Off Limits: A Stepbrother MMA Romance (7 page)

Plus my mother had
claimed she’d spend the whole summer there. We’d have tons of
time together to catch up, us girls. I should have known she’d
never meant it. Now she talked about coming to L.A. in July, August
at the latest.

The only member of our
so-called family who was at the house? Tuck. The one person I’d
counted on not being there.

I couldn’t fucking
believe it when I’d walked into the kitchen on Saturday and found
Tuck standing there, shirtless and sweaty, chugging from a gallon jug
of water.

“No. Fucking. Way.”
Eloquent first words from me, I know, but he wasn’t supposed to be
there.

“What are you doing
here?” he’d asked me at the same time I’d asked him exactly the
same question.

“This is my father’s
house,” he’d had the nerve to state, well, the truth. It only
made me more pissed off.

“Shouldn’t you be
out on a yacht somewhere? Drunk and surrounded by models?”

He gave me a wry smile.
“Sorry to disappoint you, sis.”

Uh, I hated it when he
called me that. “But you’ll be leaving, soon, right?”

“Here all summer.”

Those words, like a
fucking death knell to my sanity.

We hadn’t even spent
two full days together under the same roof and I was already ready to
kill him. He stood by the garage door holding up my backpack like I
was a school kid who’d dashed off for the bus and forgotten it. I
swore under my breath. He was only 21 to my 20, but he acted like
that one year was ten.

Damn it. I brought my
hand to my face. I didn’t want to share this house any more than he
did. Neither of us had known the other planned to live there over the
summer. Our family was fucked up like that, in the way that only rich
families could be—houses in multiple locations, our parents jetting
all over the world. Plus the lines of communication didn’t exactly
flow.

But I needed to keep my
cool. The only way to survive this would be to show him that he
didn’t get to me. Only he did get to me. I could barely even stand
to be in the same room with him.

A few minutes ago I’d
been sitting calmly in the kitchen eating a cup of yogurt for
breakfast when he’d sauntered in half-naked, rubbing his tousled
bed-head of dark chocolate brown hair. His athletic shorts rode down
low on his hips revealing six-pack abs and that insane V, drawing all
attention to what lay below. He looked like a modern-day gladiator
storming the kitchen.

I’d done what any
hopelessly shy 20-year-old virgin would have—thrown my half-eaten
breakfast into the sink and leapt out of the house like a panicked
jackrabbit.

Of course I’d left my
backpack behind. I was only human. And he was my sadistic stepbrother
who seemed to only have two speeds: tease and torment. He loved
making me squirm.

Reluctantly, I started
walking toward him. Of course he was going to make me come to him. He
would never deign to bring it to me.

“It’s my first day
of work,” I huffed. He just stood there, watching me as I
approached. “I’m going to be late.” I knew I sounded like a
whiney brat. I had no idea how he brought out the worst in me, but he
did it like no one else.

He looked at me with
his dark eyes, level, unimpressed. “That’s right. I forgot.
You’re saving the planet this summer.”

“I’m working at the
Marine Mammal Center!” I corrected him.

“Right, right.”

He didn’t care. He
towered over me. Chiseled jaw, all broad shoulders and testosterone,
he made girls drop their panties just by walking into a room. We
stood so close that I could smell him, musky and masculine.

“Tuck, give it to
me.” I hated standing that close to him.

“Aren’t you going
to say please?”

I needed strength. He
was going to kill me this summer. Unless I killed him first.

“Tuck,” I pleaded.
A swirl of tattoos played along his shoulder and bicep, down at his
wrist. He was sex on a fucking stick.

“Oh, you’re so
close. Try ‘Please, Tuck.’ I’d like to hear you say that.”

A deep, red blush
flooded my cheeks at the erotic tone of his voice. “Give that to
me.” I snatched my beat-up old backpack from him and stalked back
to my car.

“I see why you left
that behind,” he called after me. “They might not let you in the
door with that thing. It looks contagious.”

Yes, it was stained and
beat up but I loved that backpack and I was going to keep using it
until it literally disintegrated. My mother might have married a
billionaire and thrown herself 110% into the whole ‘I need a bigger
diamond tiara’ thing, but I promised myself I would keep my feet
firmly on the ground.

