Escape: A Stepbrother Romance (10 page)

I found the streets here confusing and could imagine getting lost again like I had done yesterday on the way back to the house from the store. The streets of London were a chaotic mess, but there were enough signs and landmarks for me to find my way around. The houses here all looked the same, and half the roads ended up in dead ends and cul-de-sacs.

Vicky walked up a path that seemed to lead nowhere, but ended up coming out on another street which I recognized from yesterday. I looked behind me to remember the path in case I had to walk home alone after the fight with Vicky that would inevitably happen at some point in the next few hours.

I saw a man about two hundred yards behind us walking quickly, but he slowed down when he saw me looking at him. The path Vicky had taken was a shortcut, so it wasn’t entirely surprising to see someone else walking along as well, although there weren’t a lot of people about at the moment.

Vicky took a left then another left then a right and then we kept walking for a few minutes. I looked behind again and saw the man I’d seen before round the corner and keep walking behind us. I often liked to imagine people were following me when I was out walking just to liven things up a little bit, but this time I wasn’t entirely sure I was imagining it.

The man walked behind us the entire way to the pub, but when we walked up to the entrance he took a slight detour and pretended to be looking at something in the window of a nearby shop. If he
was
following me—and I was beginning to think he might be—he wasn’t very good at it. He wore tattered clothing that stood out a mile in the posh suburban area that Vicky lived in.

I couldn’t think of any reason someone like him would be following me; besides, who knew I was here? I only found out I had to come here a few days ago and I hadn’t exactly been in a rush to tell my friends that I was leaving my London penthouse to spend the summer living at some posh house in the middle of nowhere.

Could he be a husband or boyfriend of some woman I’d fooled around with recently? I did try to stay away from the married ones for the same reasons as I generally stayed away from virgins—they weren’t worth the hassle—but at the end of the day, if someone came on to me and I was feeling in the mood I would probably have turned a blind eye to their marital status. Maybe I should stay away from women in relationships; that could be rule number four.

I cringed as I looked at the man. He wore a relatively new pair of sneakers, but everything else he wore looked barely suitable for doing garden work, let alone walking around in public. I hoped to God none of the women I’d screwed were married to him. I always used a condom, but anyone married to him would likely have had at least a severe cold to pass on to me.

I shook my head and looked away, trying to forget he was there. I hadn’t been with anyone since Vicky, so I wasn’t likely to come down with any sudden colds or flus.

“Looks like we’re a few minutes early,” Vicky said, as she pressed her hand to the window and peered through. “I can see a few lights on at the back, so Nicole should open up soon.”

“You know the owner by her first name?” I asked. “I’m impressed. Here was me thinking you’d probably never been here before.”

“I’ve been coming here ever since I was a kid,” she replied.

“Are you allowed in bars when you’re underage then?” I knew the English were more liberal when it came to drinking—especially compared to Americans who insisted on having a drinking age three years older than the age at which you could buy an assault rifle—but even so it seemed weird to let kids in bars.

“It’s a pub,” Vicky said, “not a bar. And yes, you can come in here at any age as long as you are with an adult. You’re allowed in the pub, you just can’t buy or drink alcohol.”

“But surely once you’re inside someone else can just buy you the drinks and you can sit in the corner and get drunk without anyone noticing.”

“I guess. It depends on the landlord really. Nicole doesn’t like underage drinking, because the other pub in the town had a few legal issues with a load of sixteen-year-olds buying booze. She turns a blind eye at Christmas though as long as the drink is bought by an adult. I was drinking vodka and tonics in here at the age of fourteen on Christmas Day.”

“Your dad bought you alcohol when you were underage? I don’t think he wants you to drink alcohol now, let alone when you were fourteen.”

“It wasn’t my dad who bought it for me. It was Gemma, a friend of my mom’s whom I still speak to. Here we go,” she said, taking a step back from the door just before it opened. “Hi Nicole, how are you?”

