Stepbrother Takes (His Twisted Game, Book Five) (4 page)

And besides, I didn’t fit into his
world.
 
I couldn’t take the secrets
and the lies and the covert situations that seemed to permeate his life.
 
He would never be able to let me in the
way I wanted him to, and I would never be strong enough to make him.

The problem was, I wasn’t sure I was
strong enough to stay away from him, either.

“I want to give you what you deserve,” he
said, kissing me softly on the lips.
 
“I know I have a need to control you, Avery, but I can work on it.”

“I want you to control me,” I said.
 
Heat flooded my body at the thought of
him making me strip just a few minutes ago, and I could feel myself getting wet
imagining the darkness in his voice, the decisiveness in his tone.

He shook his head, frustrated.
 
“No.
 
It’s wrong.”

I bit my lip.
 
“Cole,” I said softly.
 
“What… what’s going on with you?
 
Who was that man that was following me?”

“Avery,” he said, his tone warning.
 
I could see his face starting to shut
down, could see his self-protectiveness begin to take over, his wall coming up.

“Please,” I said, running my hand over
his chest and down over his abs.
 
I
let my fingernails graze against him, sliding down until I was touching the
tattoo he had of my initials.

There was a small round scar in the
middle of it that I hadn’t noticed before.

He saw me looking at it and he swallowed
hard before taking my hand in his.
 
He tried to pull it away from his skin, but I held firm, tracing the
scar with my fingertip.

“Cole,” I whispered.
 
“Please, let me in.”

He sighed, and I could see him wrestling
inside of himself, weighing telling me what was going on against his need for self-preservation
and his desire to protect me.

“Jeffrey and I were business partners,”
he said at last.
 
“We started a
technology company together.”

I nodded.
 
I knew this already.
 
But I didn’t say anything, knowing that keeping quiet gave me the best
chance of him telling met the things I wanted to know.

“Jeffrey was in charge of meeting with
the investors, of setting valuations, of raising seed money.
 
It was a lot of networking, and he was
a whiz at numbers.”

“Okay,” I said, my fingers still
intertwined with his while they brushed lazily against the tattoo on his hip.

“But some of the people we took money
from, they’re… they’re not good people Avery.”

“What do you mean?”

“They get their money from illegal
activities.
 
Drugs.
 
Murders.
 
Sex trafficking.”

I swallowed, my pulse pounding.

“When I found out where the money had
come from, I kicked Jeffrey out and gave the money back to that group of
investors. But it was too late – they knew I didn’t approve of what they
were doing, and they wanted to make sure I kept quiet.”

“And now Jeffrey’s working with these
people?
 
Are they trying to hurt
you?”
 
I couldn’t stand the thought
of someone trying to hurt Cole.
 

“I don’t know.
 
I’m not sure if Jeffrey’s working with them, or if he’s
trying to cut a deal with the FBI, to turn me in and save himself.”

I almost laughed out loud.
 
The thought of the FBI being after Cole
was just too absurd.
 
“The
FBI?
 
What are you talking about?”

“Jeffrey could be trying to get
information on me, make it seem like I knew more than I did so he can protect
himself.
 
I think that’s why he
stole your phone.”

“Well, why don’t you just tell on him
first?”

“It’s not that simple.”

He moved my hand away from his tattoo,
and I shivered, even though there was a blanket over us.
 
I couldn’t believe I was lying naked in
bed with my stepbrother.
 
I’d
dreamed about this growing up, all those nights Cole had brought home other
women, all those nights he’d stayed out late night with some girl, and I knew
exactly what it was he was doing.

I wanted to ask him about Lucy Caro,
about what she had to do with all this, about how long they were engaged, about
what she’d meant to him.
 
But I’d
pushed Cole far enough.

“You’re coming back to the city with me,”
Cole said.
 
He rolled over so that
his body was on top of mine.
 
I
loved the feel of his weight on me, strong and solid.

“I want to,” I said.

“Then you are.”

“I don’t know…” I trailed off, an ache
filling my chest.
 
An ache for what
I wanted there to be for us – a real relationship, a normal
situation.
 
But that could never
be.

“Avery,” he whispered, his eyes serious, “I
want to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.”
 

The way he was looking at me, coupled
with the way he’d said my name – full of longing and softness, which
encapsulated the exact emotions that were pulsing through me – made my
resolve start to weaken.

The thought of him leaving me here, of me
being without him… it was too much to bear.

He shifted his weight so that my legs
were forced open, and I could feel his dick, rock hard against my leg.
 
He moved gently, pushing inside of me
slowly, so slowly I could feel every inch of him as he went.

He kissed me, his mouth crushing against
mine, but this time the kiss was softer, gentler.
 
He was still in charge, but the intent was different.
 
This time, he wanted to show me that he
was trying to give me what I wanted – vulnerability and openness.

He continued to move inside of me,
stroking my face and kissing my lips, stopping every so often just to pull back
and gaze into my eyes.
 
With every
stroke, I could feel him slide against my clit, and the sensation was the most
erotic one I’d ever felt.

“I’m going to come,” I whispered.

