Hooked: A Stepbrother Romance (15 page)

I’d always been more-or-less successful at hiding my desire for her, but I could already tell tonight was different. If I managed it at all, maintaining that façade of decency was going to be one of the hardest things I ever did.

I can write drunk. Who says I can’t write drunk? I’m doing it
just fine
.

Should old acquaintance be forgot,

and never brought to mind?

I must be the only fucking guy on the planet who thinks of fucking his stepsister when he hears this song.

But really

Doesn’t it make sense?

It totally makes sense!

We two have paddled in the stream,

from morning sun til’ dine;

But seas between us broad have roared

since auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand my trusty friend!

And give me a hand o’ thine!

And we’ll take a right good-will draught,

for auld lang syne.

Okay yeah maybe not.

Good-will. There’s none of that, I made sure.

Oh whatever.

It’s just a stupid song, and not like I’m ever going to see her again anyway.

I’d gotten used to the idea of thinking of Simon as being
not a bastard
, but to my surprise, tonight he’d upgraded himself to
gentleman
. Sure, he’d made plenty of crude remarks, but I was happy to overlook those. I would save them for the next time I was in bed, unable to sleep.

No, what had impressed me was the way he’d greeted Arthur. He’d absorbed the man’s flamboyance and defensive irony without the slightest trace of embarrassment or awkwardness. It had been downright charming to watch.

He hadn’t even reacted badly to my implied jab at him. If anything, he’d been relieved. Simon had always had the slightest twinge of jealousy in his voice when he “joked” about my date with the fireman, and I still wasn’t quite sure what I’d been thinking when I invited Arthur along on our date.

Maybe I’d just wanted to see how he’d react.

Maybe I’d wanted to reassure him.

A jealous man was always a mixed bag, of course. It was usually overwhelming and stifling, a caustic element that ate a relationship from inside out. It suggested a lack of trust, a lack of confidence.

On the other hand, it was also fucking sexy. At least in appropriate doses, which is what Simon had been giving me so far. He wanted me, yes, but he wasn’t about to go all psycho over it. If anything, it was charming that he was so hung up on a “date” I’d had years ago with a friend.

Charming, and
ridiculously hot
.

Of course, that obsession also gave me way more power over Simon than I should’ve had after so many drinks, and after so many hours spent staring at that delicious blue-grey suit and tie.

After noting the way his pants were snug enough to hug his ass.

Tight enough to make it painfully obvious he’d been battling a hard-on for the entire damned night.

Oh, baby. They say power corrupts, and mine had gone straight to my head.

Or maybe, more accurately, it had gone straight between my legs.

“So, did you like Arthur?” I asked Simon innocently, after my friends had called it a night. The loud drum and bass tune coming from the speakers was resonating in time with the pulsing of my body, and the stiflingly hot air was making it harder to breathe.

I finished off the last sip of my strawberry margarita, chuckling as I slid my other hand along Simon’s knee. He’d made the mistake of sitting next to me in our booth, trying to box me in against the wall and the table. It was a tactic I’d been making him regret all night long, touching him and rubbing against him at regular intervals.

Much like our professional relationship, the date had quickly devolved into a back-and-forth power struggle.

One I was determined to win.

One that, judging by the way he’d
failed
to battle the hard-on all night long, I had already won.

Simon grunted a non-answer to my question, and I decided to go in for the kill. I leaned my body into his, pushing my breasts into his arm as I positioned my lips right next to his ear.

“I
said
, did you like Arthur?” I repeated in a low, sultry drawl. The dark stubble on his cheeks looked insanely sexy, and I had to resist the urge to run my tongue along his hot flesh. Being
too
blatant would only cost me points.

“Yeah, he’s great,” Simon said over the loud, slow beat of the music. Looking at me with those fucking perfect-blue eyes, his mouth curled into a grin. “Exactly how many cocktails did you drink tonight, Em?”

I giggled, amused that he was resorting to such an obvious strategy to gain back the ground he’d been losing ever since he opened the door to his hotel room. Tonight, there would be only one winner, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be him.

“Let me up,” I said, and before he could react I hopped onto his lap. His hard cock pressed tight against pants, and white-hot desire shot through me as I felt it jutting into me. I took just a second to enjoy the sensation before climbing off, taking him by the hand and pulling him out from the booth.

“Get up,” I insisted, guiding him towards the now mostly-deserted dance floor. The bass echoed out a dirty rhythm that reverberated in my ribcage, an open invitation for debauchery. I pushed myself against Simon’s long, hard body, his muscles as stable as if I’d been leaning into a wall.

A wonderfully warm, masculine wall that smelled like sex and looked at me like I was the only woman on Earth.

