RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (3 page)

“Goodie!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together. People from the adjacent tables turned their heads. Scenes from childhood filled my mind, of my mom being way too loud in public places. It had embarrassed me when I was younger, especially in my early teenage years, but I had gotten used to it now. I didn’t shrink in my chair, as I would have back then. “Because I have some news!” she went on, in the same chirpy tones.

“Oh, yeah? What news?”

“I’m seeing somebody!” she laughed, flashing her teeth. “His name is Andrew, Andrew Wright. He lives in America, but he’s down here for some business thingy—I don’t know exactly. I’m not exactly the business type, you know.”

She looked at me expectantly. She often looked at me—at everyone—like that, with an expression that waited for laughter. And then you felt that you had no choice but to laugh, because she was looking at you so seriously. I laughed the fake laugh I’d perfected throughout childhood. She nodded, apparently pleased, and launched forth into her description of the man. Even if she was annoying, and she was, a little, seeing her so animated, so alive, was infectious. I found myself smiling with her.

Andrew was a businessman, but he liked art. They had met at Mom’s art show last year, when he’d been in Bristol for another ‘business thingy’ and had kept in touch via web chat since then. Now he was in Bristol for the whole summer: he and his daughter. “I want you to meet them,” Mom said, her eyes bright with excitement. I smiled back. I couldn’t help but smile back. “Please,
please
, say you will!”

“When is it?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight!” I hadn’t any particular plans. I was just surprised by how short she’d left it. But I shouldn’t have been, I thought after my initial shock. Mom didn’t just look like a hippie. She was pretty hippie-ish in her outlook on life, too. I nodded. “Of course I will,” I said.

I couldn’t say no to her when she was this ecstatic. It would be like shooing a yapping puppy away. But I would have said no in a heartbeat if the woman from last night had somehow found me, if she had somehow gotten my phone number and texted me. Yep, in a heartbeat.

That woman . . . in my mind she was like a never-ending explosion of fireworks. Every time I thought of her I got hot.

And I didn’t get her goddamn name!

Jessica

For the first few moments after waking, I was sure it had all been some mad dream. It didn’t feel real in the slightest as I sat up in bed, my eyes crusty with sleep, my head pounding slightly with wine, my body aching, my pussy sore, the sounds of cars and people filtering into my hotel room. No way, I thought. No way did last night actually happen. But the wolf mask looked up at me from the floor, with eyes that were a little judgmental, telling me that it really
had
happened. I, Jessica Wright, was in England, and had gone to a masquerade party, and had fucked some guy whose name I didn’t even know.

Nervous, mouse-like Jessica, who was still struggling to speak up in English class and still had to try hard to make eye contact with the lecturer, had fucked a
guy I didn’t know
. I could repeat it to myself a hundred times and it still wouldn’t seem real. It was too mad, too unlike something I would do. I truly couldn’t—

My train of thought was interrupted by my phone. I hopped up from bed, my arms and legs yelling at me to give them a rest, and found the phone on the table in the corner. I swiped to answer and set it to speaker. “Dad,” I said.

“Jess,” Dad said. He had lived in Texas for twenty-five years, before I was born, but still had his British accent. “How was the party?”

“Great,” I said, cringing at how small the word was compared with what had happened.
Great
did not include the life-changing thing I had done.
Great
did not encapsulate the kaleidoscopic range of emotions that were currently causing my feet to tap wildly like my legs wanted to dance but my feet had forgotten how. My hands were opening and closing, too, over and over. My heartbeat seemed to move through my body like something manic. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying desperately to bring myself back to this room. I’m not with him anymore, I had to remind myself. I’m here, not with him. Not in that other hotel room with a muscled, tattooed lion leaning over me.

“Jess?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly. How long had I gone without saying anything, wrapped up in the night, in the unutterable pleasure of it all? I had no idea. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“Oh, okay, good,” Dad said. “Can we meet for breakfast? I have something to tell you.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. In my current state (dangerously closed to a panic attack, I was sure) surprises were the last thing I wanted. “Is it good news?” I asked, trying to keep the pathetic hope from my voice. A mad thought entered my mind. Dad knew. He knew what I had done and he was going to tell me off like I was a kid again and he had caught me shoplifting. My fingernails bit onto my palms. And then I remembered the way they had bit into the lion’s back—“No, I won’t think of that,” I murmured.

“Pardon? I didn’t catch that.”

I cleared my throat. “Good news, I hope?”

There was a pause. Did Dad know how many horrible scenarios I imagined in that pause? How many impossible, ridiculous scenarios? I saw him leaning over me, calling me brutal names he would never call me in real life. But that’s anxiety for you. It amplified even the most innocent situations into something massive and foreboding. And what I had done was far from innocent. With the wolf mask gone, I was just Jess again, and I had to face it.

“Yes,” Dad said, finally. His voice was chirpier than I had heard it in a long time. “Yes, it’s definitely good news. Shall we meet downstairs in half an hour?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said quickly. I wanted him off the phone. I felt sick, and not just from the wine. The horrible part was that I
knew
I was overreacting. But anxiety didn’t give a whit about knowledge. It was only interesting in how you
felt
. “I’ll see you then.”

Without waiting for him to reply, I hung up the phone and ran to the bathroom. I leaned over the bowl for around five minutes, but nothing would come out.

Jessica

I left my hotel room feeling weaker than I had in a long time. College days caused some morning weakness, that was for sure (waking at five am with the urge to vomit, covered in sweat, hazy images of the drunken night before swimming through your heavy head, mouth so dry your tongue sticks to your mouth), but this was something else. This was the lion. I couldn’t get rid of him. He clung to my mind. I tried to shake him away—to shake what we did away—but he came back stronger. His muscles were huge and honed and hard in my mind. His cock was even bigger. His hands were skillful. His breath was fire-hot.