Nicole looked at Vicky in a daze for a few seconds. She looked like she’d had a long night last night and hadn’t slept much.

“Victoria?” Nicole asked, when she finally spoke. “Well, you look different.”

“I changed my hair,” Vicky said. “I guess it’s been a while since I last saw you.”

Nicole agreed and motioned for us to come inside. From the way Nicole was looking at Vicky, I knew that Vicky’s appearance had taken Nicole by surprise not because of her hair, but because of her clothing. She looked like a completely different person with her pale skin on show. It was a significant improvement on the buttoned up blouses and cardigans that she usually wore and she even seemed to have more confidence and charisma today, as if having more flesh on show helped her feel freer.

“I guess you’re home for the summer now then?” Nicole asked. “I can’t imagine you would start drinking at eleven in the morning if you had school the next day.”

“I’ve finished school now,” Vicky said.  

“Wow, so you’ll be off to university in a few months then?” Vicky nodded but looked immediately despondent at the mention of college. Nicole turned to face me. “Are you a… friend?”

“Yes, a friend,” I responded. Vicky looked relieved, as if she feared I might say something else. “I’m on a study abroad program,” I added. Nicole would recognize the American accent soon enough anyway, so I came out with a preemptive excuse.

“American?” Nicole asked. I nodded. “Interesting, we don’t get many Americans in here. Not that I’m complaining,” she added, smiling at me.

Oh God, that’s the last thing I need right now. The local bar owner wants me too. “What do you want to drink?” I asked Vicky, before Nicole winked at me and started puffing up her chest.

“Vodka and orange please.”

“I suppose you’ll want a Bud Light?” Nicole said to me. “I think I have a few of them out back somewhere, but they might not be cold. That stuff all tastes like piss to me and there’s not much call for it here.”

“I’ll have a pint of the Ringwood,” I said, pointing to the tap in front of me. I had no idea what the beer would taste like, but if my experience in England so far was anything to go by it would be warm and taste much more like piss than any American beer I’d ever tasted.

I hated people to judge me based on obvious stereotypes but when I drank beer it was usually an American brand. That’s why I usually drank whiskey; I didn’t want to be the stereotypical American drinking the crappy beer.

We had the entire bar—I mean pub—to ourselves, so we took a round table in the corner away from the prying eyes of the barmaid. The place seemed a little dingy to me, but I could see the appeal. I craned my neck to look out the window towards the bench where the man who followed me had been sat. He was nowhere to be seen. I was probably just being paranoid, but I made a mental note to keep an eye out for him on the way home.

“Thanks,” Vicky said as she sat down closer to me than she needed to. We had a large seat in a semicircle, but Vicky sat about a foot from me.

“For what?”

“For saying we were friends. I mean, I know we’re not, but I’m glad you said that and not some stupid answer.”

“You mean like telling her I’m the guy who took your virginity, fucked you a few times, and will be your stepbrother in a couple of months?”

Vicky opened her mouth to snap something back in reply, but then shook her head and just muttered “yes.”

“You must really want to spend the summer cooking to talk back to your father like you did back there. What sort of stuff do you like to cook?”

“Doesn’t really matter now,” she said with a shrug of the shoulders. “You heard my dad—I’m to start studying Mandarin soon. I won’t have time to do any cooking.”

I frowned. “I also heard you tell him you wouldn’t do the summer course. Don’t tell me you’re going to go back on what you said? I was just beginning to think you actually had a spine.”

“What would be the point? I won’t win, so I might as well go back there and apologize to him. With any luck he’ll forget all about it by the time I leave for university.”

She took a slow sip of her drink and I used the opportunity to stare at her chest again. I did it subtly enough that she wouldn’t notice, but I still felt a little weird about the whole thing.

I’d never been one to peek at women’s tits before. If I liked a woman’s chest then I usually just got them naked and took my fill while screwing them. For some reason, I just couldn’t stop looking at Vicky’s, even though they were much smaller than my usual preference. I’d been obsessed with them that night and still found myself wanting to grab hold of them and pinch her nipples.

