Defender: A Stepbrother Romance (4 page)

I
couldn’t quite catch
my breath when I first saw Eden. I thought she was a beauty at seventeen. But now... if I didn’t know her… if I wasn’t practically related to her, I’d be aching for the possibility of spending a little time with her.

She came toward us with the sun at her back, causing the flimsy blue skirt she was wearing to look almost transparent. The way it hugged her hips, the way it made her thighs look…damn, I had to think of something else before my mind began to go places it shouldn’t go.

Not that I had that much control over the basic, biological reactions of my body.

But then she opened her mouth, purposely ignoring me as she had done for an entire week when she was eleven, just because I wouldn’t take her to some movie she wanted to see. That’s when my natural defense kicked in, and I remembered everything that transpired between us that summer so many years ago. And that was the end of that.

“I’m sorry,” Dad said as we both watched Eden walk into the house. “She’s been through a lot these last few months.”

“Don’t apologize,” I replied. “It’s not your fault she can’t appreciate what other people do for her.”

Dad shrugged. “Partially my fault, I think. I spoiled her after her mother died.”

I couldn’t argue with that. It was true. When my mother and I came to live with the pair, Eden was a spoiled little thing. She had a bedroom decorated in a princess theme, pictures of Disney characters on her walls, and a huge dollhouse in one corner–another corner occupied by a wooden rocking horse. There were stuffed animals all over the place, hanging from hammocks stuck into corner, scattered across her bed, and preparations for a tea party at the little table in yet another corner of the room. And that was just her bedroom.

Eden had an entire playroom that was filled with toys. Dolls and kitchen play sets, building blocks, puzzle books and dress up clothes. Just about anything a person could think of to offer a child to play around with. She was more than spoiled. She was a princess herself.

But I didn’t fault Alistair with her behavior now. He stopped giving her everything she asked for when Mom and I came to live with them. She just never got over the expectation of getting what she wanted. And that was probably why she was in the situation and why I should have stayed in New York.

“Do you think you can help her?” Dad asked. “I told your mother that we would be better off with a local attorney, but she insisted on calling you.”

“It’s just a civil case. It should pretty much be a matter of proving that the other driver was just as responsible for the accident as Eden was.”

Dad shook his head. “It’s not as simple as that.”

I heard something in his voice that worried me just a little. I crossed my arms over my chest and moved in front of him so that he had to turn away to keep from feeling confronted.

“I did a little research on my own,” he continued, a weariness coming into his voice. “This guy…he’s the son of the police commissioner.”

I nodded, keeping my face calm as I pretended to contemplate what he’d just said. But, in reality, there was a little panic going on in my head. What the fuck? I grew up out there–I knew what a clannish group the police could be. And for Eden to pick the Lubbock police commissioner’s son to ram her car into…she was lucky they hadn’t arrested her already.

“When they did the blood alcohol test in the ER, did you actually see it?”

Dad shook his head. “The cop pulled me aside and told me it showed that she was drunk.”

“Did he say what the number was?”

“He implied that it was quite a bit over the legal limit.”

“But he never showed it to you?”

He shook his head again. “And they didn’t arrest her.”

I turned back toward the house, an image of Eden in handcuffs floating through my mind. There might have been a time when that would have been a pleasant image in my mind–still might be to a certain degree–but I could see the toll all of it was taking on my stepdad. Despite the fact that she was a grown woman who should be supporting herself, living an independent life, she was still that little, motherless princess to him. He needed to save her.

Unfortunately, I knew it was just the beginning of a huge, ugly mess.

I touched Dad’s arm lightly. “I have to warn you,” I said quietly, “that it’s still possible they will arrest her. I’m not sure why they didn’t arrest her the night of the accident or within the first few days after. It’s possible something went wrong with the blood test at the hospital, or there was some sort of paperwork snafu. I don’t know.” I glanced toward the house again. “But, from a lawyer’s point of view–if I were representing the commissioner’s son, I would be pushing the police to arrest her within the next few weeks. If I were him, I would want that arrest on the record before we go to court in order to bring it before the judge.”

