Dynomite: A Stepbrother Cowboy Romance (18 page)

If I had known what I know now, I would’ve wrapped my arms even tighter around my Dyno. Never let him go.

APRIL

L
uckily, Sequoia had
texted Dyno by the time we reached the house, so Dyno didn’t even come inside. He let his engine idle as he replied to Sequoia. “He’s in the hospital,” Dyno told me. “Bruised ribs, broken arm, possible broken thigh bone, they’re still looking at the x-rays.”

“You’d better go,” I urged. I can’t believe now, looking back on it, how I actually fucking
urged
Dyno to leave me. If he’d stayed, I would have been protected. What good could he do Sequoia in the hospital anyway? He couldn’t ride two up with a guy wearing casts, a guy with broken ribs. A guy like that needed a cage, a car. It would’ve made a lot more sense if
I
had gone to drive him home, but Marcus had told me to come straight home. There was a chance my dad might not find out about any of this mess if I played my cards right.

“Yeah.” Again he gave me that crooked grin. I’ll never fucking forget that, standing out by the front portico while he revved his engine, or “blipped his throttle” as he’d say. “I’ll text you with Sequoia’s status.”

“Please do.” I had to stand closer to him now. Otherwise I’d be yelling loud enough for Marcus to hear. I touched his arm. Too bad he had to put his cowboy shirt back on. “I had a nice time, Dyno.” I felt shy. Actually shy. Like a middle school girl.

He even looked up at me from under his curtain of hair. “I did too. Now y’all get back inside. I’ll wait ’til I see the door close. I don’t want to hear about no fucking Marcus”—he hitched his jaw in the direction of Marcus’s Corvette in the driveway—“bothering the shit out of you. Go direct to your room. No more wine for you. It loosens your inhibitions.”

Okay, now that was
definitely
a joke, and I obeyed him to a T, after telling him to wear his helmet. I made sure I was inside with the door closed, and I even flickered the front light a few times to let him know I was okay. Who knew? I might get lucky. I might even make it to my room without Marcus waylaying me.

But he was waiting in my room. He was standing in the dark by the back slider with a drink in his hand. Just standing in the fucking dark, right? Go figure. Of course I turned on a light right away.

He said, “Good. You got rid of the punk. What do you see in him, anyway? Giant dick?”

I frowned something fierce. Marcus was blood family. As such, he was allowed to be in my room, by all rules of propriety. But as a guy who constantly tried to tit-fuck me, or at least jack off while sucking on my tits, he was definitely a guy who shouldn’t have been in my room. At all. And how did he know Dyno had a giant dick?

I didn’t have much to lose at that point. Either Marcus would tell my dad about our extracurricular activities, or he wouldn’t. I had no control over that. “How do you know Dyno has a giant dick? Watching him shower?” I scoffed. “It’d figure.”

Marcus scoffed back. “Kind of hard
not
to notice, those sweats he wears. Listen. I made you a drink.” He tossed his head to indicate my dresser. Sure enough, some sort of clear drink sat there. He’d even put a lime wedge in it. I could’ve used a drink, so I sipped it. Gin and tonic. Good enough for me.

“Thanks. But if it’s all right with you, I’d like to go straight to bed.” I noticed with a jolt I’d chosen unfortunate words. That gave him an in for all sorts of tacky comments.

Oddly, he didn’t pick up on any of them. “Stay with me. Stay and have a drink. Aren’t you upset about that Sequoia kid? You’ve been friends with him a long time.”

I chugged the drink. “Yes and yes. But he sounds like he’ll be okay. Busted arm, mostly. He won’t be able to ride pickup for a while, at least.”

Marcus eyed my drink as though mentally encouraging me to keep chugging. “Sounds like you kids were hell-bent for a lot of trouble out there at the arena. Your boyfriend got into a hell of a scrape too. Thoracic compression injury, according to his dad.”

My jaw fell open. “His
dad
?” I quickly got it together, though. “Well, of course. It happened on his dad’s property. Of course his dad knows about it.”

Marcus stepped closer to me. I cringed internally. “April, give up the pretense. We all know you were down at the roundup arena. You guys broke in to do whatever games kids these days do”—he loved calling me a kid, though I was almost eighteen. It seemed to make his perversion more complete—“and the shit hit the fan. Lawson was injured, pissing off his friends, who took it out on that Indian kid.”

“Well.” I sneered. “If we aren’t all CSI these days.”

He glowered. “I can put two and two together. I was with Bob Groff along with Ted Willard when the news came through.” Bob Groff was the arena director. “Bob sent a guy over, who found several gates unlocked and some lights still on. Not to mention several booze bottles that definitely weren’t there before. Now fess up.”

Marcus loomed over me by this time. He kept creeping up on me like some pervert from the shadows, backing me into a wall. He took my empty glass from my hand and put it back on my dresser. I had nowhere to run. It only occurred to me now that he’d tricked me into a corner. I know I might sound idiotic, but seriously, that was the moment it occurred to me. He’d been keeping to himself the past several weeks. I thought maybe he was finally over me.

“I ain’t fessing nothing,” I said, lapsing into Dyno’s lingo.

Predictably, a hand came up my ribcage to cup a boob. There was no wearing a bra with that damned bandanna shirt, and the whole thing was completely unfortunate. I gritted my teeth and hoped the boob would be enough for him. Sometimes it was.

“We have evidence.” Marcus lifted the bottom hem of my shirt and tucked it under the neckline, just like Dyno had. Thinking of the two men in the same way made me feel nauseous. That’s when my head started spinning. I had to breathe deeply, gulping large, bracing breaths. Now two hands were on both boobs as he thumbed my nipples. I hated that they got hard. It was just a physiological reaction, and it pissed me off beyond all reason. “You’d be smart to convince me not to tell Cliff about your escapades.”

