Mine: A Stepbrother Romance: (With bonus novel Bossy!) (50 page)

Peterson is on a roll and I let him cut me off. “That ratty little bastard hasn’t treated anyone right since he took over the company. He drove his father to an early grave, turning it from a respectable place to work into a crooked death trap.”

His knuckles whiten as he stands to his full height and grips the podium. “Health regs. Overtime. Careers. We’re just bugs for him to step on when it suits him. He thinks I don’t understand why he asks me to keep the books like we do, but I wasn’t born yesterday, you bastard!” His voice turns shrill and cracks while it rises in a scary crescendo. I’d expected him to get aggressive, but this is starting to go off the rails.

The mood was already tense, and Peterson’s words are just adding fuel to the fire. The courtroom rumbles behind me. “Bastard.” “Slimeball.” Angry words filter through the hum.

Cooper’s looking like a frightened animal, cornered in its own den and I don’t fucking blame him. Some of those guys look ready to climb over the railing and give him their own personal flavor of justice.

The cameras roll, catching everything. Claire, I hope you’re seeing this.

I clear my throat loudly. “Mr. Peterson, I don’t think this is—”

“No, sir, I think this
is!
” He’s fucking shaking, like he’s gonna explode. “This scumbag ruined my career. He ruined a lot of careers. He’s driving the whole damn company into the ground, and when the new layoffs get announced tomorrow, he’s going to ruin a whole assload more!”

What? Layoffs? I didn’t even know about that. Holy shit. The rapidly growing rumble behind me tells me that the workers didn’t know either.

And then everything happens at once.

“Mr. Peterson!” The judge bangs the gavel, calling the court to order.

A huge bear of a man in the crowd tears himself loose with a roar from the restraining grasp of his only slightly less crazed looking friends and leaps for the railing.

Cooper doesn’t notice, maybe because he’s coming for me, rushing out from around our table. His eyes are sparking in fury and his fists are tightly clenched. I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do, but he never gets to do it. The giant from the crowd tackles him from behind before the guards can get to him. They go down over the stenographer’s table, smashing it to splinters with their weight, while she launches herself out of her chair with a scream.

They roll across the floor to right in front of me, and Cooper gets a fist right to the nose, sending blood spurting over everything. I step to the side, arms raised. I’d love nothing more than to throw myself into the melee, but this is their fight now, not mine.

Everything’s out of fucking control. It’s not a court case, it’s a barroom brawl. More angry people pour over the railing. Judge Bailey’s banging his gavel like he’s trying to break through his desk. “Order! Order!” Police officers stream into the room, pushing their way past eager press crews who are probably creaming their fucking pants at this footage.

Dave quietly stands and starts making his way along the wall to the back of the room. He throws me a look like “holy shit” and gets himself behind the police. Smart guy.

I’m about to follow, when I see a familiar bounce of red hair flash at the back of the courtroom. What the fuck? She’s supposed to be home watching my triumphant downfall on TV, not about to get flattened by a fucking riot.

For a moment the crowd parts and I see her face. She’s watching me with a mix of confusion and terror, and then the next thing I know, she disappears in a wave of angry workers who break through the doors and flood into the room. Jesus Christ. The only danger I’d planned for was to my career. Where the fuck did she go? I scan the room. Not among the press, not at the door, not at—

A loud shriek cuts through the rumble, and I recognize her immediately. The surging mob crashes against the police officers and she’s right in the middle of it. I don’t think twice before throwing myself into the center of the mob. The crowd’s too dense, though. I’m not getting there fast enough.

There’s no time to deal with working my way through. I dodge around a furious guy with a bushy beard, wearing a t-shirt that reads WELDERS DO IT HOTTER, and leap at my chair, using it to jump to the top of the railing and then launch myself into the air above the crowd.

A
large body shoves me from the side, pushing me up against a bench and knocking the breath out of me. My lungs work hard, gasping while I clutch my stomach with one hand and steady myself against the railing with the other. This is insane. Another person slams into me, and I’m surprised I don’t hear my ribs crack when I hit the wooden back of the seating. I shriek from the pain.

When I was little, I got caught in quickly moving water once. I’ll never forget that feeling of going from confident, to nervous, to terrified as my muscles tired and I realized “just swim a little harder” wasn’t going to work that time.