Alistair nodded. “That crossed my mind.”

“Have you talked to Eden about it?”

“No. I didn’t want to upset her.”

“I think the time for worrying about her frame of mind has long passed. We need to discuss all of this with her. But first I need to hear what happened that night from her.”

And there I was, pulled into the case despite my determination to just make an appearance, appease my mother, and then convince them all that a local lawyer would be a better option after reviewing all the details. But that wasn’t the best chance Eden had. And, no matter what had happened between Eden and me, I cared enough about my stepdad to want to make it right for him.

H
ow was
I supposed to be honest and forthright with my attorney when it was Crawford staring at me from across the dining room table?

The amazingly tender pot roast we’d just finished for dinner had turned into a lump in my stomach, threatening to leave me with a terrible stomach ache for the rest of the night. I wanted to get up and go upstairs, to disappear into what was my childhood bedroom, still furnished with my old canopy bed and band posters that had hung there all through high school. I hadn’t spent more than a few months in that room since I graduated and went off to college, but it was still something of a sanctuary, and I still longed for it before anything else.

“What time did you leave your apartment that night?” Crawford asked.

I shrugged. “I was supposed to meet my date at six, so I left a little after five to give myself a few minutes to find parking around the restaurant.”

“And this was Zirki’s in Lubbock?”

“Yeah.”

Crawford typed something on the tablet he held in front of him, his eyes darting impatiently at me over the top. “And then?”

It irritated me when he assumed I knew what he wanted me to do or say. If I’d kept talking, assuming he wanted to know more, he would have told me to shut up so he could make notes.

“I pulled into the driveway in front of the restaurant and handed my keys to the valet, then went inside. The hostess took me to the table where my date was waiting.”

“Had you gone out with this guy before?”

Did I hear a little trickle of…probably not.
“No. It was a blind date Jeannie set me up on.”

Crawford glanced at me, but then he went back to typing on his tablet, waving an impatient hand at me to continue.

“We ordered, ate our dinner, then I left.”

My stepbrother shook his head. “If I’m going to help you, I need as much detail as possible.”

“Then you have to help me out here. What kind of detail do you want? Do you want to know what I ate? It was some sort of chicken marsala mess. Do you want to know what we talked about? He’s an accountant. We talked about his work most of the night, which is why I left.”

“How long were you there? How much did you drink? What did you drink?”

I groaned. My Dad took my hand and squeezed it gently. I saw Crawford look pointedly at our touching hands then met my eye, the expression in his eyes like a page from a novel.

Look what you’re doing to your Dad,
he seemed to say.
Look what your actions are doing to this family.

Like I hadn’t heard that from him before. Sometimes I heard his voice in the middle of the night, my heart replaying that summer years ago.

“You’re a fuck up, Eden,” he’d said. “You do all these things without thinking about how it might impact the people who love you the most. You’re like a hurricane, ripping through our hearts and leaving all this destruction in your wake like it doesn’t matter. But it does matter and I, for one, am done. Next time you get yourself into a bind, don’t bother to call me, because I won’t answer.”

Yet, he was there. And that made me wonder if maybe his opinion of me had softened a little over the years.

“I was there maybe two hours, if that. And, yes, we drank. He ordered a bottle of merlot, and I drank maybe two glasses from the first bottle.”

Crawford’s sharp gaze fell on my face. “How many bottles were there?”

“Two. I drank two glasses from the first, two, maybe three, from the second.”

“How close together?”

“The last two were pretty close together. I downed them because he was irritating me, and I thought a good buzz would make him easier to swallow. But I didn’t even feel it.”

Crawford shook his head, clearly not impressed with my behavior. Nothing new about that. “So, you downed two glasses of wine, maybe three, and then walked out of the restaurant?”

“And went to the valet. He took my ticket and went to retrieve my car. I remember tipping him as I got into the car, then I pulled forward. After that…things are pretty jumbled.”

