Crush

CRUSH

A STEPBROTHER ROMANCE

© 
2015 by Caitlin Daire

**Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual situations which may be objectionable to some readers. Not recommended for anyone under the age of 18.**

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COPYRIGHT

Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarities to events or situations is also coincidental.

© 
2015 Caitlin Daire

All Rights Reserved

Editing: Vivian Beckett

Cover design: Louisa May Armstrong

Cover image licensed by Deposit Photos

CHAPTER ONE

MIA

Someone was watching me.

I slid my sunglasses down my nose a bit and turned to the side, letting my favorite book slide down my lap. I was catching some of the last afternoon rays of sun by the pool at the Beau Rivage resort in Biloxi, where my Dad and I had come to celebrate my imminent return to college. Sophomore year was starting soon, and I was excited to get back to my studies, but for now the pool was a nice, relaxing distraction.

As I turned to the side, I saw that a little blonde girl was standing there staring at me. She couldn’t have been older than five, and a woman who I assumed was her mother noticed and sat up on her sun lounge.

“Sorry,” she said with an apologetic look on her face. “I think she likes your hair. She’s always wanted curls, but hers has always been dead straight. Tahlia, sweetie, it’s rude to stare at people. We’ve talked about this.”

“It’s okay,” I said, flashing her a smile. “Tahlia is a pretty name. And don’t worry, your hair is very pretty too. It’s the same color as Queen Elsa’s from Frozen!”

She gave me a shy smile and looked back at her mother before staring at me again, her blue eyes wide. “I love Elsa.”

I sat up straighter and swung my legs over the side of my sun lounge. “Well, I actually know how to do braids like hers. If it’s okay with your Mommy, I could do your hair like that for you.”

Her Mom gave me a rueful smile. “Please, go ahead. I’ve always been a total klutz when it comes to hair styling. Tahlia, do you want the nice lady to do your hair like Queen Elsa’s?”

Tahlia squealed with excitement and dashed over to me, and I patted the sun lounge. “Okay, sit here and we’ll get started. My name’s Mia, by the way.”

“Okay, Mia,” she said shyly, sitting up straight as I ran my fingers through her soft, corn-silk hair.

As I began to twist strands of her hair into a fishtail braid, I saw her Mom out of the corner of my eye, watching me and her daughter with a look of pure maternal adoration on her face. I felt a sharp pang of envy for the girl, as horrible as that sounded. My own Mom had passed away nine years ago, when I was only ten, and I still remembered the day she died like it was only yesterday.

She’d had breast cancer, and all the treatments she’d received had been too little, too late. Dad and I had gone to see her in the hospital after school one day, and even though the doctors had told us she still had approximately three to four months left, she must have somehow known that her time was much closer. She’d asked to speak to me privately, and every word of that conversation was still etched into my brain.

My mind absently wandered back to that day as I toyed with little Tahlia’s hair.

“Mia!” Mom had said that day, smiling as warmly as she could manage with her painfully cracked lips as I raced into her hospital room. Dad was waiting outside on a chair, his head in his hands.

She was so frail; a shadow of her former self. She was short, but her curves had always well and truly made up for her diminutive stature. Those curves were gone now, replaced by skin stretched across bone, and her once cinnamon-colored skin was almost as pale as a sheet. She was still beautiful to me.

Her eyebrows, lashes and previously thick head of hair were mostly gone, destroyed by invasive chemotherapy and radiation treatments in an attempt to stop the ravages of her disease. It hadn’t worked. It was so unfair. She was my Mom, and she was too young to be this sick. Despite that, my ten year old mind still hadn’t understood where she was really headed. I had so much childish faith in all the grown-up doctors here at the hospital, and I assumed they’d be able to make her all better one day. There had to be
something
they could do; something they hadn’t tried yet.

I perched up on the bed next to her, and she took my hand and squeezed it gently in hers.

“Mia, there’s a few things I wanted to talk to you about. Just between us girls. There’s some stuff your Dad might not really understand how to talk to you about, because he’s a man, and I want to tell you all of it now before it’s too late.”

