Defender: A Stepbrother Romance (12 page)

I
could still taste
him on my lips. Even as I sat at the kitchen table with Dad on one side and Vera on the other, all I could think about was the feel of Crawford’s hands on my body. I wondered—a ridiculous thought—if they could see the heat of his touch glowing on my skin. I wondered if they could tell simply by looking at me how hard it had been to let him walk away from me when Mom called everyone in for lunch. Perhaps they could see what was happening between us when he looked at me and my train of thought evaporated.

I almost expected someone—anyone—to say something. But the only one who seemed even remotely aware of the tension between us was his assistant. She shot me a few confused looks during our meal. But other than that, all anyone seemed interested in were the files we’d been going through for the last few hours.

“What exactly happens when we go to trial?” my Dad asked Crawford.

“We begin with opening arguments. The prosecutor will lay out his case, describing how he believes the accident happened and how it proves that Eden was drunk and that she was reckless in getting behind the wheel of a car.” He glanced at me, his eyes softening as they moved over me. “Then I get my chance. I’ll outline how I think the accident happened and discuss the fact that Joel, the other driver, was likely drunk at the time of the accident and how his recklessness contributed to the accident.”

“You think he was drunk too?” Daddy asked.

“I do. And I think the police are covering up that fact.”

“But the cop at the hospital said they had a test that showed Eden was quite intoxicated. He told me that it was more than twice the legal limit.”

Crawford focused on him a little closer. “What exactly did he say?”

Daddy shrugged, his eyes moving to Mom. “You were there, babe. Didn’t he say twice the legal limit?”

She nodded. “We were in the emergency room. It was loud and chaotic. She was still unconscious,” she said, gesturing toward me. “But, yeah, I remember hearing him say that.”

“Then why didn’t they arrest her then?” Crawford asked.

“Should they have?” I asked, imagining myself in handcuffs while I was still unconscious in a hospital bed.

Kendra seemed surprised that I would even ask such a question. “It is routine.”

That made my head spin a little. My arrest had been traumatic enough. The thought that it should have happened sooner made me a little sick to my stomach.

“We should talk to the cop,” Crawford said to Kendra. She nodded and immediately got up, pulling her cell phone from her pocket. I watched her go, torn between jealousy at her relationship with Crawford and gratefulness that she seemed so completely competent. I needed as much competence on my side as possible.

We went back to work a little later, but I couldn’t concentrate on the task at hand. I literally couldn’t read the sheets of paper I was trying to organize because each time I saw my name attached to such an official looking case number, my vision got cloudy. Dad came up behind me and slid his arm around my shoulders.

“You want to go for a walk?” he asked.

We went out through the back door and wandered along the pasture that once fed dozens of cattle but now was overgrown except for the well-tended flower garden Mom put in shortly after she moved in with us. I remember how much I hated it. Every day of my short life at that point had been spent waking in the morning and looking out at the overgrown grass and sage brush. And, suddenly, there was a bright spot of color that really pulled the whole thing together. But I hated it because it wasn’t mine anymore. It was hers.

“I’m sorry,” I said aloud as I remembered the temper tantrums I had at the time.

“For what?”

“For making it so hard on you when Vera and Crawford came to live with us.”

My Dad laughed. “You were six, Eden. If you hadn’t acted out a little, I would have worried.”

“Yeah. But I was a little terror.”

“You were difficult. But that was partly my fault, too. I felt so bad for you, growing up without a mother that I gave you everything you ever wanted.”

“You still do,” I said, moving closer to his side. “And I love you for it.”

He kissed the top of my head. We walked in silence for a few minutes, both of us lost in our own thoughts. I found myself thinking about my childhood, of all the times Dad and Mom had quiet arguments over something I’d done, I wanted, or I said. There was once or twice I remembered seeing hurt and accusation in both their eyes.

Maybe more than once or twice.

“Was I really all that spoiled?”

