Romance: JADEN: An MMA Fighter Romance (Bad Boy Tattoo Romance) (New Adult Pregnancy Short Stories) (19 page)

Just as I said that the garage door opened and Bastian appeared, looking no more ruffled than he had coming inside after shoveling the driveway. I scowled at him. How dare he look so goddamn perfect?

“How is it all going? Are you two okay doing all that work?” Mom asked as we all began eating in an uncomfortable silence, the clink of silverware the only thing to keep us company.

I glanced up at Bastian, daring him to say a single thing. The corner of his lip quirked up. “It’s quite, ah, demanding. But we’ll live, won’t we Isabelle?”

“You bet,” I ground out.

Mom nodded and smiled.

###

The next few days, Bastian and I avoided each other like the plague. The only time we suffered each other’s presence was when we absolutely had to; dinner and breakfast.

Randy and Mom most likely noticed the change, but no one commented on it. We all just pretended that everything was fine, all while Bastian and I kept each other distant. When we had to speak, the temperature must have dropped ten degrees in the room at the cool civility that we strove to keep between us. He didn’t even attempt to annoy me anymore, and though that hadn’t even happened for a full twenty-four hours, I found that I missed it.

Everything had fallen into a kind of strange routine by the week’s end, and I felt that I was doomed to become the estranged daughter of a marriage that would become news over the entire city. Lovely title, it would be.

I smirked as I thought of this while dusting the polished gemstones carved into animals on my windowsill. They were the one thing I still had of dad’s, besides some of his old clothes and his police badge. He had given one to me every year for my birthday until I turned eighteen. I had never asked him why, but now, after his death, I wished that I had.

It had been the sudden kind of death that no family ever plans to experience. He had been shot in the line of duty on a drug deal gone wrong. I still remembered the day that his partner had walked to our door, tears in his eyes and told us what had happened. I had been packing for college.

I sighed and leaned against the sill, looking out onto the dreary day. Mom had left to get groceries, and she had been gone a little too long. I hoped that she was stuck in the meat isle deciding between sirloin and T-bone steaks and not stuck behind some accident in her car whose heater had seen better days.

A knock sounded on my door and I started, nearly dropping the owl carved from fossilized wood and let out a curse. “What?” I snapped, seeing Bastian standing in my doorway. His face was pale and his lips pinched.

“We just got a call from the hospital,” he said, and everything rushed out of me, and for a moment, I felt like a blank canvas, empty, endless, nothing. “Your mother has been in a car accident.”

A sob welled up inside of me before I could stop it, and Bastian was there, arms around me. I had never had any better arms to cry in.

###

Ten hours later, I was exhausted. I had missed lunch and dinner, and was practically running on fumes.

Mom had been driving along—carefully, of course—when her balding tires had hit a patch of black ice, which sent her spinning out of control. She had been strapped in, which had prevented her from going through the windshield, but she had hit her head on the steering wheel and had a minor concussion.

The doctors said that she should wake up soon, but I was still freaking out about the entire ordeal. Nothing slaps you in the face quite like having your surviving parent put you through a scare like that. With dad gone, I only had Mom, and the thought of losing her when I was still in my twenties terrified me. No one should lose both parents before they fully knew how the world worked and didn’t have to fall back on the safety net of being able to come and stay with them until they got back on their feet and had gathered enough money to go and try again.

The hospital where Mom lived was small and made me claustrophobic. The ceilings were too low and the lights too bright. It felt as if I were suddenly a tiny insect under a microscope being picked apart and examined.

Then there was the smell. If death had a smell, this was certainly it. Antiseptic mixed with cold, harsh metal and the lingering stench of decay and rot was not how I wanted to go. I wanted to smell the breeze and watch the sun slide over my legs in my own bed when I died. I had decided that while sitting next to Mom and watching her chest rise and fall as the monitor kept careful record of each heartbeat.