“But Mommy, you’ll come home soon. The doctors will find more medicine for you that works.”

She ruffled my hair and sighed. “Well, let’s hope so, darling. But just in case, I think we should have this talk.”

At the time, I’d thought she was going to give me some sort of goodbye speech, but instead she’d launched into a conversation featuring all sorts of girly survival tips.

“One day, you might have an urge to play around with your eyebrows. Don’t make the same mistake I did when I was thirteen and try to do it yourself. If you ever want to do anything with them, call your Aunt Colleen and ask her to make an appointment for you at Maxie’s Salon. They do the best damn eyebrow shaping in town.”

I watched her speak, my eyes wide. She didn’t sound emotional at all. Instead, she was speaking in a practical, no-nonsense tone, as if she were simply giving me a cooking lesson or teaching me to play the piano like she’d done when I was seven.

“I know you haven’t started your period yet, but you will in the next few years,” she continued. “Don’t be alarmed if it isn’t regular at first. Mine wasn’t for years. You might get cramps, and if you do, a hot water bottle and some Advil goes a long way. You might get a few pimples around that time, and a dab of tea tree oil will help clear them right up. If all else fails, just remember that chocolate always helps everything.”

She winked, and I nodded for her to go on. Some of my older friends at school had already started having their periods. I’d always thought it was gross to talk about that kind of stuff, especially with my Mom, but for some reason it seemed totally normal now.

“Oh, and speaking of your period,” she went on. “One day you might find yourself caught out without any tampons or pads. Don’t worry – just find another woman and ask if she has a spare. No woman in the world would say no. It’s part of our secret girl code that men don’t know about.”

For the next half hour, she continued to give me more life tips on all sorts of subjects pertaining to womanhood, and finally she sighed and squeezed my hand tighter.

“Now, onto the subject of boys,” she said with another wink.

I wrinkled my nose. “Mommy! I don’t like boys. They’re gross. They have germs!”

She laughed. “Yes, they do. But believe me, one day you might start to notice boys and like them despite all their germs. When that happens, there’s something I want you to know. Have you ever heard the saying, ‘you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince’?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh. I heard it on a movie.”

“Well, it doesn’t mean that you literally have to kiss frogs. You don’t even have to literally kiss a bunch of boys. What it means is that you’ll find there are quite a lot of boys who don’t know how to treat a girl properly, and you might meet a few of them before finding the right one who treats you properly. So you have to be careful to recognize the bad ones and ignore them.”

I nodded again, and she smiled. “When you’re old enough, I want you to end up with someone who understands you. Someone who ‘gets’ you, you know? Someone who can be your best friend as well as your partner.”

“Okay, Mommy.”

“All right. One more thing. You know how I said chocolate helps with everything?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I haven’t been able to eat much at all in these last few months, but I suddenly feel like I might be able to handle a few bites of pudding. Be a dear and send your Dad in to see me, and then run down to the cafeteria. They do nice chocolate pudding cups. Can you do that for me, darling?”

“Yes!” I said, jumping up. “Can I get myself a pudding cup too?”

“Of course you can,” she said with a smile. “Now give me a big kiss and hug before you go.”

I leaned in close and nestled my head against her chest, listening to her heartbeat as she kissed the top of my head. Even though the hospital room was filled with the scent of disinfectant and other cleaning agents, she still smelled the same as she always had.

She ruffled my dark curls one more time before I pulled away.

“I’ll be back with the puddings soon,” I said. “We’ll eat them together.”

“I know. I’m looking forward to it,” she replied with a smile as tears glistened in her eyes.

I told my Dad to go in and see her before racing down to the cafeteria to get her chocolate pudding cup. It was busy, and there was a long line, so it took me twenty-five minutes to get back to the room with our desserts. Twenty-five minutes was nothing in most people’s lives; a mere blip on the radar.

But twenty-five minutes was everything to me that day.

By the time I’d returned, Mom had slipped away. Dad was next to her, grasping her hand as his face contorted with grief. Tears were sliding down his face in earnest as he leaned over and kissed her one more time, and I dropped the pudding cups right on the floor, barely even noticing them slide out of my grip as I stood in the doorway.