“You shouldn’t apologize,” I said. It pissed me off no end that she was planning to apologize to Roy. He should be apologizing to her not the other way around. “You’ve done nothing wrong, and if you agree to do those Mandarin lessons you’ll have a miserable summer.”

“Maybe not. It could be fun to learn Mandarin and my dad is right; it’s a useful language to know.”

“You’re so you fucking annoying sometimes, you know that?”

She looked up at me with a passion in her eyes that I hadn’t seen since I had on her back in the hotel room. “And you’re a complete wanker sometimes. You know that?”

I laughed. “I know that word is supposed to be an insult, but it just sounds so sweet when you say it. Sorry, but you’re too posh to really offend me. You need one of those slightly rougher accents like the ones from up north or maybe East London. Look, you have already given in about going to Cambridge when I know for fact you don’t want to go. You talked yourself into it like you’re now talking itself into learning Mandarin. I studied Mandarin for a while.”

“You did?”

“Yes. You don’t need to look so surprised.”

“I am surprised. Let me guess, there was some hot piece of Chinese arse that you wanted to pull and you needed to know the language.”

“You really don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you? Do you really think I would learn another language—especially one as hard as Mandarin—just because I wanted to pull some Chinese girl?”

“I suppose not.”

“Good. Because it was
two
Chinese girls and they looked like they could have been sisters. That would’ve been the hottest damn threesome I’ve ever had.”

“Well, maybe I will succeed where you failed.”

“You want to have a threesome with two Chinese women?” I asked.

“I meant, I might be able to learn the language.”

“No, you won’t. You don’t
want
to learn the language and trust me, with foreign languages if you don’t want to learn them then there’s no way you will. This isn’t like passing a math test at school. If you want to develop a high degree of proficiency in a foreign language then you have to be really enthusiastic about it. If you agree to go to these Mandarin lessons they will just be a waste of time and you’ll end up hating yourself for it in the future.”

“I’ll think about it,” she replied. “Now stop whining. I’d hoped to get away from the lectures. That’s why I came here to drink.”

“I can go back to being an asshole if you like?”

“That would be lovely. I know how to deal with you when you’re being an arsehole.”

She could certainly deal with me all right. For a shy, slender virgin, she had dealt with me just fine last week. The way she had climbed on top of me and guided my dick inside her resembled someone with far more experience and confidence than she usually had. She drove me so hard I had been relieved to see the condom was still in one piece when we finished.

I wanted to see that side of her more often. If I could do that, then this summer might be a lot more eventful than it otherwise would be. I leaned forward under the table so that Vicky wouldn’t see my cock stiffening in my pants.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I ignored it the first time, but it vibrated a second and a third time. That could mean I just received a few different messages at the same time, but that would be one hell of a coincidence because not many people had this phone number. There was one girl who always sent me three or four messages in quick succession.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw the messages from Naomi. I groaned and let my head drop forward, nearly knocking over my pint in the process.

“Another rejection?” Vicky asked.

“I wish.” Naomi was apparently just touching base to see how I was, which might have been more believable if she hadn’t immediately followed that message up with another saying that she would be in London soon and wanted to see me. She ended with a picture message of the hotel room she had booked. She was about as subtle as my hard cock was right now.

“It must be tough for you, having all these women throw themselves at you.”

“It’s harder than you think,” I replied.

“Just remember, you can screw whoever you want, but don’t do it in my house.”

“You needn’t be jealous.”

“I’m not jealous,” she said.

“You needn’t be jealous,” I said again, “because I have no intentions of screwing her. She’s going to be in London and that’s far too much effort for me. I told you before, women come to me, I don’t go to them. Besides, why go to all the way to London when I have unfinished business with someone right here?”

“Our business is completely finished. Our business should never have started in the first place.”

“You only have yourself to blame for that. Need I remind you who came on to whom?”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” she said. “It’s not a mistake I intend to repeat.”