A knock sounded on the doorframe. I raised my head from my hands, expecting another nurse to ask me if I needed anything at all and if Mom had lifted a finger or twitched an eyelash. When I glanced, bleary-eyed at the doorway, I didn’t recognize Bastian at first. He was alien in this element, all hard cut lines of jaw and cheekbone, skin bleached by the punishing lights. But those blue eyes hadn’t changed a bit.

“How are you holding up?” he asked softly. Randy had been in here most of the time, but had just gone to get some coffee saying that he was about to pass out from exhaustion. I had told him to attempt to get some sleep, but he had just shrugged and gotten up anyway.

Somehow, this had drawn us all a bit closer. I no longer felt alienated from Randy as he had held my mother’s hand, tracing the shape of the diamond he had placed on her finger. “I love her,” he had told me. I had been holding tightly onto her other hand and had looked up in surprise.

“What?”

“I love her more than I have ever loved anything walking this earth, save my son. Your mother is a very special woman, Isabelle.”

“I know,” I said mutedly. “My dad said the same thing.”

He had looked up at me then, eyes tired and bloodshot. “I’m not trying to replace him,” he said after a considerable pause. “I hope you know that.”

“I do,” I said. “Thank you.”

There had been silence after that, but it had impressed me that he was man enough to say that. Most boyfriends would simply ignore the daughter of the first marriage and pretend that she didn’t exist unless she could be of some use to them. That’s how my dorm mate said it went, anyhow. She had been wrong about Randy, at least.

“I think that we’ll be a good family,” I said eventually.

Randy glanced back up at me. “You think?”

“Yeah.” The smile he gave me couldn’t compete with dad’s, but it gave me a small sense of relief and hope. A spark that maybe something good could come out of this strange arrangement, whatever it was.

Now, I blinked a few times at Bastian. “Okay, I guess. As okay as I’ll be.”

“Your Mom’s going to be fine,” he said, coming into the room and taking his father’s vacant seat. He didn’t reach out and touch her in any way, but he looked at her face for a long while. It was peaceful in sleep, more peaceful and unlined than I had seen it in years. “The nurses say that she should wake up anytime.”

I smiled at him. “You don’t need to comfort me, they told me the same thing.”

He raised an eyebrow, but it looked half-hearted. “Who said I was comforting anybody?”

“You’d be a bad brother if you didn’t,” I joked. It sounded strained and weird in this place of death and dying. I winced at my own voice and subsided, gripping Mom’s hand again.

“You look like hell,” Bastian said, and I immediately wound up to snap something back at him, but he cut me off before I could utter a single syllable. “Let me take you home. Randy will call us when she wakes up and then you can get back. But I haven’t seen you eat since breakfast, and you need to sleep.”

I sighed. He was right. I couldn’t keep running on fumes like this until I dropped and then I’d be in a bed right next to Mom. “Okay.”

“You must really be out of it. You didn’t give me a single iota of fight.”

“Iota? Do you even know what that means?”

He pushed my shoulder playfully, and I shoved him back. This was how normal siblings were supposed to act, wasn’t it? I felt the same confusion I had for the past week roaring up like a dragon inside of me, stronger than ever before. I fell quiet and we didn’t speak again until we got to the car.

I slid into the seat of the Porsche, which warmed me up quickly despite the cold of the outside. The heated seats were a plus, I had to say, but I would still insult his car at every chance I got.

“Do you want to stop and get some food or are we good raiding the fridge?”

“I’ll be fine with leftovers.”

“Cheap.”

“Champagne taste, Bash.”

“I hate that name,” Bastian sighed as we pulled out of the parking lot. I turned to look at him, smiling for the first time in a long while. It felt stiff, as if I hadn’t smiled in years, though it had only been hours in reality.

“Well then, I’ll keep it in mind. Blackmail, darling,” I said, waggling my eyebrows at him. He laughed, a deep low laugh that sent a shiver down my spine and electric bolts of pleasure through my blood.