I’d hated hospitals ever since. They smelled of nothing but disinfectant and misery.

I blinked back the tears that were prickling at my eyes as I continued to twist Tahlia’s hair into the braid. Her mother had returned to reading a magazine on her sun lounge, and she shot me a grateful grin when she noticed me looking at her. I smiled back at her, and the hair on my arms suddenly stood up.

Someone else was watching me now.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a man looking at me from the other side of the pool. He might’ve been there watching me all along, and I simply hadn’t noticed him after the distraction with Tahlia.

I drew in a sharp breath as I took in his face and body. He looked around my age, maybe a little older. Shirtless, he lay basking on a sun lounge, cell phone lazily dangling in one hand. He was tall, very tall, and his muscular chest and arms were twined with tattoos. He reminded me of a bronze sculpture, something strong and wonderful carved by the talented hands of an artist from ancient Greece or Rome.

It was his face that drew my attention the most, though. His eyes were a captivating blue, and his face was filled with masculine angles from the prominent ridge of his brows, the square of his jaw, and the sides of his cheekbones. His lips were full and arched, the corners seemingly drawn into a permanent smirk. Every inch of him was so defined that I wanted to run over to him and touch him just to see if he was real.

Totally and utterly breathtaking.

I tilted my head to get a better look at him, and to my surprise he didn’t look away. Most guys dropped their gazes when they were caught staring and tried to make it look like they’d never been looking at all, but this guy didn’t seem to care that I’d caught him. He kept his gaze fixed right on mine, and a lazy grin spread across his perfect lips.

That movement of his lips was potent to me, and I felt something resonate within my core like the echo of a drum. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was staring at him just as much as he was staring at me.

Embarrassed, I cast my eyes back down to Tahlia’s hair as heat spread across my cheeks. I didn’t go for guys like that. He looked like a typical bad boy with those tattoos, bulging biceps and chiseled abs, and bad boys were exactly what my Mom had warned me about.

I’d dated a couple of good guys over the years, but those relationships had always fizzled out after only a few months. It was just so hard to find time in between all my studying and reading. I was enrolled in political science at Overton University in Mississippi with my eye on law school for post-grad, and while it was hard, it was worth it. When I was young, my Mom had always said I took after my Dad appearance-wise, and I wanted to make her proud by taking after him career-wise, too. He was a relatively famous civil rights lawyer and activist, and I intended to follow in his footsteps.

I had a spare hairband on my wrist, and I quickly wrapped it around the end of Tahlia’s long blonde braid before gently tapping her on the shoulder.

“All done!”

She turned around and reached for the back of her head, her eyes lighting up as she felt the braid.

“Mommy! Mommy, look! Mia made me look like Elsa!”

She jumped off the sun lounge and started belting out ‘Let It Go’, and her Mom grinned at me. “Can you guess what her favorite song is?”

I grinned back at her. “I think that’s every little girl’s favorite song at the moment.”

She leaned down and scooped Tahlia up in her arms. “All right, sweetie, Daddy should be back from his golf game now, and we want to have an early dinner before you get too tired. Say thank you.”

Tahlia gave me a shy smile. “Thank you, Mia.”

I waved and watched them head back towards the hotel. The last rays of the sun had come and gone, and it was finally setting over the sea beyond the resort, where the beach stretched along for miles and miles. The sky was a beautiful mixture of orange, pink and purple as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, and I watched it for a moment before detecting some movement out of the corner of my eye.

Hot tattooed guy was still here, and he was heading towards me.

Oh, jeez.

He moved with the grace of a lion, and I took a deep breath as I pretended not to notice him stepping closer and closer. My cheeks turned hot again, and I gulped as he reached within inches of my sun lounge and then stood still, a laconic smile on his face. Up close, he was even sexier. I was in awe as I looked up and down the length of his body. His legs were toned, his shoulders broad, and those abs…God, I could probably sip water from them with a straw if he were lying down.