its claws into me and snarling. Half an hour in bed with Summer’s legs open, and the tiger had gone away, like magic.

It was the effect she’d intended, I could see that. She’d been giving me what I needed. But she’d gotten plenty, too. Her cheeks were flushed as she looked over her shoulder at me. “What? What are you looking at?”

“You look nice,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, but I could tell she liked the compliment. She handed me my plate. “Here you go.” She watched me eat for a minute, then put her hands on her hips as if she’d thought of something. “How long has it been since you ate a grilled cheese sandwich?”

“Six years,” I said, eating the first half in two bites. Damn, burning off my anger with sex had made me hungry.

She still had her hands on her hips, but her look had gone serious. “Bram, will you tell me about it? About that night?”

The tiger came back and dug his claws into my shoulders. “No.”

“Please? I’m asking.”

I finished the sandwich and sat back in my chair, looking at her. No, I did not fucking want to talk about that night. I never wanted to think about it again.

But she was asking. She’d done something for me tonight. Even though the pleasure was mutual, it had been her idea. She hadn’t listened to the bullshit I’d said to her, trying to push her away. She’d offered what I needed, even when I didn’t know what that was. She’d given a shit.

She still did.

And man, I was really, really fucking tired of carrying the tiger around.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you. But you have to go sit down. Like, over there.”

She looked past my shoulder at the living room. “You want me to sit in the living room? Why?”

“Because it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life,” I said. “And I can’t tell you if I’m looking at you.”

She blinked. I could tell my expression had gone hard, my voice like ice. There was nothing I could do about it. “Okay,” she said, and she walked past me, behind my back, into the living room.

I stared at her nice curtains and forced the words out.
Fuck off, tiger.
“You know I left after that day on the beach,” I said. “It wasn’t because of anything you did. I had to get out of there.”

Her voice came from the living room sofa, a little sad. “I know.”

“No, you probably don’t. That day was—it’s hard to explain. It was really good for me. And I knew that if I stayed in that house, I wouldn’t be able to stay away from you. I’d want to fuck you again and again. And then we’d get caught, and it wouldn’t just be me paying the price, it would be you. And you were just eighteen. So I left.”

Behind me, she was silent.

“I hooked up with some guys who were taking a road trip to South Carolina,” I pressed on. “I didn’t know them very well—I just needed a ride. Turned out they were fucked-up guys, a little scary, even to me. But I thought, what the hell, I just need to get where I’m going. That’s all.”

She was still silent behind me. I focused on the curtains on the window and made myself say the hardest part.

“We got to South Carolina, and they invited me to a party. And then another one. I didn’t know anyone else there—I was just drifting, so I said yes. I got my other tattoo, the dragon on my chest. A few days after that, we were hanging out when one of the guys brought out coke, and everyone started taking it.”

Now she finally spoke. “Cocaine?”

“Yeah. I’d never taken it before—never taken anything that hard. Even so, I think it must have been laced with something, because the effect was crazy. I’ll never know now, because I can barely remember anything. But one of the guys suggested we take the liquor store a few streets away, and we all thought it was a good idea. I was jazzed to do it. We were out of our minds. We held up the place, and the owner fought us. And we ganged up on him, and we took turns kicking him.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Including me, okay? Including me.”

She was quiet for a minute, and then her soft voice said, “Bram.”

“Listen.” I talked over her—I didn’t want to hear the understanding in her voice. “I did it. I own it. We could have killed that guy. I own that, too. No one held me down and forced coke up my nose. I was twenty years old, and I knew what the fuck I was doing. You got that?”

“And you paid for it,” Summer said.

I gave a bitter laugh. “I started paying the second they arrested me. When the coke wore off, it felt like someone had turned my brains inside out. I puked for two hours, bent over the filthy toilet in the holding cell. I had no idea what anyone was saying to me, what my rights were. I didn’t have the money for a lawyer, so they gave me a public defender. He told me my best bet was to plead, so I did. And I paid and paid and paid. For six years.”

I heard her shift on the sofa. I was glad I couldn’t see her, couldn’t tell whether she was terrified or disgusted, whether she was regretting having anything to do with me. “What about the man you hurt?” she asked. “What happened to him?”

“He recovered,” I said. “He had broken bones, but he eventually got better. I wrote him a letter last year, from prison. I told him I was sorry—that he didn’t have to forgive me but I wanted him to know that it was killing me that I did it. That I was paying the price with my life and my soul. That if he wanted revenge, the system was working and he was getting it. That regret was the only thing I had left to feel when I woke up every day.”

She shifted again, and I heard her stand up. “Did he answer you?”

“He did.” It still burned me with shame, how kind he’d been to me. “He told me that he’d decided to be grateful that his life was spared that night, that he’d been given the chance to see his kids grow up. He said that I had to forgive myself, because forgiveness wasn’t something anyone else could give me.”

Summer was quiet. She came softly behind me and put her fingertips on my bare shoulder, stroking them up my neck. “You’re tired, Bram,” she said. “Get some rest.”

I was. Telling her all of that—saying it out loud—had made me feel like I’d done a five-mile run. I pressed my hands into my eyes. “All right.”

I slept at first, exhaustion getting to me. But when I woke up hours later, the tiger was on me again. I woke up Summer by pulling her shorts off and putting my face between her legs again. Only when she came on my tongue was the tiger silent.

T
hat week had
the unreal quality of a dream. Days, I’d go to my work, and she’d go to hers. Evenings, I’d get home and make myself some shitty dinner while prowling around Nate’s empty house, finding things to fix, some way to keep my hands busy. When the blue dusk darkened into charcoal night, I’d go to Summer’s apartment, and we’d begin.

