Stepbrother OMG! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #2) (2 page)

“Bob, she only just got here!” Mom laughed. “She
doesn’t even know where the main hall is. Here, let me show her.” Mom took me
by the arm, all smiles and joy as she led me through the living room area where
I’d met my new family. She was talking a mile a minute, telling me how nice
Jaxon had been ever since he’d arrived earlier in the day, how excited she was
to be spending the holiday all together, how much she hoped I’d love Bob and my
new brother. “You know, you used to beg me to get you a brother all the time
when you were little,” Mom said, and I gritted my teeth, smiling as she grinned
at me. “It took me a while, but I got you one, baby girl!” I laughed, forcing
myself to keep up the look of excitement in spite of the fact that everything
Mom was saying was just making everything worse inside of my head. If she knew,
I thought, she’d be horrified.

Mom opened the door to my bedroom and I nearly froze
in place where I stood. “It’s great, isn’t it? I knew you’d love it.” Mom was
saying something to me while we just stood there, but I could barely hear her.
The room was better than great—it was kind of amazing. It was bigger than my
room at home—almost as big as the entire dorm room I shared with three other
girls at school. There was an enormous bed against one wall, covered in thick,
fluffy blankets and huge pillows; I had my own bathroom on the opposite side of
the room, and my bags were in front of an open closet door that extended back
into a wall for an improbable distance. There was a tiny fireplace, a big
flat-screen TV, a desk—every comfort I could imagine.

I finally convinced Mom that I was perfectly fine,
that I just needed some time to myself to decompress after the two-hour drive
and how tired I was. The moment she left I closed and locked the door behind
her. For at least ten minutes I stood there, just staring at the incredibly
luxurious room and trying to figure out just what the hell my life had come to.
I turned on the TV and flipped through the guide until I found something on
ESPN that I could at least pretend to watch without getting completely
distracted,
then
I sank down onto the edge of the bed.
I was exhausted—my nerves
were completely and totally shot
—but
at the same time, I wanted absolutely nothing more than to get back in the car
and drive back to school. Or maybe wander around the incredibly huge house
until I was completely exhausted and passed out.

What I wanted most of all was to somehow be able to
forget the entire terrible day had happened. I stared at the TV, the color and
light dancing across my eyes, the noise of the commentators filling my ears
with meaningless babble. I wished that I could just start completely over. Go
back in time and keep myself from sleeping with Jaxon—or maybe keep my mom from
meeting Jaxon’s dad. My stomach churned and I felt like I wanted to throw up. I
felt like I wanted to punch something. I felt like I wanted to find the nearest
door and just run out into the snow and keep running until I couldn’t see the
house, until I couldn’t see any of it, just totally lose myself in the woods or
somewhere and pretend
like
nothing at all had
happened.

It would have been easier if I could have decided
how I felt about the whole situation. I was horrified—I was angry—I was
confused. Why did Bob and my mom have to meet? Why did Jaxon have to flirt with
me? I couldn’t think of who was to blame for the incredible pile of messy crap
that I was suddenly forced to deal with. I wanted to be mad at everyone, but
every time I turned my mind onto one or another of my family members, I
couldn’t actually come up with any specific reason to be angry with them.

It would have been so easy if I could have just
blamed my mom. If she hadn’t married Bob, this whole situation wouldn’t matter;
Jaxon and I would have just been two people in college who’d had sex, and it
would have been meaningless. But how could I deny my mom happiness? She’d been
unhappy for so long, and really, she had gone to so much stress and trouble for
me, I’d be the worst kind of petty, horrible person if I wanted her to trade in
her happiness just so I wouldn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of having
inadvertently slept with my step-brother. Had he been my step-brother when we’d
slept together? That didn’t seem likely—the wedding was pretty recent, and
Jaxon had been avoiding me for weeks.

The wedding.
I tried to be angry at Mom for getting married so suddenly—to a guy she’d only
been dating for a handful of months—but at least, I thought, she and Bob seemed
to love each other a lot. It may not last, but she was a grown woman, and it
was a done deal. If they got divorced, as much as it would hurt mom, at least
it would make things less uncomfortable with Jaxon and me. But I couldn’t even
wish for that outcome. Mom was happy; I wanted her to stay happy.