As it turned out, Simon was actually a good dancer, and it didn’t take long before we’d coordinated our movements together. Our bodies slipped into perfect accord, following the slippery beat. His upper abs brushed against my breasts, and I wrapped my arms over his shoulders and leaned my mouth next to his ear.

He stopped dancing, and I bit at my lip as I struggled to behave myself.

Licking him was out of the question, after all.

After a moment, he groaned low with frustration, and I took that as my cue.

“Happy to be going on the same date with me that Arthur did?” I asked him, feeling his hands creeping up my back as his hips pressed against my pelvis.

My turn to moan.

“Sure, this place is quite happening,” he whispered back, and my eyes feasted on the way his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down whenever he spoke. Delicious. “But I hope we have a slightly different ending than Arthur got.”

“Pervert,” I scolded, tracing my fingers along the back of his neck. “I’m practically your sister, or have you forgotten?”

“I haven’t been able to forget you since the moment I saw you, Emilia Jones,” Simon purred. “And our parents signing a piece of paper doesn’t make us related, no matter what the state of California says.”

I laughed, and the swelteringly hot room suddenly felt like
exactly
the right temperature. It was humid, dirty and sweaty. Wonderful and wrong.

In short, it was the perfect physical representation of how I felt about Simon.

“How did you find out about my date with Arthur, anyway?” I asked, body vibrating in a haze of wet heat and forbidden sexual intimacy.

“Google alerts. One for Emilia Jones, and once I knew you started working there, another for Goodman Youth Center,” he said, and I inhaled the scent of his skin. Moving in so close to him was probably not the best move I could’ve made in our game, but
dear god it felt amazing
.

“Stalker,” I teased, even as a thrill shot through me and I felt perversely proud. “Did you have fun? Thinking about a big, burly, fireman’s hose pumping away inside of me?”

Simon shrugged, pushing my arms up a few inches in the process and pulling me in even closer to his delicious body. I shivered, wishing he would just concede already and drag me off to somewhere private. At this point, I was
almost
turned on enough to find even a public bathroom sexy.

“I’m not going to apologize for the alerts, you know. I love them. Any time your name pops up on my computer, it brightens my whole damn day,” he whispered into my ear before leaning down, kissing my neck and making heat radiate from my belly to my chest, from my chest to my aching core. “Besides, it always adds a little fuel to my fire,” he added.

“What fire?” I whispered, surprised I was able to speak. My heart was pounding fast and hard, my throat tight. It felt like I had an untamed horse inside of me, galloping wildly, but yet intrigued by a handsome stranger’s offer of food.

Simon pressed himself back into me, and I felt the bulge in his pants twitching as he stared into my eyes.

“
That
fire,” he said softly into my ear, his lips brushing the soft, tender patch beneath my earlobe as he made his way down towards my collarbone. “And if I’m not more careful, it’s going to grow and grow. You’re the only one who could put it out, and the blaze will devour me whole.”

“Who says I wouldn’t put it out?” I asked, slipping my arms off his shoulders and sliding my hands down to curve of his perfect ass. I took a moment to squeeze before pulling him against me, reveling in the feeling of his cock mashing into me.

He responded in kind, placing his knee between my legs and grinding it against my tight dress. I gyrated my hips, my most intimate parts making indirect contact with him, feeling better than anything I’d ever experienced before.

Hell, Simon’s fire was going to consume us both.

I didn’t care.

I threw my head back and gasped, feeling the invasive touch of his lips along the hollow of my neck. His hips undulated alongside mine as I rode through blissful abandon.

Fuck.

Simon was clearly thinking the same thing, and suddenly we were dashing back to collect our belongings and leave. Within moments we were out of the club and back on the street, the cooler air serving as a wake-up call against my hot skin. I stopped in my tracks, taking a few deep breaths and thinking.

Simon looked down at me, his piercing eyes scanning my face carefully.

“What do you want, Emilia?”

I could’ve easily lied, pretending that the cocktails and the heat had gotten to me. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The fact was, I didn’t
want
a wake-up call. I wanted to ride this feeling to the end, and see where it took us.

I’d wanted Simon for a long time now. He’d broken back into my life, ripping open old scars, but he’d done it to heal me. Now, for the first time, I felt like that chapter of our past was mostly behind us. Now I wanted to move on, to look ahead, to see what our future held.

I wanted to find out what this invisible bond between us would feel like in bed, with all the calm strength of his body on top of me.

“I want
you
,” I answered in a long exhale, and immediately I saw his pupils darken with animalistic desire.

“Fuck,” he growled, and in an instant his lips were on mine, his tongue invading my mouth with a hunger that had clearly been building for over a decade. It was sensory overload, and I could barely comprehend exactly what was going on. All I knew is that the bully who had once tried to ruin my life was kissing me ravenously and I wanted more. I wanted it to last forever.