Standing there trying to make myself as small as possible to avoid the crush of much larger bodies, I feel just as helpless.

I don’t actually see Declan coming. It’s more like a tingle of awareness. What I do hear, is his roar. Startled, I look up, and all of a sudden I know what it’s like to be a rabbit on the receiving end of a tiger’s leap. Declan is literally flying through the air over the angry workers between us, his face a mask of angry concentration. I freeze, unsure if I’m about to be rescued, or flattened.

“What the fuck?” The guy next to me tries to dive out of the way, but still ends up going down with a thump as Declan lands on top of him.

Nobody is paying attention to who is on whose side anymore, and the flattened gentleman recovers quickly, rearing up to bring pain down on his recently airborne attacker.

“Sorry!” I scream as I kick him in the side, grabbing Declan’s arm as he springs to his feet and shoves the guy away.

“Thanks, babe.” Even in the middle of the chaos, he flashes a grin and in a moment of relief I laugh at the absurdity of our situation. At least until one of the other rioters charges him. Declan steps aside and grabs the guy by his collar, throwing him past like he weighs nothing. “How about we get out of here? I think I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“Riordan!” Cooper’s somehow managed to get free, and charges at us, eyes wild and his face streaked with blood from his nose. “This is all your fault!”

He’s charging Declan, but I’m closer. Swinging hard and putting my shoulder into it, I place my fist right in his face with a crunch. God, I hope those weren’t my fingers. That hurt like crazy, but wow, did it feel good.

It stops Cooper dead, and he howls with rage and pain, hands covering his face.

Declan looks at me and laughs. “Fuck, Catholic school must be a rough place.” Then he grabs Cooper by the shoulders, spins him around and sends him back into the crowd which swallows him up eagerly like a piece of meat tossed to a pond full of hungry alligators.

With absolutely no thought to our current personal differences, I throw myself at Declan, clutching him for safety. “We need to go. Like, now!”

He laughs. “I’ve got you, babe. Just don’t expect me to let go again later.”

I don’t have it in me to spend time analyzing what he means, but his words make my stomach flutter, and not in a bad way. He wraps one arm tightly around my waist, and as much carries as drags me along, clearing a path through the angry crowd with his other arm held out like he’s breaking through a scrimmage line.

There’s no doubting his strength as he moves us steadily towards freedom. A couple of cops barrel past us when we get to the doors, driving into the crowd and then suddenly we’re on the other side. The riot has expanded into the hall, but everyone is trying to get to the courtroom, so it’s not hard to break out to the side and escape the mass of people.

We round a corner and lean up against the wall, both of us breathing heavily.

“You okay?” he asks.

I shake my head but give him a weak thumbs up. “Been better, but I will be.”

“Shit, I think I fucked up again. Sorry.”

G
uards and more police pass by without paying us more than the occasional glance. We probably look like innocent refugees from the fight, instead of the match that lit the whole damn thing on fire.

Declan grabs my arm. “Come on.” Dragging me behind him, he pushes the door open into an empty courtroom across the hall. The door slams shut behind us, and the sound of the chaos deadens to a muffled clamor.

He spins me to face him, then pins me up against the wall, dragging my hands above my head. I should push him away and remind him it’s over between us, but my blood is running hot after our escape, and the dark intensity of his eyes shows it’s the same for him.

“I’ve fucked up a lot of things. All my life. I don’t usually mean to, but it happens anyway. I’ve got no one to blame but myself.” He takes a deep breath. “I usually don’t care, but us? I don’t want to fuck this up. Please don’t let me fuck this up.”

My chest goes tight, constricting my heart, which is beating a mile a minute. “Declan... I don’t know. The two of us? It’s just so—”

His fingers tighten around my wrists, burning against my skin and holding me in place. “Please. Let me finish.”

I open my mouth to argue, but shut it again and nod. I should have listened to him the day of the wedding. Or answered one of his calls. Or swallowed my pride and gone to him.

His clear blue eyes hold me in place as firmly as his hands. I can see that this is difficult for him, and I’m not proud of it, but I’m glad it is.

Difficult means he cares.

