RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)(6)

Nervous, mouse-like Jessica, who was still struggling to speak up in English class and still had to try hard to make eye contact with the lecturer, had fucked a guy I didn’t know. I could repeat it to myself a hundred times and it still wouldn’t seem real. It was too mad, too unlike something I would do. I truly couldn’t—

My train of thought was interrupted by my phone. I hopped up from bed, my arms and legs yelling at me to give them a rest, and found the phone on the table in the corner. I swiped to answer and set it to speaker. “Dad,” I said.

“Jess,” Dad said. He had lived in Texas for twenty-five years, before I was born, but still had his British accent. “How was the party?”

“Great,” I said, cringing at how small the word was compared with what had happened. Great did not include the life-changing thing I had done. Great did not encapsulate the kaleidoscopic range of emotions that were currently causing my feet to tap wildly like my legs wanted to dance but my feet had forgotten how. My hands were opening and closing, too, over and over. My heartbeat seemed to move through my body like something manic. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying desperately to bring myself back to this room. I’m not with him anymore, I had to remind myself. I’m here, not with him. Not in that other hotel room with a muscled, tattooed lion leaning over me.

“Jess?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly. How long had I gone without saying anything, wrapped up in the night, in the unutterable pleasure of it all? I had no idea. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“Oh, okay, good,” Dad said. “Can we meet for breakfast? I have something to tell you.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. In my current state (dangerously closed to a panic attack, I was sure) surprises were the last thing I wanted. “Is it good news?” I asked, trying to keep the pathetic hope from my voice. A mad thought entered my mind. Dad knew. He knew what I had done and he was going to tell me off like I was a kid again and he had caught me shoplifting. My fingernails bit onto my palms. And then I remembered the way they had bit into the lion’s back—“No, I won’t think of that,” I murmured.

“Pardon? I didn’t catch that.”

I cleared my throat. “Good news, I hope?”

There was a pause. Did Dad know how many horrible scenarios I imagined in that pause? How many impossible, ridiculous scenarios? I saw him leaning over me, calling me brutal names he would never call me in real life. But that’s anxiety for you. It amplified even the most innocent situations into something massive and foreboding. And what I had done was far from innocent. With the wolf mask gone, I was just Jess again, and I had to face it.

“Yes,” Dad said, finally. His voice was chirpier than I had heard it in a long time. “Yes, it’s definitely good news. Shall we meet downstairs in half an hour?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said quickly. I wanted him off the phone. I felt sick, and not just from the wine. The horrible part was that I knew I was overreacting. But anxiety didn’t give a whit about knowledge. It was only interesting in how you felt. “I’ll see you then.”

Without waiting for him to reply, I hung up the phone and ran to the bathroom. I leaned over the bowl for around five minutes, but nothing would come out.





Jessica



I left my hotel room feeling weaker than I had in a long time. College days caused some morning weakness, that was for sure (waking at five am with the urge to vomit, covered in sweat, hazy images of the drunken night before swimming through your heavy head, mouth so dry your tongue sticks to your mouth), but this was something else. This was the lion. I couldn’t get rid of him. He clung to my mind. I tried to shake him away—to shake what we did away—but he came back stronger. His muscles were huge and honed and hard in my mind. His cock was even bigger. His hands were skillful. His breath was fire-hot.

I walked down the hallway like an automaton, so focused on my own thoughts that the outside world barely seemed real. It was impossible, for me, to associate this timid woman walking down the hallway and the mad wolf from the night before. This woman was quiet, shy, scared of everything. The wolf was daring and did things that I would never do.

It was a trick of the light, of course it was, but when the elevator opened and the mirrored wall came into view, for a brief flicker of a moment I thought I saw the lion, standing behind me in the hallway. Then I blinked my tired eyes and he was gone. I started slightly, taking a step back, but there was an old couple in the elevator, eyebrows raised, waiting impatiently.

I kept my eyes down as I made my way to the restaurant. Dad was sitting at a table near the window that overlooked Bristol Bay. “It used to be a slave city,” he’d told me, smiling widely. “And tobacco, and—well, everything. Fourth largest city in the Elizabethan era.” Dad, with his farmer accent (which was similar to the Bristol accent) was so proud of knowing its history because he had grown up near here as a boy. Just fifty or so miles to the west, in a town called Weston-Super-Mare which I had never been to. For some reason that came to me when I greeted him that morning. Maybe I was trying to distract myself.

He stood up, his chair making a low screeching noise on the linoleum floor, and walked around the table. His shoes, shining as usual, clopped toward me. “Jess!” he smiled, and threw his arms around me.

“Dad,” I said.