Vindication: A Motorcycle Club Romance (44 page)

Kellan took a swing at me
again, but this time I was more than prepared. I leaned back as he threw a hard
left hook at my face. I only wished I’d leaned back farther.

I felt Kellan’s knuckle
connect right against my mouth, almost knocking me off balance as I tried to
step backward. His fist twisted as it met my face, the impact lessened, but the
rotation proved enough to tear open a nasty cut on my lower lip.

Behind me I could hear
more of the junkies rousing themselves, shouting for me to get the hell out.
Out the corner of my eye, I caught the glint of something shiny in the one of
their hands. A knife? A needle? Either way, I didn’t want to find out.

Kellan was still
disoriented from whatever drugs he’d injected into his arm. As much as I could
have, I decided not to press my advantage this time. His fellow addicts had all
started to surround me, calling for me to leave, “or else.”

“Forget it,” I said as
Kellan regained some of his bearings and readied himself to throw another
punch. I wasn’t about to get into a fight with my brother, let alone with about
ten other junkies hanging around to watch his back. “This is a waste of fucking
time.”

“Good,” he spat, glaring
at me in the dim light of the foreclosed home. “No one even wanted you back
here in the first place.”

I thought of about a
thousand other things to say back, to kick him where I knew he’d be hurting,
but I knew that if I pushed him too hard, he’d just want to get high and make
it all go away. As angry as I was, I wasn’t going to be the one responsible for
him ODing.

I turned and headed back
through the house, kicking garbage and bottles out of my way as I went. I
wasn’t in a mood to be careful or subtle. In fact, there was only one thing
that I wanted.

In situations like this,
I applied a tried and true method of relieving the stress and frustration that
a life in medicine could accumulate—I found someone to fuck, and that was
exactly what I was going to do tonight.

The sun was already
dipping down over the roofs of the houses when I slammed the door to the
foreclosed crack-house hard, hoping that I’d startle what few junkies weren’t
already up from their drug-induced stupors. I was mad, and I wanted—no,
needed
—someone
to take it out on.

I pressed Iris’ contact
button, listening to it ring all of once before I heard her putting the cell
phone to her ear.

“Slade? What happened?”
she asked, hope tingeing her voice. “Do you have Kellan?”

“No,” I growled, slamming
the door to my car shut and turning the ignition. “Your idiot of a brother
isn’t coming with me, even if I paid him. He hates me with every fiber of his
being, Iris.”

“But why? What happened?”

“He knows, Iris,” I said,
resting my head on the steering wheel. “He knows everything.”

There was silence for a
moment, the only hint that Iris was still there being her soft, rapid
breathing. Everything that I had feared would happen was coming true, and it was
all my fault. I should never have come here.

“I’m going to go get a
drink at Flannigan’s,” I told her as I moved to end the call. “Don’t wait up
for me.”

“Slade, wait,” she said,
making me pause for just a moment. “I’ll come with you. You shouldn’t be
drinking alone.”

“Don’t worry about me,
Iris,” I said. “I can find my own company.”

~
SEVEN ~

Iris

Well, here we were—Slade had done
exactly what I’d wanted him to do, what I’d
asked
him to do. He’d found
Kellan. The only problem was that Kellan, evidently, hadn’t wanted to be found.
Not by Slade, at least. Was this really the fruit of my master plan—the
knowledge that I would never get my baby brother back?

Everybody changes,
I thought, slipping my arms beneath my head.
Everybody changes on you.

I sprawled across my bed in the dark,
thoughts of all the men in my life dancing through my head. There was my
father, who’d treated us like shit and walked out on us. There was my
stepfather, the proud, stubborn man who refused to see reason and still envisioned
me as some kind of child. There was my little brother, Kellan, who was
obviously never going to be the man I’d always thought he would be, one who was
happy and well-adjusted and living up to his potential and
not on drugs.
And then there was Slade, my opportunistic stepbrother who once pumped and
dumped me just to settle the grudge he had against my mom.

How much was I to blame in all this?
What was that saying—that if you meet a few bad apples a day, they’re the
assholes, but if bad apples are all you ever meet, the asshole is you? Maybe I
was the weak link in this equation. Maybe I was the reason that all the men in
my life kept abandoning me and letting me down.

I turned over on my side and curled
up with my trusty pillow, the one I always ended up wrapped around this late at
night. What the hell was wrong with me? And how could I fix it so Kellan
wouldn’t end up dead in a ditch somewhere?

What about me and Slade? Was the
damage there irreparable, too? He was God-knows-where tonight, probably fucking
some bar slut in an effort to clear his mind of all things Iris Walker.

Goddammit. Why did I care so much?

I couldn’t bear the thought of him
bringing some girl back to my apartment. I tried to tell myself it was just
common courtesy—you didn’t do that to your stepsister, no matter what the
case—but the truth was it ran deeper than that. No girl wants to see their ex
balls-deep in their replacement. And like it or not, Slade
was
my ex. It
hadn’t been about sex with him.

Well, not
just
about the sex.

I took a deep breath, trying to clear
my thoughts. The reality of the situation was that Slade had gone through a lot
of replacements since we’d been together, and whoever he brought home wouldn’t
be the first, nor the last, girl he stuck his dick into. Hell, maybe I was
overreacting even worse than that—maybe he wouldn’t come back here at all. If
he was three sheets to the wind, he’d probably end up back at her place and
save me the embarrassment of listening to them fuck, probably in someplace
entirely inappropriate, like my living room.

