Escape: A Stepbrother Romance (18 page)

I knew what would happen next. It was what I’d wanted for weeks, but this wasn’t how I’d imagined it happening. This wasn’t how I wanted it to happen, but I wasn’t strong enough to stop it either. She pressed her lips against mine and kissed me. My hands went to her face and held her clammy wet cheek firmly as the kiss deepened.

My other hand moved down to her ass and squeezed it firmly. Her lips parted from mine briefly as she whimpered with pleasure from the sensation of my cock pressing against her pussy.

Suddenly, as if she’d been daydreaming and had just woken up, she pressed her hands against my chest and pushed away so hard she fell back onto her bed.

“Get out,” she yelled. “You’re disgusting. This is disgusting. Just leave. Please.”

I walked out and slammed the door behind me. That’s what I get for trying to help someone. This is why I limit my relationships with women to sex. I can’t deal with the tears. I hadn’t even wanted to fuck her. I just wanted to hold her while she cried. That was the scariest thing of all.

I kissed him. He hadn’t kissed me. He hadn’t taken advantage of me when I was upset. Once again, I’d been the one to make the first move and only had myself to blame. I’d been upset, but that didn’t excuse it.

When Caiden told me that Sheri was a fraud, I’d felt like my entire life was collapsing around me. I knew I was being overly dramatic, but the dream of having a career in the food industry had been one of the few things keeping me going recently.

My best memories were of cooking Sheri’s recipes with my mum, so finding out she just copied those recipes from someone else didn’t just destroy my chances of becoming a successful recipe developer—it shattered treasured memories I’d shared with Mum before the crash.

Caiden should have just kept insulting me. He should have made fun of me for crying and for being so pathetic. I could’ve handled that. I would’ve known what to do. The sense of shock I’d felt when he pulled me into his strong arms for a hug added to the explosion of emotions going on inside my body. One second I had been crying and the next I’d wanted him inside me. I had no idea where it came from, and it confused and frightened me. Still, I should’ve known better than to kiss him.

After yelling at Caiden, I lay down on my bed and resumed crying until I fell asleep. I woke up about an hour later and tried to work on setting up my blog. It suddenly felt so pointless. I was just one of millions of people with a website. I could never make any impact on the food industry, not when there were people like Sheri out there with an established fan base and apparently no morals.

I couldn’t get any work done, so I spent a few hours going through Sheri’s cookbooks and seeing how many of the recipes I could find online. I couldn’t find anything from the older cookbooks—the ones that largely predated the Internet era—but I quickly found a few recipes in the newer cookbooks that appeared to be copied from elsewhere.

The names of the recipes had been changed and the measurements converted from metric to imperial, but otherwise they were the same. Even the description of the food and the cooking process seemed to have been copied, in some cases word-for-word. As Caiden had said, not only was Sheri deceitful, she was also a lazy. If she’d gone to the effort of editing the descriptions even a little bit it would have been much harder to accuse her of copying.

I created a new email account and sent a few emails to the owners of the websites that have been copied from and pointed them in the direction of Sheri’s cookbooks. Perhaps they had already been paid off, but if they hadn’t been they would at least have the chance to earn some money from Sheri’s fraud.

Caiden went for a run in the afternoon and managed to avoid me for the entire day. I’d been hoping to bump into him so that I could apologize, but I didn’t have the confidence to seek him out to do so.

When I went to sleep that night I felt lower than I had in quite a while, but there was also a positivity there too. I knew what I had to do now. The blog wouldn’t go anywhere; it had been a pipe dream from the start and I should have known that.

I was going to Cambridge like my father wanted and from there what happened, happened. I wouldn’t be living my dream, but at least I knew what was going to happen over the next couple of months. The certainty helped me relax. I might not like my father, but he’d always provided a rigid structure for my life and in many ways that had made things easy for me.

With Caiden and the blog, I’d tried to rebel against him, but that was pointless. I decided to give up on the blog and make sure I didn’t develop any emotional attachment to Caiden. That meant I needed him to go back to being a sleazy jerk who just talked about fucking me. Maybe I could even give in and fuck him, I thought as I drifted off to sleep. Fucking him was better than crying in his arms.

The next morning I woke up early for the away day. I considered one final act of rebellion by wearing the clothes I wanted to wear instead of my dad’s choice, but I didn’t have much time and if we ended up arguing then we would be late.

I slipped on a modest skirt and a blouse and looked at myself in the mirror. If I pulled the skirt up a few inches and unbuttoned the blouse a bit then I would a touch sexy. But who was I trying to impress?

Caiden wasn’t going, and there sure as hell wouldn’t be anyone among the solicitors at my dad’s firm worth impressing. His firm hired people with a singular focus—people like him—and the last thing I wanted was someone like my father. I added a cardigan and pearl necklace to my outfit and reluctantly headed downstairs.

“Well, you look… boring,” Caiden said.

“Actually, for once I agree,” I said, relieved that Caiden was back to his offensive self. I’d never really thought of my outfits as boring before. I knew they were formal, but my dad went to work every day in a suit. Formal was what a lot of people did. Now the outfit felt depressing and even claustrophobic, like the clothes were suffocating me.

“I like the pearl necklace,” Caiden said.

“Really?”