My Dad missed a step as he glanced at me. “What do you mean?”

“Did I make your life difficult?”

He chuckled under his breath. “You’re my child. You enriched my life in ways you will never understand.”

“But look at all I’ve done. Look at this mess? You’re spending time you could be using to work on your art to go through legal documents—“

“I would do anything for you, Eden.” He stopped in front of me and grabbed my shoulders. “You are who you were meant to be. And I love you all the more for it. Don’t ever forget that.”

“But I’ve embarrassed you.”

“Psssht,” he snapped. “Who cares about small town gossip?”

“What if I go to jail?”

A pain sliced across his face, but he never looked or pulled away. “Then we’ll deal with it.” His expression softened, and he touched the side of my face. “You don’t have many memories of your real mom, do you? I don’t suppose you would since you were so young when she died.”

I shook my head even as a flash of dark hair rushed through my mind.

“She was a free spirit, not unlike you. So full of life that it was hard to realize that life was being slowly snuffed out of her when she was diagnosed with cancer. But she continued to dress each day, continued to make a presentation of herself because that’s who she was. Nothing could stop her from being who she was.” He touched the side of my face again. “Nothing will stop you from being who you are, either.”

“Not even jail?”

“Not even jail.” He drew me into his arms and held me for a second. “But I do believe Crawford knows what he’s doing and I think he’s going to give these local lawyers a run for their money.”

I nodded as I reached up and kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Daddy.”

I
went back
to my place a while later. I’d done all I could in helping Kendra organize the emails. I tried to be cheerful about the whole thing, but it was hard. Some of the words I saw written on those papers—manslaughter, intoxication, reckless—they were like tiny paper cuts on my soul. And each one allowed a little more doubt to sink in until I could hardly look at the people around me the same way. They all believed in me, believed that I was innocent. But what if I wasn’t? What if I’d never really been innocent? What if I really was the spoiled brat Crawford had always accused me of being?

I stood in the shower for a long time, those thoughts dancing in my mind. Maybe I deserved to go to jail. Maybe it was finally time for me to pay for all my mistakes. And Lord knows I made a lot of them. It wasn’t the first time I’d crashed a car. There was that time when I was fifteen and I snuck out of the house with Jeannie. We took her Dad’s car and ran it up a light pole, because we hadn’t yet learned how to drive, and I thought I could do it better than her. Or the time in college when I borrowed my roommate’s car and my Dad had to pay to have it completely repainted after I left it under a tree in the library parking lot. Who knew that bird shit was so corrosive?

Let’s face it. I’m a fuck up. And I’ve been fucking up all my life. And this…just because I couldn’t remember what happened that night didn’t mean I wasn’t at fault. Yet, Crawford was fighting so hard to clear my name. It made me love him all the more, but at the same time, it weighed my soul down with guilt.

There was a heavy knock on my front door as I stepped out of the shower. With my hair still dripping, I slid into a thin bathrobe and peeked out the living room window. Crawford was standing there, his back to the door as he surveyed the small parking lot and the town beyond it. There was one advantage to being on the third floor. The view was pretty amazing.

I pulled the door open. “Hey.”

He turned, his eyes sliding over the places where the thin, silky robe stuck wetly to my skin, revealing almost as much as if I had simply come to the door naked. He made this noise deep in his throat as he pushed me backward, shoving his way inside, and stole my lips all at the same time. I sighed, the feel of his touch like a soothing balm on my hurting soul. I wrapped my arms around his neck and let him lift me up, my bones turning to molten lava as if no time had passed since our last embrace, as though we were simply picking up from the heated touches we’d shared in my father’s studio.

I was vaguely aware of the front door closing as he carried me through the apartment into my tiny bedroom, cursing against my lips as he hit his thigh sharply on the corner of my dresser. And then we were on the bed tearing at each other’s clothing. He had on far more than I did, and it would have taken too long to work it all off. I chose to concentrate on his belt as he tore open my flimsy robe and began to use his teeth to send shivers of pleasure down my spine. My toes curled as he nibbled at the thin flesh of my throat, the tingles still burning at the small of my back as he took a nipple in between his lips and caused it to elongate and fit the shape of his perfect mouth.