“Just because it’s
not Hermes!” I fumed, stalking back to the car.

I could hear him
chuckling. “You don’t pronounce the H.”

I swear, the smirk I
could hear in his voice made steam come out of my ears like a
freaking cartoon.

This marriage had to
crash and burn at some point soon. None of my mom’s relationships
lasted long, and you knew with a guy this rich he had to have an
air-tight pre-nup. Chances were good that I’d be fielding a call
from my sobbing mom in six months asking if she could crash on the
couch in my college dorm room. It couldn’t happen soon enough.

“By the way, a
homeless guy just called,” Tuck said in that lazy, bedroom voice of
his. “He wants to know why you stole his backpack.”

“You’re such an
asshole,” I mumbled.

“Got that right,”
he agreed before he turned back into the house and closed the door. I
hated that he got to close the door on me first. That’s the kind of
childish level he made me sink down to, and he did it in seconds
flat.

Driving to work, I told
myself to get a grip. The next eight weeks weren’t going to be that
bad. With a party boy player like him I’d probably barely even see
him. We’d probably never even run into each other.

§

The next night when I
walked around the corner I flew right into him. It was my fault, I
wasn’t thinking about where I was going. My mind was on work,
thinking through what I’d done that day, my second in the
internship. The other college kids in the program were friendly. A
bunch of them were going out tonight to a club and they’d invited
me, but that really wasn’t my scene. I didn’t mean to be lame or
spoil anyone else’s fun, I just didn’t enjoy myself in those
kinds of places. The whole point of a club was to cut loose, let go
and drop all your inhibitions.

Inhibition was my
middle name. I had a long list of things I wouldn’t, couldn’t,
absolutely no question would ever consider doing. Items A-Y on the
list were things my own mother had done all during my childhood.
Clubs were her milieu. As for the last item on the list? The one I
would absolutely by all means necessary at all costs stay away from?
I now stood pressed up against him in a hallway.

“Sorry!” I
exclaimed, my hands up to his chest to steady myself. Mistake. He
wore no shirt, of course. Did the man have a shirt allergy or
something? I didn’t think I’d seen him in one once over the past
five days we’d co-habitated in the house. I preferred to think of
it like we were boarders who happened to be under the same roof,
instead of living together. That seemed too intimate.

He had muscles on top
of his muscles, but not in that pumped-up silly steroid balloon way.
Tuck’s muscles looked hard-earned, like he’d fought for them,
some kind of a warrior on an ancient battlefield. He would have made
a great medieval knight.

“Take your time.”
He smirked down at me. I removed my hands as if they’d been
touching a hot stove.

“I was just steadying
myself.” I blushed as I spoke, always so quick to betray my
emotions. He was right. I had left my hands up on him a second or two
too long. A real knight wouldn’t have pointed that out, though.
Tuck was no chivalrous knight.

“Why aren’t you
wearing a shirt?” I huffed.

“I just got back from
the gym.”

“Is that all you ever
do?”

“I’m training.”

“For what? The most
annoying naked stepbrother contest?”

“You want me naked,
huh?”

How had the
conversation gone there? And so fast? He didn’t move, his huge body
practically blocking the hallway.

“Excuse me, I’m
trying to get past.” I hated the way my voice escalated, annoyed
and bitchy. I swore I wasn’t like that with most people.

“Hot date?”

“I might head out to
meet some people.” My chin jutted out defiantly. I hadn’t planned
on it, but suddenly this giant mansion felt too small for the both of
us. I hadn’t expected him to be around so much. Back in New York
he’d been out more than he’d been in. But the past five days he’d
been home in the morning, and home at night.

I knew because his
bedroom was two doors down from mine. Only a bathroom separated us.
I’d wanted to set up my room in a whole different wing, but the
housekeeper had told me that was where Mr. Leland liked to put up
guests. I didn’t know when he and my mom would be dropping by over
the next eight weeks, never mind when these hypothetical guests would
arrive, but I was a pleaser. I didn’t want to make more work for
her. So there I slept, two doors down from the Incredible Hulk who
surprised the hell out of me by keeping monk-like hours like mine,
lights out at 10 p.m., alarm off at 6 a.m.