“Yes, I do like to see a pearl necklace on a woman. That’s not the kind of pearl necklace I have in mind for you though.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I knew from the grin on his face that his words had some kind of sexual connotations, but I’d never heard of anything sexual involving a pearl necklace. I made myself sound naïve by asking, but it was a bit late to act experienced around Caiden.

Caiden stepped forward and fingered the pearls around my neck. “The pearl necklace I have in mind for you involves me shooting my load over your chest. If my aim is good,—and without sounding like I’m bragging it usually is,—I can make a decent representation of a pearl necklace.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said, although I found myself laughing.

“You would look beautiful with my cum over your chest. I can’t wait to spray all over those pert little nipples of yours.”

I didn’t tell him that would never happen. I didn’t tell him to go away. I liked it when he spoke to me this way. This was the Caiden I could deal with.

“It all sounds rather messy,” I said.

“It can be,” he said with a shrug. “A few tissues should be kept close by, although everything is a lot cleaner if the woman just swallows the whole thing in the first place.” Caiden put his finger on my lips and then used it to gently open my mouth. “You reckon you can fit my cock in this tiny mouth of yours?”

“I’m sure I could,” I replied, pushing his finger out of my mouth with my tongue. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to.” I smiled at him and then quickly backed away as I heard my dad’s bedroom door open.

“If I didn’t know better,” Caiden said, “I’d swear you were teasing me.”

“You ready?” Dad asked as he arrived at the bottom of the stairs.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I looked around for Sheri, but she was usually the last one to be ready. Probably applying the final touches of makeup to her face.

“You know what,” Caiden said, “I think I will come, after all. It’ll just take me a minute to get changed into something more boring.”

“You’re only coming if you can act like an adult,” Dad yelled after him.

Caiden came back down the stairs a few minutes later in chinos and a polo shirt. He looked like he was ready to play golf. He’d fit in with my dad’s friends perfectly.  

Even though he had dressed ‘boring’ he still looked good. The polo shirt was tight enough to show off the form of his chest and his biceps made short work of the sleeves. The chinos hugged his ass and reminded me of the time I’d grabbed hold of it the first time he screwed me.

Sheri came down the stairs a few minutes later. I couldn’t even look at her. Whereas before I had seen a woman who successfully created her own business and became a minor celebrity, now I just saw a fraud. A fraud who had been present during some of my favourite moments with my mother. Tainted memories.

“Let’s take two cars,” I said to Dad. “There’s four of us going now, and I don’t like being in the back seat of your car. It’s too cramped. Caiden and I will take the second car.

“Fine,” Dad said. “You can follow me there. Try not to get lost.”

I didn’t bother pointing out to Dad that I had my own sat nav, not to mention about one hundred apps on my phone that could easily get us there. In the end, we beat Dad there by using an app that collected live traffic data to avoid a congested road.

Caiden stared at me the entire way there as I drove. He kept commenting on my body. Sometimes he just said nice things like telling me my legs were well-toned, while other times he talked about how my nipples would stiffen in his mouth the next time he sucked on them.

Much to my annoyance while driving, my nipples had actually reacted in the same way he described in his fantasies. Something had changed between us after yesterday. We were both joking around a lot more, and I had all but given up denying that his descriptions would come true. His words now sounded like foreplay as opposed to him trying to annoy me.

Sex with Caiden now felt like part of my future as well as my past. At some point it was going to happen; it was just a matter of when.

---

Dad had been worried about Caiden misbehaving, but he should’ve been more concerned with me. It wasn’t that I misbehaved as such, but I certainly didn’t act exactly as Dad wanted me to. He tried to show me off as the perfect daughter who had achieved excellent grades and would soon be going to Cambridge.

The other partners at the law firm asked me questions about the degree I was studying for and where I would be living in Cambridge. Unfortunately, I hadn’t given any consideration to that. I knew very little about the PPE degree subject matter because I’d only chosen it at Dad’s insistence. I certainly hadn’t given any thought to where I would live when I got there. I ended up just nodding along and looking serious the entire time. I could see Dad wanted me to perform a little more enthusiastically, but I just couldn’t find the energy to do so.

The first few hours of the day consisted of the solicitors backslapping themselves over excellent annual results and some of the bigger case wins. A few of the other partners had brought their families along as well and they spoke of them in patronizing terms, thanking them for their support in a way that made it clear the wives were not really appreciated at all.

Once all the self-congratulatory stuff was over, the solicitors split up into teams and started doing some friendly competitive sports. Nothing too extreme. I followed them around as they completed archery and had to climb a wall that could barely have been more than fifteen feet high. Dad celebrated like he’d climbed Everest.

The entire thing was cringe inducing and I kept waiting for Caiden to break down and start misbehaving. Instead, he spoke to the partners and asked them questions about their careers as if he were legitimately interested in becoming a solicitor—or a lawyer as he kept calling them—himself. He made up convincing lies about his plans to attend Harvard or Yale in the next year and how he would eventually go to law school. He kept a straight face the entire time and almost had me believing him.

Over lunch, the topic of conversation returned to work, and the managing partner role came up more than once. I spotted at least three other candidates for the position talking about themselves and how they were reluctantly putting themselves forward for the position because they thought it was in the best interest of the firm.