I couldn’t be mad at Bob either. I barely knew the
man, but if I could give my mom credit for being a grown woman who knew her
mind at least fairly well, I had to give Bob—who had apparently managed to live
successfully—the credit for being an intelligent guy with his own interests at
heart. He had loved my mom enough to want to marry her. Whether it worked out
or not, I couldn’t go around telling people they couldn’t get married because I
might have slept with their kids. I couldn’t hate either of them for doing what
made them happy when I’d done the same thing; I’d be an enormous hypocrite.

I wanted to be mad at Jaxon. I really did. The way
he had snubbed me, the way he’d deliberately flirted with me and led me on and
then slept with me and shut me out—only for me to find out that he was now my
step-brother—it would be so easy. But I had to admit that if he’d had knowledge
that his dad was dating my mom, and then that they’d gotten married, it only
made sense that Jaxon wouldn’t want anything to do with me after that. I didn’t
want to have anything at all to do with him. I wanted nothing more than to
spend my entire holiday avoiding him. The house was big enough that I was
pretty sure that it wouldn’t be that difficult; and anyway, I had brought my
gear with me, and I had plenty of warm clothes. If nothing else I could hit the
slopes or I could go walking or do anything at all to stay away from Jaxon. The
sight of him—the thought of him—turned my stomach.

I sat in bed, staring at the TV without really
watching it, trying to decide how I was possibly going to get through the whole
ridiculous holiday weekend without being forced to say to my mom, “Hey, so, you
know how you wanted to introduce me to my new step-brother? I already know him.
Biblically.”
It was a complete disaster. There was
absolutely no one I could tell about it, either; as far as I knew, no one in
the frat knew that Jaxon and I had slept together, and I pretty much wanted to keep
it that way. I wasn’t close with my roommates, I didn’t have any other siblings
I could confide in, and I definitely couldn’t tell my mom about it.
Who
do you even talk to about something like
that?
I thought wryly that the school psychologist would probably be a good
start.

I groaned in the darkness. It was hopeless. The only
thing I could do would be to completely and totally avoid Jaxon. He had snubbed
me at school and I had been hurt by it, but it was easy to see now why he had.
I would just do the same thing I’d been doing and pretend that he didn’t exist.
I’d stay away from him and eventually the awkwardness of the situation would go
away on its own and I would be able to stop thinking about how good the sex had
been and how much it sucked that I clearly couldn’t even hope to ever have sex
with him again. Even if Mom and Bob got a divorce, how weird would it be to
have sex with someone who used to be your brother—even if it was only by
marriage?

It wasn’t fair. I was sure that Jaxon probably
didn’t mean anything by the sex, but why would he have even done it if he knew
that we were going to be siblings? I had to assume that Jaxon was just as
weirded out by the situation as I was, so he couldn’t have known anything about
our parents when we’d ended up having sex on the couch. Or maybe he was just
ashamed of the fact that he had knowingly slept with a girl that he knew was
going to be his step-sister. How long before the holiday had our parents gotten
married? And why hadn’t mom told me?

I turned over onto my stomach, staring at the TV.
The harder I tried to forget about what had happened between Jaxon and me the
more it came back to me. It was too easy to remember him taking off my shirt,
pulling my bra away from my body, sucking on my nipples until I was soaking wet
for him, more than ready to take whatever he had to offer. I shivered in a
mixture of disgust and remembered desire as the sensations and the facts came
back to me in flash after flash.
Jaxon finding my clit with
his fingertips, rubbing and stroking me until I gushed on his fingers, hot and
ready and soaking wet.
“Fuck, Mia,
you’re soaking wet. You’re so fucking hot, girl—so hot and wet, fuck.”
I
could hear his voice in my head, barely above a whisper, as if it had happened
only the day before and not weeks.