It was always her place. We never said it, but it felt weird to think of doing what we did in Nate’s house, under his roof. We’d long ago left behind the guilt of what we were doing, but what we did that week was between her and me, no one else. Just two people, with everything else stripped away.

Just the sight of her made me crazy—her soft, flawless skin, the way her blond hair rested against her neck. Her expressive, sexy mouth. She got this heavy-lidded, drowsy look of pure lust in her eyes when she looked at me sometimes that I couldn’t get enough of. I wanted to make her look like that all the time—either that, or the rosy, just-fucked look she got after she came. Those were the only two looks I wanted to see on this woman’s face. I didn’t think about the cops saying
That’s what happens when you spend six years inside. You lose.
I didn’t think about the punk kid mayor’s son, who kept showing up at the body shop, putting Nate in a bad mood. I didn’t think about safes or missing money or office managers who hated my guts or Nate pretending he was a gambler with a pocket full of betting slips. I forgot all of those things once I was alone with Summer.

I’d told her once that I wanted to do everything to her, and I did.

I pressed her down to her knees in the shower and had her suck me off as the water ran over us and the steam filled the room. I lowered her onto my cock and held her still, making her say a list of filthy things in my ear before I fucked her and made her come. I tied her wrists to the headboard and explored every inch of her body as she writhed helpless beneath me. I gently rubbed lube into her ass and fucked her there, too, the two of us locked together, panting like two kids in a backseat on prom night. I wanted her body to have no secrets from me. I wanted to claim her everywhere, so that when she inevitably dumped me and found some other guy, he’d find me everywhere he touched her, my smell all over her, like an animal’s.

She took all of it, her skin flushed, her nails digging so hard into my skin they left marks all over me, my name moaning from her lips. After I came in her ass, marking even that part of her as mine, I drew us a bath and washed her gently. She lay back against me, between my legs, and I curled my body around her until the water grew cool.

I tried everything I could to break her, but it turned out that Summer couldn’t be broken.

Instead, she broke me.

She did it every time she touched me. She did it every time she came, no matter what filthy thing I did. She did it every time she hooked her leg over mine possessively in her sleep or laughed at something I said or told me the things about herself that she’d never told anyone else.

She told me her last boyfriend had told her she was dirty and abnormal. He’d guessed she was a slut because she liked sex so much. I couldn’t help it—I laughed. Not at her, but at a guy that would be so stupid as to cut Summer loose for such a dumb reason. “You can’t be fucking serious,” I said. “What was that guy’s IQ? You should feel bad for him, Summer. He’s sitting at home alone beating off right now and making himself feel bad about it.”

She stared at me, her jaw fallen open, and then she punched me in the chest. “Don’t laugh,” she said. “I was hurt. I felt
terrible.
”

I pictured her feeling bad about herself and I wanted to knock the guy’s teeth down his throat, but I said, “Did you believe that shit? That you’re some kind of slut?”

“Of course I did.” She punched me again. It hurt a little—she was pretty strong—but I was willing to take if it made her feel better. “I thought there was something wrong with me. And it’s
your
fault, Bram Riordan.”

“My fault? I never called you anything.”

“Your fault because of that day on the beach.”

I looked at her as she punched me again. I remembered thinking that day that I could show her it could be good. I’d had no idea I’d be stuck in prison while she felt bad over some shitty guy. It was sort of sad, and sort of moving at the same time. She was making up for lost time, if you asked me.

But she didn’t want me to say something soothing. So I said cockily, trying to make her angrier, “I tend to have that effect on chicks. It’s a real problem I have. One taste of my cock, and they’re ruined.”

“God, you’re so full of yourself!” Her cheeks were flushed now, and she hit my chest with her open palm, then my stomach. “I spent six years wondering what the fuck was wrong with me. And now I’ve lost my mind!”

I didn’t care that she was hitting me. She was hitting her past, and her fucked-up ex-boyfriend, and her doubts, and everything that stood in her way. I wanted her to punch those things into oblivion so she could see past them to the other side. So I kept provoking her. “Your problem is you haven’t been laid enough,” I said. “I’ll help you out, but only if you ask nicely.”

“That is
not
my problem!” She was worked up now. I liked to watch Summer lose control, whether it was in sex or in anger. I liked to watch her drop everything, say
fuck it
, let go. “I met nice guys while you were in prison! Guys girls want to marry and have kids with! And I didn’t want any of them!” She hit me again, right in the sternum, and when I made a little
oof
sound she dropped her hands in horror. “And now I’m hitting you,” she said. “Oh, God.”

I grabbed her wrists. We were on the sofa, and I pinned her hands down and pressed her back, fast as lightning, before she could say anything else. “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” I said in her ear. “Don’t you dare.”

She was quiet, her breathing heavy.

“Repeat after me,” I said. “Say, ‘I’m not sorry.’”

She hesitated. “I’m not sorry.”

“Again.”

“I’m not sorry,” she said with more conviction this time. “I’m not.”

“That’s better. I want you to practice saying that everywhere in your life from now on.” I let go of her wrists and drew my finger along her jawline. “As for sex, none of those losers are fucking you now. I am. Only me. How much you like to fuck, and how you want to be fucked, and what makes you come, are nobody’s business but yours and mine.” I leaned in and brushed my lips over hers. “Especially mine.”

She calmed down after that, but I could tell part of her was still riled. She was in the mood to take control that night, so I let her. I did everything she told me to.

“You know,” I said, after she had rolled me onto my back and straddled my face, her hands gripping the headboard until she came, “I’m starting to think you might be dirty.”

“You think so?” Summer asked, crawling down my body like a kid on the monkey bars.