I walked down the hallway like an automaton, so focused on my own thoughts that the outside world barely seemed real. It was impossible, for me, to associate this timid woman walking down the hallway and the mad wolf from the night before. This woman was quiet, shy, scared of everything. The wolf was daring and did things that I would never do.

It was a trick of the light, of course it was, but when the elevator opened and the mirrored wall came into view, for a brief flicker of a moment I thought I saw the lion, standing behind me in the hallway. Then I blinked my tired eyes and he was gone. I started slightly, taking a step back, but there was an old couple in the elevator, eyebrows raised, waiting impatiently.

I kept my eyes down as I made my way to the restaurant. Dad was sitting at a table near the window that overlooked Bristol Bay. “It used to be a slave city,” he’d told me, smiling widely. “And tobacco, and—well, everything. Fourth largest city in the Elizabethan era.” Dad, with his farmer accent (which was similar to the Bristol accent) was so proud of knowing its history because he had grown up near here as a boy. Just fifty or so miles to the west, in a town called Weston-Super-Mare which I had never been to. For some reason that came to me when I greeted him that morning. Maybe I was trying to distract myself.

He stood up, his chair making a low screeching noise on the linoleum floor, and walked around the table. His shoes, shining as usual, clopped toward me. “Jess!” he smiled, and threw his arms around me.

“Dad,” I said.

Nobody looking at us then, I thought, would have judged us to be father and daughter. Here was this tall English man with a farmer’s accent in a pristine suit, balding slightly on top, hair stuck down to his head, a few grays here and there, a few lines here and there, booming across the restaurant so that people turned in surprise. And here was this young Texan woman, short, blonde, and timid. Yes, timid. I could tell I was not the wolf today by the way I flinched, their eyes like burning coals, their sneers like gargoyle’s grins, peering at him like some twisted faces from a horror novel, when the people from the nearby tables turned to look at us at Dad’s loudness. I rushed him to the table. I couldn’t stand the angry stares of the Brits any longer. That was one thing I had observed in my travels. Brits
hated
public noise like that.

He ordered a full English breakfast. I ordered toast and some orange juice. “Best sausages in town, here,” Dad said. “Are you sure you don’t want one?”

“I’m sure.” I smiled. Maybe I was being too miserable. Maybe he would sense something. The idea made me clench my knees under the table. It was completely irrational, but I suppose it was that kind of morning. “I’m still a little hung over.”

Dad laughed and nodded. “Okay-dokey.”

He talked for a while about his job. Maybe it sounds bad, but I often tune out when Dad talks about his job. He works with numbers, manipulating numbers for big corporations so that they can analyze statistics (or something like that). Truth be told, I have never been exactly sure what he does, only that he gets paid extremely well for it and it was a good decision for him to start up his own firm. My mind, which was used to delving into Hardy and Scott Fitzgerald and Shelley and Bronte, was not built for business; few English literature students’ minds were, I found.

When the breakfast came, he abruptly stopped the business talk.

He crunched a sausage in half in one bite, laid the remains on his plate, and then rested his chin on his clasped hands. “Jess,” he said. It was the
Jess
which came before
your mother left us
or
I found a cigarette in your school bag
or
you need to work harder at school
or any number of horrible childhood moments. The tone was unmistakable. He wanted to tell me something big. Dread immediately invaded every part of me. I clasped my knees harder. My toes wriggled in my sneakers as though they wanted to crawl away. Heartbeat, that’s one word for it . . . it was like a giant was jumping up and down in my chest. Anxiety’s a bitch, I thought in the haze.

“Yes?” I asked, my voice wobbling.

Dad didn’t seem to notice. He barreled on with the air of a man repeating a well-learned speech. “As you know, I have been single now since you were four, when your mother left and moved to Australia with her lover.” There was no bitterness in his voice. Both of us had gotten over that long ago. Mom was happy in Australia. Dad was happy to let her go. And I was happy because I barely remembered her and she had never tried to take an interest in me. I had long ago stopped worrying about the woman who had once sung to me in a half-remembered dream. He took a deep breath and went on. “Since then, I have not had a girlfriend. I know it’s not something you want to hear from your dad, but I’ve been lonely. Well,” and here he paused dramatically, looking out at the bay for a moment before turning back, “I’ve found somebody!”

His face lit up, and I unclasped my knees. “Is that the news?” I dared to ask.

“Yes.” He creased his forehead in confusion. “Why?”

“Just—” My toes stopped wriggling. My heartbeat slowed. I had been a fool, I realized, to imagine that Dad could know anything about last night. I had let my anxiety get the better of me, as I had done a thousand times before and no doubt would do again. “Just, I’m so happy for you!” I laughed, half with relief that he did not know what a certain wolf and lion had done the night before, and half with genuine happiness for him. “Who is she?”

“Her name in Annabelle Finch,” Dad said. “She’s an artist—a painter. I met her last year, at a gallery where she was displaying some of her work. Excellent work. I like a bit of art here and there—you know that—but I’m no expert. But even
I
could see how excellent this was. And, anyway, we got to talking and kept in touch online and now that we’re here for the whole summer, we’ve decided to meet.”

“That’s great, Dad,” I said. “Really, that’s fantastic.”

“And I want you to be there,” he went on. “Tonight. Me, you, Annabelle, and her son, Eli.”

I saw no reason to refuse this. I was so happy that he had not somehow divined by activities from last night that I would have agreed to meet anybody. “Of course,” I said.

He nodded once, and then turned to his food.

It’s over, I told myself. You did what you did, but nobody will ever know. Not even the lion will know. It’s done, you silly girl. Relax! You’ll never see him again!