Stepbrother Romance: My Alpha Cowboy Stepbrother (Stepbrother Romance, Taboo, Forbidden, Stepsister, New Adult, Western Romance, Cowboy Romance) (6 page)

Well, I was sick of dreaming.  I would make it happen, damn it.

***

My plan was more or less in place.  It took a few weeks to arrange everything, but I got it done.  All that was left to do was leave.  But I dallied, because truth be told it was a nice life I'd be leaving behind.  I don't know why I waited--Marley genuinely believed in the two-cars-white-picket-fence idea of a perfect life and that was something I didn't want to take from her.   The goal, I decided, would be to get this over with as quickly as possible, like ripping off duct tape. 

But plans change, especially in light of stupid idiotic husbands who think it's a good idea to bring their lovers home while their wife is supposed to be out drinking, because the wife is
such
a lush (who drove her to booze, anyway?) that of course she'll be passed out by eleven and not come home at noon to see a strange car in their driveway and a woman's coat in the mudroom.  I went upstairs quietly--I'd walked those stairs enough times to know which ones creaked and which ones didn't--and opened the bedroom door to find him pounding the pussy of Deborah Waterhouse, a thin blonde woman with tiny breasts and no ass at all.  They were so caught up in it that I debated whether to take a picture of them and send it to Alan's boss.  But at the moment I began reaching for my phone Deborah screamed and grabbed the sheets--
our
sheets, the ones I'd chosen to complement my aesthetics and Alan's tastes--to cover herself. 

"Honey," Alan stammered.  "What are you doing home so early?"

"The same thing you're doing with this bitch.  Fucking around," I retorted. 

"Now, now, I know you're not happy, but there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this--"

"I know, I heard.  She just fell out of the roof."

"Are you kidding?" she said.  "I don't weigh enough to break beams.  You, on the other hand--"

"Get the cunt out of my house," I said, trying not to break down.  Holding on to the one thought in my head--revenge--and working out how to change my plans around this fact--how would a true cool bitch do it, how would a "bad girl" use this to her advantage?  I couldn’t be a meek little Stepford wife anymore. 
Move past the pain, get angry
. 

“I hope you know you just ruined his life,” I said, watching Deborah dress.  I don’t normally go for humiliating other women, having experienced plenty of it myself, but if anybody deserved to feel bad it was a woman who would fuck her married lover in the wife’s bed.  “Your panties are inside-out,” I told her.

She turned red and put on her jeans and ran out the door, sobbing, holding her shoes.  “A real man would’ve stood up for you!” I shouted after her. 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Alan snarled, snapping himself out of bed.  “That’s no way to treat a lady!”

“This—” I shouted, pointing at his naked, lanky body, and the shriveled, wilted cock that only a week ago had astounded me with its size, “—is no way to treat your wife!”

He remembered himself, and reached for his shirt, tying it around his waist.  “You wouldn’t understand,” he grumbled. 

“You know what, you’re right.  I don’t understand how I could have been as faithful and devoted a wife as I have been to such a loser and a horndog as you.”  I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth.  Quiet, little Evelyn Goodman actually had some balls after all—that was a good thing, because my plan would require that I do things that I’d never done before.  “If I have one regret in my life, it’s not marrying you, actually.  It’s letting you think that you can get away with treating me the way you do.”

“Is that a threat?” he asked, his face turning a shade of reddish-purple that was somewhere between “ridiculous” and “dangerous”. 

My plan was simple:  slip away, preferably in the middle of the night.  While leaving my soldering gun on, and near a puddle of turpentine.  It was a careless mistake—I’d made it myself a few times already, luckily always catching it before any serious damage could be done.  And a perfectly understandable one, too—because the on-off switch was on the stand, and not on the gun, and the “on” indicator would go off by itself if you just left it alone.   It was a well-documented problem with that particular model, but it was cheap, and the point was tiny, so people just kept using it and hoping for the best.

I’d already put out a story that I’d been invited to a gallery opening, which would be believed because I had sold some pieces already, after all, and I did have a website and the gallery opening was real.  But I’d told them—the people running the gallery opening—that I wouldn’t be able to go, because my husband and I were going through marriage troubles and about to enter counseling.  I’d gone so far as to book an appointment with one Dr. Sheldon, adding it to Alan’s calendar (which he never looked at—he had assistants to do that for him)—we’d synced our virtual calendars when we first got married and I did add things like the occasional gallery opening to it.  He never went.  It did bother me at the time, but now I was glad—because it made him seem that much worse of a husband. 

Disappearing alone wasn’t that hard to do—I’d managed to get a new ID with another name; because we lived so close to the state line it only took a few trips to the DMV on the other side to set up a fake address with a PO Box, where I had a whole new set of credit cards sent.  I made a new life for myself online.  Easton Miles was cool, sexy, confident—and it was the name I already used when I painted.  She knew what she wanted, and she knew how to get it. No, the truly hard part was knowing that I would be hurting some people that I cared very much about:  Marley; Simson, the owner of the gallery who’d agreed to let me present a few pieces there, where I’d made my first sale; even Janet and the rest of the Martini Morning crowd.  We weren’t especially close, but as I drove away from Wild Flower Meadows at two in the morning I was pretty sure that they’d be shocked at my disappearance.  But after the insurance company found the positive pregnancy test I’d planted (it’s amazing what you can get on Craigslist) they’d never look Alan in the eye again. 