“I can be a jerk. I know that, and it’s probably not going to change overnight.”

“
This
is you convincing me?

“This is me being honest. You want pretty and fake? That’s not me.”

“No! I want to believe you wouldn’t hurt me. I want to go back in time and not see you standing there watching my
sex tape
!” God, it hurts. I close my eyes at night and see that image in my head.

Him at the laptop with my video playing.

“You don’t think I want that too?” he shouts. “I want to kill your douchebag of an ex-boyfriend for even touching you, let alone filming it. You might not have noticed, but I don’t share well. I wasn’t watching, I was
turning it off
.” Declan’s voice vibrates with anger.

Heaven help me, I believe him. I look into his eyes, and I see a man tortured by my own pride. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

He jerks back like I’ve slapped him. “I’m that hard to believe?”

“No, I mean, I’m sorry for running. I’m sorry for avoiding you. I’m just... sorry.”

Declan’s body relaxes slightly. “I didn’t make it easy on you, did I?”

“No,” I answer honestly. “But I should’ve at least listened.”

“So why did you come? You could’ve watched me make an ass out of myself on TV like you were supposed to.” He’s so close it’s hard to breathe.

I turn my head, breaking eye contact. I came because the instant I heard his opening speech, I knew what he was doing. I’ve read his opening. Hell, I helped write it.

What we wrote together wasn’t what he said.

The words he said were perfectly average, predictable, solid B+ material for a lawyer fresh out of school. He’d been throwing the case, and I couldn’t sit home on the couch waiting to find out why. “You sounded like your opening was written by an intern. I just wanted to make sure my name wasn’t on it anywhere.”

He stares at me for a long moment and then rests his forehead against mine and laughs. “Fuck. How can you expect me to let you go when you keep being so adorable?”

“Well.” I lick my lips. “First off, I’m not adorable. Puppies are adorable. Second, you start by relaxing the muscles in your fingers.”

He moves closer, his soft breath playing across my neck. His voice drops deeper, into a sexy tone that makes heat flow straight into my center. “Like I said, adorable. But I don’t think you want me to let you go, do you?”

I struggle against him, but he holds me in place with ease so I change tactics and go with honesty. “No, I don’t, because every time you get near me I can’t tell if I want to slap you or tear your clothes off. You’re crazy. You’re impulsive. You’re distracting. And sometimes you are so sweet it hurts, but then the minute I slip up and let you in? You break my h—”

He kisses me forcefully, rough lips forcing mine open while he presses his body against me. I’m distinctly aware of every inch of us that is touching. His heat, his strength, the scratch of his stubble against my cheek, and the sheer intensity of his presence threatens to overwhelm my better judgment.

“I broke your heart.” Declan watches me like he’s seeing something for the first time.

I press my traitor lips together, partly to keep them from revealing any more secrets, partly to keep from closing the distance between us and kissing him again like I want to.

He smiles. “I broke your heart.”

“That’s not exactly a thing I’m celebrating, you jerk,” I snap.

He grins again, eyes going right to my lips. “I can’t break your heart if you don’t like me. You like me.”

“Do not.” I press my lips together to hold back the smile.

His only response is to go right back in, like his plan is to kiss the anger right out of me.

I think it’s working.

Electricity arcs between his fingertips and my flushing skin as he strokes the side of my neck and throat. Without meaning to, I lean into his touch, my body well aware of exactly how good it would be to just give in and let this happen.

His lips leave mine, kissing their way along my jawline. When he dives into the hollow of my throat, I raise my head to let him in, luxuriating in his rough pecks and nibbles. I can barely force out words, but I try. “Tell me again you didn’t do it. Look me in the eyes and say it.”

He slides his hand down and up underneath my t-shirt, dragging the fabric with him until he palms my breast through the thin fabric of my bra. He traps the nipple between his thumb and forefinger, giving a light squeeze. I moan softly, unable to help it.

Nose to nose, he looks straight at me. “I. Didn’t. Do. It. I did, however, go back a couple days ago and find out they still had the thumb drive, which among other things, was full of Michael’s course work. I turned it over to the police along with a report of what happened. It might never go anywhere without more proof, but if you ever need to get a restraining order, it should help.”