All I had to do was close my eyes for a second and I
could see him naked—the scattered brown hair on his chest, the muscles rippling
underneath his skin, the deep cuts of his hips, the sight of his hard cock
standing up, proudly erect. If he’d known then that we were going to be
siblings, that
his dad was going to marry my mom…he couldn’t
have known. I couldn’t believe that he’d had any idea that it was going to
happen. But it was almost the very next day when he had started to snub me. It
didn’t make any sense, but it made all the sense in the world.

What in the world was I going to do about it, other
than just avoid him entirely? It was a big house, and there was plenty to do.
As long as I could avoid any stupid “family time” events that Mom cooked up out
of her need for us to all be one big happy family, I thought maybe I could bear
it. It was only a few days, and then I’d be back on the campus and Jaxon and I
could go back to pretending
like
the other one didn’t
exist.

I remembered how angry he’d been when I’d confronted
him about the way he was being such an asshole to me. He’d told me to
completely forget anything had happened, and I’d tried—but I hadn’t succeeded.
Maybe if a little more time passed, I’d be able to do it. I had to hope. I
couldn’t deal with how incredibly awkward it was; especially when it was
difficult not to remember that Jaxon had made me come so hard I’d been willing
to put aside my scruples of wanting to stay single and uncommitted in any way
just to get another chance at him. God, I thought, burying my face in the
blankets. I’d been such an idiot the whole time. But then, Jaxon could at least
have told me what the hell was going on. Maybe he hadn’t known at all; maybe
he’d just brushed me off for reasons of his own and it was just convenient for
him that our parents had gotten married—though it sure as hell didn’t seem any
more convenient for him than it was for me.

I’d just have to make the situation work. I’d do as
much as I could away from the house, keep myself busy and out of Jaxon’s way.
He would probably be just as anxious as I was to avoid being alone together.
That
should, at least, make
it easy. If only our
parents didn’t push too hard.

I had been sitting in the dark with the TV for maybe
an hour when my peace—such as it was—was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Mom, I told you I’m fine, I’m just tired,” I called out. With my luck she had
gotten out a stack of board games and would want me to partner up with Jaxon
against her and Bob at Pictionary or something.

“It’s not your Mom, it’s me.” I groaned as the
familiar voice came through the door.
Jaxon.
What the hell was he doing at my door?
He spends weeks completely avoiding me and
pushing me away and now he comes to my door.
The very last thing I could
have wanted in the entire world.

“Jaxon, go away,” I called out, turning away from
the door.

“I want to talk to you, Mia,” Jaxon called back. I
cringed, realizing that I’d seen about a handful of people in the house other
than Mom, Bob, Jaxon and me. Any one of them could be within earshot. Mom could
be just down the hall. I didn’t know anything about the house. I wanted to tell
him to go to
hell, that
he was the very last person in
the world I wanted to talk to right about then, but it’d be too obvious that we
knew each other already if I said that.

“I’m tired and I feel sick to my stomach. I just
want to sleep,” I called over my shoulder. “Please just leave me alone. It was
a long freaking drive to get here.” I heard a dull thud.

“Mia, I know it’s a long drive, I made that drive
myself.” I sighed, clenching my teeth. Why was he doing this? He had been just
fine with ignoring me. I would not have thought that I would ever be at a point
where I preferred him going out of his way to pretend I didn’t exist—but that
was before. As hurt as I had been, I was more than ready to bring ignoring each
other back into style.

“Jaxon, I don’t feel like talking. I really don’t.”
Another thud at the door.

“Come on, Mia. Just let me in. Open the door.” I
buried my face in the thick, fluffy pillows on my bed and groaned out, lifting
my head and letting it fall into the soft cushions over and over again.

“I am not going to let you in, Jaxon,” I called out.
“Just leave me alone, will you? I’m not going to talk to you tonight. I’m going
to bed.” I could feel Jaxon’s presence lingering outside of my room for a few
more moments and I wondered if he’d go so far as to actually talk to me through
the door—or at least try to. If he did, I’d have to open the door and let him
in just to avoid anyone at all knowing what we were talking
about
.