Jesus, I told myself. You are ten kinds of fucked up. Your mother’s in the hospital and you want to screw your stepbrother right now in a moving car. I glanced over at Bastian in discomfort. He had his eyes on the road, but I knew that he could feel me looking at him. He never seemed to miss those small things like that. It must have been from being a business man for so long, he had learned to pick up the subtle nuances of every movement a person made in his general vicinity.

“Are we going to talk about what happened in the garage?” Bastian drawled lazily. “I know that you girls are prone to chick flick moments when you’re in emotional distress.”

“Shut up,” I told him. “But yes, we should talk about the garage.”

“I’m not going to apologize,” Bastian said. “Ever since I laid eyes on you, I wanted to shove you against a wall and kiss those pretty lips of yours. And then you had to stroll around nearly naked. What’s a man supposed to do?”

“That was unintentional,” I said pointedly. “I sleep in shirts because pants are uncomfortable. If I had it my way, I’d just go pantless all the time.”

“I’d enjoy the sight.” His voice was just that side of sexy, which made more tingles go through my body. I was suddenly hot, wanting, needing.

I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t find anything logical to say, so I simply closed it again. The rest of the ride was spent in silence, as I tried to crush my rising desire and get a handle on myself.

By the time we’d reached the door I gave up and dragged Bastian inside. “I don’t care if this is wrong,” I told him, unbuttoning his coat—which he had actually decided to wear this time—and roughly pushing it off of his shoulders. I could already see that he was hard, ready, and I wasted no further time. We didn’t even make it to the kitchen before we were clawing each other like wild animals, scrabbling over clothes and attempting to take them off. I think we left a trail up the stairs, but I didn’t mind, because by the time he shoved me down on my bed, I was more animal craving his touch than logical human being.

He devoured my lips and tongue much as he had the first time, demanding and almost rough. Many sounds that I would regret later were coaxed out of me by force from the sheer pleasure just his mouth created as it dipped across my jaw, down my neck and ate away at my collarbone. He licked between the hills of my breasts, teasing the expanse of my stomach with teeth and tongue. By the time he had gotten to my pants, I was a writhing mass of pure desire, needing him. He stripped my pants and panties off with a nearly inhuman speed.

“Do you want this?” he breathed against my ear, sliding his body up alongside mine. I could feel him at my entrance, and with a shudder of pure desire, I titled my legs open and my hips upward in response.

“Isabelle,” he whispered, brushing his fingers over my face as he entered me. Internally, I cried yes! This is what I have been waiting for my entire life! It was as if I had been empty, wanting for something that I didn’t even fathom for my entire life, and the Moment he was immersed in my flesh, I had found the last piece of the puzzle. My entire being just clicked into place, and I knew that there was no way that this was wrong. Nothing wrong should have felt this good.

My fingernails gripped his shifting shoulder blades, heavy with muscle as he began hitting that place that felt just right and I tilted my head back to capture his lips more. He paused his thrusting long enough to kiss me and he murmured my name into my neck as he resumed, and I could feel the pleasure beginning to build deep in my core.

“Isabelle,” he murmured.

“I’m here,” I whispered, drawing him closer to me. “I’m not leaving. I’m here.” Before I could hear his response, I felt myself reach that edge of pleasure, like the top of a waterfall, and then I was spiraling down, down, down into the depths of pure bliss that I hadn’t even known existed. He said my name once more and then Bastian joined me, heavy muscles jerking and clamping underneath my hands and against bare skin.

We lay there for several minutes after we have both come down from our high, neither speaking, just basking in the after-sex glow. My head was resting against his chest, and I listened to his heart slow. His hand reached around my waist and pulled me closer to him, the other stroking my hair.

“What are we going to tell them?” he asked eventually. I looked up in surprise. I hadn’t expected him to talk the serious talk so soon after. Most guys were content to just fall asleep and let me do all the thinking and worrying. I smiled at him. He really was a business man.