“She had a concussion,” Dad told Crawford. Mom nodded, agreeing with everything that had been stated so far.

Crawford hid his face behind his tablet, clearly not interested in looking at me in that moment. That was fine with me. I stood up and stretched, feeling a little too much like I was in some police interrogation or something.

“They didn’t give me a ticket.”

“Excuse me?”

I turned and looked at Crawford. “The police. I didn’t get a ticket for the accident. How could this guy sue me if even the police didn’t think I did anything wrong?”

Crawford sighed heavily as he set his tablet face down on the table. He looked first at Dad then at Mom, his mouth pulled so tightly into a frown that it totally altered the lines of his face. He was still handsome, just an unhappy sort of handsome.

“My assistant called the police station this afternoon and spoke with the detective in charge. According to him, the accident is still under investigation. No tickets or warrants will be issued until the investigation is concluded.”

“How long does it take to investigate a traffic accident?” I asked. “It’s been six weeks.”

“I’ve seen it take three or four months,” Crawford said.

I groaned, annoyed by his know-it-all attitude. I’d forgotten that unfortunate aspect of his personality. Crawford always knew everything and would always make you feel like a loser because you didn’t know everything he knew.

Such a loving brother.

“There’s still a possibility you will be arrested, Eden.”

I laughed. I actually laughed because it just seemed so absurd, the idea that I could be arrested for anything, let alone an accident in which I lost my car and my favorite dress. I was the one with over five thousand dollars’ worth of medical bills waiting to be paid (the insurance through my job pretty much sucks). I was the one who was taken to the hospital by ambulance. This guy…he had a few bruises. He didn’t even bother to go to the doctor until two or three days later. “This whole thing is ridiculous,” I scoffed. “He had to have hit me. Have you seen my car?”

Crawford inclined his head slightly. “My assistant is tracking some photos down as we speak.”

I shook my head again and began to pace, walking the length of the small dining room behind the line of chairs where Mom and my Dad sat side by side. They were always next to each other. I was so used to Vera being at my Dad’s side that I hardly thought about it anymore. I don’t even have memories–not really strong memories–of a time before my stepmom.

Or Crawford.

But Crawford was more of an enigma to me. He was always busy with sports and his own thing, always off doing something with his friends. Maybe that was why I shadowed him so much during his free time. Because he had so little of it that it was the only time I could hang out with him.

And then he went to college. I hardly saw him at all during that time. Just a few weeks during the summer when he had time off from whatever he was involved in at school. One year he had a football training camp he had to attend. Another year, he went off with a group of classmates to hike part of the Appalachian Trail. Another year he had a job he wanted to keep.

And then that summer before law school. He was only home a week, but it was an incredibly awkward week, in part because of what had happened between us when he invited me to stay in his dorm with him. Then there was the favor I asked of him…

“You should expect to be arrested at some point in the next week or two, Eden.”

I turned on my heel and stared at Crawford. “Me? Why me?”

“Because you’re not the police commissioner’s child, but the guy you hit is.”

My head started to spin then. I took a step forward and nearly fell flat on my ass. If Crawford hadn’t jumped up and got his arm around my waist, I would have been on the floor.

“Take her to the couch,” Dad said, worry dripping from his voice like water from a soaked paper towel.

Crawford swung me up into his arms, and I found myself nestled around his chest, my head fitting perfectly on the width of his shoulder. He smelled like something expensive–patchouli and sage–a strong, masculine scent that would have made my knees weak if they hadn’t already given out on me. Tough, I had to admit, I kind of missed the Drakkar he favored in high school.

I was almost disappointed when we got to the couch and he lay me down, settling my body carefully against the soft cushions, his hand dragging against my arm before he stepped back, almost as though he wanted to touch me, almost as though he cared about me.

But that couldn’t be possible, could it?

“Here,” Dad said, pushing Crawford aside as she bent to press a cool cloth against my forehead. “This will make you feel better.”

And then the doorbell rang at the same moment Crawford’s phone rang.