He moved out of my touch, and I groaned, needing to touch him, needing to feel him with my hands. But then he was dropping little kisses all along my belly, and I couldn’t catch my breath. When he urged my thighs apart, I lost my ability to think. All I could do was lie there and let all these exclamations slip from my lips because I no longer had control over my body. Pleasure was always a word that was something of an abstract to me. I mean, I understood the concept. But to feel it—like that? I never could have imagined something so intense actually existed.

He ran his tongue along my outer lips, and I was gone. By the time he found my clit, I was so lost that he could have done anything he wanted to me, and I would have laid there and begged for more. His touch was perfection. It felt like he’d found the secret to my soul and was playing with it, reprogramming it so that I would never be the same when he was done with me. That was something I’d known from his first touch, since that night after my arrest. But I had never imagined it could be so… well… perfect.

When he tired of tasting me, he moved slowly back up my body, his hot breath bathing every inch of me, I could only open to him and welcome the connection that I would never feel with anyone else. I would have thought that when he came inside of me, it would be familiar. It would be like it had been before, and my body would know exactly how to welcome him, how to accommodate his presence.

And it did.

My hips moved at just the right angle, my body opening to him just right. But there was something new about it too, something that wasn’t familiar and more than just the physical fitting together of two bodies. As he stared down at me, pleasure danced in his eyes. He ran his hand slowly against the underside of my arm and moved with a sort of slow determination inside of me. I knew there was something about that connection that would change everything. It would change me, change him, and make us something better.

And that brought tears to my eyes even as my lower belly began to clench with orgasm.

It wasn’t ‘til much later that my sanity came back to me. I watched Crawford sleep, admiring the way he looked when he was completely relaxed. It was a sight not many had ever seen, I suspected. He wasn’t a man who relaxed often. I wanted to touch him, but I didn’t want to wake him, so I contented myself with watching.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen over the next few weeks. I might go to jail. If not, Crawford had a life in New York City. He’d want to go back to his life there, his position with a high powered law firm, his girlfriends and his social life. He wouldn’t want his small-town sister embarrassing him in front of his colleagues. And I…well, there was a lot about me that could stand a little change. I needed to grow up, stop being such a fuck up. But that didn’t mean I was ready to leave my small town behind. I liked the simple life, liked knowing who my neighbors were, liked that everyone knew who I was—even when that led to everyone sticking their noses into my business. I would never fit-in in New York. And I suspected Crawford enjoyed the city too much to come back home.

I ached so deep in my soul at the thought of letting him go that tears streamed down my cheeks just at the thought. How would I ever survive the actual moment of separation? But what other choice did we have? If he stayed there, our parents would learn the truth. I knew Mom would be unhappy, but she’d come around. She wanted her children to be happy. If he found that with me, I’m sure she would be okay with it after a while. But Daddy? He had specific ideas of what was right and wrong. He occasionally bent the rules of those basic morals when it came to me. But this? He would never understand.

I wanted to believe he would come around like Mom. But each time I thought about it, each time the scenario played itself out in my mind, I always came to the same conclusion. He wouldn’t accept it in any way, shape or form. In his mind, Crawford was his son. It didn’t matter that Crawford was conceived by another man. It didn’t matter that he had come to our home after it was already established. It didn’t matter that there were no blood ties between us. In my Dad’s eyes, we were family. And that trumped everything.

So there were three possible outcomes to the situation, and none of them were happy endings:

1. I go to jail.

2. I give up Crawford and remain in my Daddy’s good graces.

3. I lose my Daddy’s unconditional support in favor of a potential commitment from the only man I have ever—and probably would ever—love.

A
bleak future
, no matter how I looked at it.