Let’s be clear about something—I wasn’t out to ruin his life, per se.  Just make it miserable enough that he would never, ever, be able to live it down, that every time he went on a date with a woman and she decided to do a Finder search for his name, she’d come up with the article in the local papers about how his house burned down and his pregnant wife disappeared.  One tragedy might be chalked up to bad luck, but two of them, linked somehow, would be sinister enough as to effectively put him off the market for good.  And the noncommittal neighbors, who could only say, “Well, I thought they were fine—working through a rough patch—but who doesn’t have those?  I don’t think he did anything to her, but then again, he never showed up to her gallery openings.”  The last was something that I’d harped upon several times to the Martini Morning people in the past—they’d merely murmured sympathetically, but it wasn’t as if it were their responsibility to get him to go.

I drove out to the middle of nowhere, and got out the bike—something he’d bought back in the day when he was a fitness freak, rode twice, and now languished in the garage.  It was a nice bike.  I hoped whoever stole it would get some pretty good mileage out of it.  I’d spray-painted it red and gold, so that it would be harder to recognize, but the odds of Alan even remembering he had it much less knowing what it looked like, were pretty slim.

I’d calculated that it would take me two hours to ride the bike from the middle of nowhere to the suburban train station, given that I would be carrying my overnight bag and a poster tube of my latest works.  I wasn’t too far off, either.  It was took me a little more than ninety minutes riding on the country roads before I saw the town, and then twenty minutes later I was at the train station.  It helped that there was almost no traffic at that hour. 

By then it was five in the morning.  I left the bike in the bike rack, unlocked, and bought a ticket for the city with a credit card belonging to Easton Miles.  It was my first purchase made under that name—and it finally, really felt like I was getting somewhere.

The fire was chalked up to an accident, a careless mistake with the soldering iron.  The police suspected Alan with some mischief, but they would never be able to prove anything except that he was a total dick of a husband, and made every aspect of his dick-ness known:  “Sources have confirmed that there were DNA samples of at least three people found in the bed.” I wondered what Deborah thought about that. They found the car, abandoned on the side of the road, and no trace of me in sight.  It was a bit of a mystery to them as to why I told people that I was going to a gallery opening and then the car was found somewhere in the complete opposite direction, but while they might make Alan rather miserable for a rather long time, they couldn’t charge him with murder without a body.  And, well, I was very much alive.

I was feeling pretty darn good. 

Easton Miles flew into Philadelphia with an overnight bag and a tube of paintings.  Over the course of a week, she got herself set up with a job as a barista, a new apartment, a new wardrobe.  No more conservative jackets and scoop-necked shirts, no more sensible shoes and sedate jewelry.  I went to work, served coffee for eight hours, clocked out, and painted, went to gallery shows, hung out with people who liked my work and whose work I admired.  I even managed to sell a piece, which was good because I was despairing of ever saving up enough to buy my next set of oils. 

I became known as the “cartoon barista”, because if I had time I would do a quick, funny sketch of the customer as they waited.  They always loved it, and after about three months I started taking on more managerial tasks, like keeping track of inventory and store layout and design.  I got permission to display some of my smaller works in the shop—and managed to close a few sales.

Easton Miles was rocking this thing called “life”, and loving every minute of it.  She was single, hot, and making it as an artist.  I took a vacation to New York one day and basically bought out the Max Factor line of makeup at Sephora.  Where I used to be content with just a light foundation and some mascara, I now began to discover the joys of going totally glam.  I dialed it down a little for work, but now that I could afford to go out again I loved the feeling of being in total control of my life and the men that got up the courage to flirt with me.  But I never took any of them home.   They reminded me too much of Alan. 

And then
she
started coming to the coffee shop where I worked:  she gave her name as Stella, and I drew her as a cartoon star.  She had a lovely smile and an athletic build, and deep-brown, soulful eyes, rimmed with thick, long lashes.  “I heard good things about this place,” she said, when I gave her the order for the first time.  My heart skipped a beat. 

She usually came towards the end of my shift, in the afternoons, always ordering the large latte made with skim milk.  It was a slow time of day, and we often chatted as I wiped the counters and cleaned the machines:  she’d just moved to the East Coast from Chicago.  She was a lawyer.  I told her about my art, and the pieces I’d managed to sell.  “I think that’s really brave,” she said.  “It’s a piece of you, isn’t it? To give that to a total stranger must be totally nerve wracking.”

Finally, someone who gets it
.  Usually when I told people I was an artist, they’d nod, and I could just see them thinking,
Painting a dead cat doesn’t mean you’re an artist, sweetie, but if that’s what you want to believe, go right ahead.
  If the conversation managed to progress to where I’d be able to tell them about the pieces that I’d sold, then their faces would morph from complete disdain to annoyed condescension: 
So you sold a few pieces.  Doesn’t mean you’ll be able to quit your day job
.

“You’re the first person who truly understands what it’s like for me,” I said.  “Thank you for that.”

She smiled sadly, and said, “It’s nice to know I’m not the only one left who has an appreciation for the finer things in life.”

“I know!” I cried.  “Guys these days—they’re all like, ‘C’mon, let me touch your titties—‘”

“—and then if you let them, you’re a slut, and if you don’t, you’re a bitch,” she finished. 

We laughed bitterly.  I picked up my water bottle—free coffee was one of the perks of working in a place called Counting Beans, but I’d learned long ago that there was, in fact, too much of a good thing.  “To progress,” I said. 

“Amen,” she said, raising her paper cup. 

We each took a sip.  “Well, I gotta get back to work,” I said, sighing.  “Floors aren’t going to wipe themselves, you know.”

“Wait—Easton.”  She grabbed my hand, and in that moment a thousand butterflies began to flutter in my stomach.  I’d never been held with such urgency.  “Meet me.  Tonight. Little bar on Sixteenth, between Walnut and Chestnut.”