“Won’t Mr. Willard tell him anyway?” Just as I said that, it didn’t make any sense. Suddenly I couldn’t even remember who Mr. Willard was. Willard, what a strange name. Sounded like a creepy neighbor in a horror film. Then I laughed as I pictured what Willard would look like. He’d have a scar on one deeply sunken cheekbone, and would play the piano. Then I wondered why I was thinking that.

Marcus’s hands on my shoulders were shoving me down the wall. Why not submit? I was tired, so tired, and sitting down sounded good. Why was Marcus saying these silly things? I laughed at some of the absurd things he said.

“That’s right. Good little girl. See this big dick? It might not be as big as your stepbrother’s but it’s pretty damned big. You’re going to suck it. Yes, you are. You want to suck it, don’t you?”

“Suck it.” A ding-dong hung right in my face. Suddenly I was confused between that johnson and Dyno’s dick. Everything was a swirling blur by then. Looking back, that’s when I started to lose consciousness. I mean, on Rohypnol, which is what they figured out later Marcus had given me, your body keeps doing things without your brain realizing it. You sort of become paralyzed. You can lie back and watch events unfold without feeling you’re really participating.

It all makes perfect sense to me—now—that Marcus would roofie me. It fit in with his MO and goals perfectly. I remember a lot of filthy talk, but it was like I was watching a movie. I was detached from it, observing it from what I thought was a safe viewpoint.

“Suck it. That’s right. Ah, you’re a good little girl. You like sucking older men’s dicks, don’t you? Oh, I can tell you do. That’s right. Suck your uncle’s wiener.” I remember that. He actually said “wiener.” “Lick my wiener like a lollipop.” I don’t remember too much about this part, maybe because I don’t want to.

And then suddenly Dyno was in the room. He swept in like a tornado. I looked up and he was punching Marcus in the jaw, like John Wayne in a western. Helpless, I just sat back, crunched in the corner of the wall and floor. From this vantage point the men’s feet looked enormous. Both wore cowboy boots, and they were kicking each other like a kung fu movie. It was clear that Dyno would win, though, so I felt no threat.

“You god damned fucking asslicker!” Dyno yelled. There were certainly lots of colorful words being flung around. “That’s the last fucking time you assault April!”

What a hero
, I remember thinking.

And then I didn’t think much of anything for several hours.

DYNO

I had a
bad feeling as I rode away from April. I didn’t like the fact that Marcus’s stupid Corvette was in the driveway, but Cliff’s truck wasn’t. I’d seen Marcus leer like a creepy clown at April’s tits so blatantly that it was a wonder ol’ Cliff didn’t catch on. Or maybe he did. That made it even worse, that he condoned his brother’s gross activities. April, too, was covering up for her uncle. I couldn’t figure out what Marcus had over them. Must have been financial.

Then my phone buzzed, so I pulled over to read the text. Sequoia told me they’d put a cast on his arm, his leg was okay, and they were keeping him overnight, so not to bother coming. He was going to sleep. So I turned around and went back to the ranch house.

It wasn’t such a giant fucking surprise to find that diddler backing April up to her bedroom wall, his willie in full swing. His noodle was in the general vicinity of April’s mouth and she looked weirdly loopy, especially seeing as how I’d only been gone fifteen, twenty minutes.

I didn’t have to think twice about busting him in the chops. He was a tough old bird, hanging around ranches since the short pants days, but he hadn’t done any cowpoking lately. His version was more like pushing the button on a western slot machine emblazoned with horse cartoons.

Marcus went down like a row of dominos, falling onto April’s bed. I suspected he’d been there many times before, pissing me off even worse. So I grabbed him by his stupid lapels and stood him upright before walloping him again, in the nose this time. Blood spurted in a brilliant arc. It sort of stayed in the air like a red rainbow even after Marcus was down on the bed again.

I was yelling some stuff about him being a kiddy diddler and a pedo when someone else came into the room and got me in a rear choke.

Of course it was Cliff, and he was really strangling me. “Get the fuck off my brother!” he snarled in my ear.

That’s when things got even weirder. Marcus was sprawled on his own niece’s bed with his
tube steak
hanging out, for Christ sake, but
I
was the one in the wrong here? Marcus pointed at me and shrieked, “I caught him assaulting April! I think he put some date rape drug in that drink over there! And I know he’s the one who broke into the arena tonight and caused all that mayhem.”

I was fucking aghast. I mean really, truly in shock. It had never occurred to me that someone could stoop that low. Or that anyone would
believe
such an utter, rancid raft of shit.

But it was me against two guys who were determined to believe in the same fiction they’d invented. I whacked my boot heel into Cliff’s knee and gained a temporary reprieve. He might be my stepfather and employer, but now he was assaulting
me.
Spinning back to face Cliff, I saw my mother standing behind him, her mouth agape, probably at Marcus stuffing his wang back into his jeans. Maybe she hadn’t been in on the whole pervy lowdown on her new brother-in-law. Her shock seemed genuine.

But if there’s one thing about my mom, it’s that she’s easily duped. Hell, Cliff Pleasure tricked her into an affair with him right after his wife was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer. He fucking told her his wife was on death’s doorstep like a
week
after diagnosis. He said she’d been ill for five years and caring for her was taking a toll on him. Like, her death at midnight was imminent, and he’d need consoling to recover from the trauma. To use his own wife’s illness to lure a fresh woman into his lair?
Below
low. I’d never told April because I didn’t want to sound like sour grapes, and she wouldn’t believe me anyway.