Surveying me with
skepticism, Tuck asked, “Where are you heading out to? A Quaker
meeting house?”

“What?”

“You’re wearing a
tent.” He gestured with his huge hand to my dress.

“This is not a tent!
It’s a maxi dress.” I looked down and, OK, it kind of was a tent,
but it was super comfortable.

“Two of you could fit
into that thing.”

“Why do you care?”

We stared each other
down, standing close in the hallway. He had a cut up along his
cheekbone under a small butterfly bandage. I wondered how he’d
gotten it. It didn’t look like a nick from shaving. It looked
bigger, a gash but healing well. I suppressed the urge to reach up
and touch his face and ask if he was OK. I shouldn’t care if he was
OK. I hated him.

“I’m just saying.”
He shrugged a massive shoulder. “If you’re trying to impress one
of those tree-huggers you’re working with—”

“We’re not hugging
trees. It’s a Marine Mammal Center.” I wished I could stop rising
to his bait, but I felt powerless to resist. He completely got under
my skin. And I couldn’t stop looking at his, wondering about the
tattoos that played across his muscles. I wanted to trace them with
my finger.

“Like I said,” he
continued, “if you’re trying to get with one of those super cool
guys you’re working with—”

“I’m not trying to
get with any of them! You’re such a Neanderthal.”

“Ooh, big word.”

“Sorry to confuse
you.”

“I’m not the one
confused.”

We stood there
practically panting, neither of us backing down. He had a band
tattooed around his bicep and perfectly defined pecs like a
sculpture, only he wasn’t made of marble. I could feel heat
radiating off of his massive chest. I didn’t think I’d ever stood
that close to a man that powerful.

“I’m guessing it’s
going to be another early night for you.” He tilted his head to the
side, one of those cocky eyebrows lifted slightly.

“You’ve been going
to bed early, too.” Everything he said made me so jumpy and
defensive.

“You’re paying
attention to when I go to bed?”

I exhaled in
frustration. Why did he always insist on teasing me? I’d grown up
an only child, maybe this was a normal
older-brother-pestering-his-younger-sister dynamic. It didn’t feel
like that, though. I figured in the typical scenario I wouldn’t
notice how low his athletic shorts rode down his lean hips. Any lower
and things would get X-rated. Part of me wanted them to slip.

He was so huge, I had
to wonder if he was huge all over. I had to admit, I was curious. I
wasn’t exactly an expert in penises. OK, direct experience with two
if you had to know. One in the dark in my hand, one with the light on
and, yes, still just in my hand. No mouth. No anything else.

I was still a virgin.
You wouldn’t think being a virgin at 20 would be that big a deal,
but I sure felt out of it at school. Most everyone around me seemed
to think casual, alcohol-soaked hook ups with all kinds of sloppy sex
were just a normal part of college life. Honestly, I didn’t judge.
I wasn’t the moralizing holier-than-thou kid giving them the evil
eye when they did their walk of shame the next morning. If I had to
be totally honest, I was a little jealous. I wished I could not care,
wished I could be free and not think about any consequences. But I’d
seen shit go wrong with my mother far too many times to be able to do
that. So, I kept my cards close to my chest. And wore tents.

“You don’t like any
of the guys at work?” Tuck pressed on.

“I like them fine.”
Why was he asking me about this?

“Anyone special?” I
wanted to wipe that smirk right off his face. That and get away from
him. Each second in his presence seemed to slow my brain functions,
my senses increasingly aware of nothing but him, his nearness, his
maleness.

“Yes,” I flung
back, suddenly feeling reckless. “His name is Mike and I like him a
lot. I’m hoping we spend tons of time together this summer.” That
was 100% true, as was the fact that Mike was 100% gay. He was also
funny and smart and we’d hit it off right away.

“Mike.” His voice
dropped lower and suddenly he seemed darker, like a cloud had passed
overhead in what had been a blue sky. I shivered.

“Let me get past you.
Please.” My voice came out quiet and pleading. I’d meant to sound
bossy and firm but it was hard standing so close to him with my
rapidly racing pulse and a slight throb starting down between my
legs.