“Come for me, baby,” he murmured, his
eyes half closed.
 
“Come right on
me, Avery.”
 
My orgasm came a
second later, cresting waves of ecstasy that sent vibrations of pleasure
thrumming through my entire body.

He came, too, again filling me up, not
stopping until I’d taken every last drop of him.

When he was done, he kissed me softly on
my forehead.

“Was that okay?” he asked.

I nodded, loving that he’d decided to be
soft with me like that, when I knew it was against his natural urges.
 

He kissed me again, and then rolled off
of me.

I watched as he sat up and slid his legs
over the side of the bed, his back muscles flexing as he moved.
 
I knew what was coming next, and I
dreaded it.
 
I wanted to stay in
this moment forever.

“We should go,” he said.
 

“Cole,” I said, reaching out and touching
his back.

He turned and looked at me, but I didn’t
know what else to say.

So instead I just nodded, and then
climbed out of bed.

I would get my stuff.

And I would go with him.

Because the truth was, no matter how
wrong it was, I couldn’t stay away from him.
 
And trying to pretend I could was useless.

***

I was in my room getting dressed when I
heard the sirens.
 
They filtered
through my window, from seemingly far way, and at first the sound hardly even
registered.
 
It wasn’t unusual to
hear sirens in my neighborhood, wasn’t strange for the police to be called at
all hours of the night.
 

I slid a long-sleeved t-shirt over my
head, then grabbed some of my clothes and slid them into my old backpack.
 
If I was going back to Cole’s, I should
at least have some clothes that fit.

When I got into the hallway, Cole wasn’t
there, but I could hear those same rustling sounds coming from Gordon’s office.

I walked toward the open door just in
time to see Cole take some papers out of Gordon’s filing cabinet and slip them
into his back pocket.

“You ready?” he asked, not making any
move to hide what he was doing, but not giving me an explanation for it,
either.
 

I thought about asking him what he was
doing, but again, I knew it would be no use.
 
So instead I just nodded.
 
“I’m ready.”

He took my hand and we began walking down
the stairs.
 
He put his finger to
his lips as we skipped the squeaky step near the top.
 
But it didn’t matter.

As we passed through the living room, the
light on the end table in the corner switched on.

Gordon was sitting on the couch wearing
jeans and no shirt, his legs spread out in a casual position.
 
An open beer was sitting on the table
next to him.
 
“Well, well, well,”
he said.
 
“What do we have here?”

“Ignore him,” Cole instructed me, pulling
toward the front door. His hand tightened around mine as we walked, and my
heart thrummed in my chest.

Gordon stood up and stepped in front of
Cole, blocking his path.

“Don’t do this,” Cole said.
 
He didn’t sound threatening –
instead, he was calm and measured, which almost made it scarier.
 
Cole was here to do what he needed to
do, and if that meant going at it with Gordon, he was going to – no
threats needed.

“Don’t do what?’ Gordon asked.
 

“Don’t try to stand in my way.”

Gordon laughed, a loud sick laugh that
permeated the room.
 
From down the
hall, I heard the click of a light switch and saw my mom’s bedroom light come
on.
 
Stay in there,
I pleaded.
 
Please don’t come out here.
 

She was going to pay either way –
if we got out of here, Gordon would take his anger out on her for letting me
come back.
 
And if Gordon somehow
ended up hurting me or Cole, he would still take it out on my mom, blaming her
for pushing him to do something he always swore he didn’t want to do.

The difference was, if she stayed in her
room now, I wouldn’t have to see it.
 
It made me selfish, but if she came out, if I had to see her and look into
her eyes, I might never leave. I understood how fucked up it was, wanting to
stay and protect my mom, a person who’d let me get abused over and over again,
who’d just told me a couple of days ago that I’d pushed my stepfather to do
horrible things to me, that I wasn’t allowed back into my house even though I had
nowhere to go.

But it was what it was.

“Stand in your way of what?” Gordon asked
Cole now.
 
He slid his hands behind
his back and stretched, almost acting nonchalant.

“We’re leaving,” Cole said and we pushed
by Gordon.
 
He let us go no
problem.

But I knew it wasn’t going to be that
easy.
 

Once we were outside, the sirens I heard
earlier got closer, and a second later, a police car pulled into our driveway.

Cole sighed next to me.

“Cole,” I said, wrapping my hand around
his arm.

“It’s okay,” he said.
 
“Everything’s going to be fine.”

“What’s going on here?” the cop
asked.
 
I didn’t recognize him from
around town.
 
He must have been
new.
 
He had a dark crew cut and
his nose was too small for his face.
 
His voice was deep, commanding, and his eyes narrowed at us
suspiciously.

“This man broke into my house.”
 
Gordon’s voice came trailing across the
yard from the porch, and I turned to see him standing there, leaning against
one of the rotting beams.

“Do you live here, son?” the cop asked
Cole.

Cole shook his head.
 
“No.
 
I came to get my stepsister.”

The cop looked at me, his eyes lingering
on the way I was holding onto Cole.
 
I loosened my grip on Cole’s arm.

“You want to leave with your brother,
miss?” the policeman asked me.