Jealousy is an ugly
thing,
some distant part of me said. It made me
uncomfortable. Was I jealous of whatever girl Slade had his sights set on for
tonight, possibly even right now?

I startled as the sound of my front door
slamming open echoed through my otherwise silent apartment. I heard a snort,
then a chuckle, and then the door clumsily shut and lock from the inside. Slade
was home. And judging by his staggering gait, he was drunk. And alone. Thank
god for that, at least.

I sat up in bed and was greeted by
an, “ow, fuck!” a moment later. Pulling a short, silk robe over my cami and boy
shorts, I padded barefoot out into the living room where my stepbrother was
swiftly destroying my décor.

“Jesus, Slade,” I murmured, watching
as he toppled over the coffee table and onto my couch. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” he answered, grinning
sloppily. His eyes shone in the darkness, wet and smoldering. “Spent all day
getting my ass kicked. What could be better?”

I flipped the light switch up as my
gaze fell to the cut on his lip. Instinctively, I reached out. “Let me get you
something for that…”

Slade brushed my hand away. “Relax.
I’m a doctor. Jesus.” He glared at one of the end tables, now askew, that he’d
bumped into on his way through the living room. “The hell you got all this
furniture for? Your apartment doesn’t even look like it belongs to a
twenty-five-year-old. It looks…” Slade wrinkled his nose. “Nice.”

I snorted. “It ought to. I’m an
interior designer. Having a shitty apartment would be a waste of my degree.”

“You are?” He blinked at me, eyes
thinning.

I nodded. “Run my own business and
everything.”

“You never told me that,” Slade
murmured.

I shrugged. “You never asked.”

For a second, Slade looked like he
was going to argue with me. He parted his lips, brow creased, and let out a
strangled noise that almost, but not quite, sounded like a word. Then he looked
at me, hard, with a kind of stoniness in his eyes. I almost could have mistaken
him for completely sober.

“Kellan doesn’t just know about us,
Iris,” he said, jarring me from any pretext of a pleasant conversation. “He
thinks I raped you.” He wet his lips, the corners of his eyes creasing. “Is
that what you think happened between us?”

My stomach turned. “No!” I said,
shaking my head vehemently. “No, Slade. That’s not what I think at all. Jesus,
why the hell would I say something like that, make up a lie about what happened
between us?”

“Revenge,” he suggested with a shrug.
“Payback for me leaving. For what I did to you.” He reached down and started
taking off his shoes. “Make me get on a plane, make me go to the worst part of
town to talk to a kid I haven’t seen in years, make me feel all responsible for
his downward spiral—and then let him punch me in the face.” Slade’s eyes met
mine again as he peeled his socks off. “Iris, if you’d ever wanted to stop…”

“I didn’t,” I said, maybe for the
first time out loud. My heart was racing. I’d never meant to bring all this
down on Slade’s head. All I’d wanted was my little brother back. The way
Slade’s pulse throbbed in his neck, the way his eyes shone—I could tell he was
upset. And not just in an “I’m angry and drunk and a dickhead” way. What Kellan
had accused him of—what his own father thought of him—had hit him like a ton of
bricks.

I thought back to our tryst. From the
very first moment to the very last, I’d wanted Slade Jarvis more than anything
in the world. He was a sweet, sexy, smart as hell twenty-one-year-old, and I
was the eighteen-year-old virgin who fell in love with him. For years, I’d told
myself it was all an act, that Slade never felt anything for me, that I’d been
a pawn, a tool to get back at his father for whatever sin Slade thought he’d
committed.

Looking into his eyes now, I realized
I was wrong. Slade did care. He cared a whole hell of a lot.

“I didn’t want you to stop,” I said
softly, afraid of those words and what they meant. “I never wanted you to stop,
Slade. Because I trusted you. I…” My throat was suddenly hoarse. I swallowed,
hard. “I loved you. And I thought you loved me, too. You betrayed that, and
yeah, I’ve thought once or twice about revenge…” More than that, but that was
beside the point. “…but not like this. I never wanted to—”

“Iris,” Slade said much more gently
than I’d imagined he could. He stood up off the couch, beginning to undo the
buttons on his shirt. “I believe you.”

I blinked. Tonight, Slade was just
full of surprises. My gaze fell to his fingers working at his shirt. “Wait,
what are you doing?”

“Getting comfortable,” Slade said,
shrugging out of his shirt. He had a little trouble with the sleeves, but once
he’d gotten them off, he was naked from the waist up. “What’s it look like?”

I bit my lip, hard, to keep from
answering him.
It looks good. Damn good.

Slade’s chest was perfectly chiseled.
He’d kept in shape—hell, he was probably more ripped than he was when we were
teenagers. The tattoos he’d gotten back then were as striking as ever, the
black ink playing perfectly against his sun-kissed, ivory skin. I remembered them
like yesterday, like I was still up on the counter in our parents’ pool house,
digging my nails into Slade’s flesh. My feminine core throbbed and I shifted
just a little to accommodate the hot drop of lust that stained my inner thighs.

“I… I dunno,” I finally stammered
when Slade didn’t release me from his glare. “Just… shouldn’t you be in your
room with whatever girl you decided to hook up with?”

“Do you
see
any other girl
here, Iris?” he asked, slowly rising from the couch. God, I loved the way his
muscles bunched and flexed. “It’s just us, sis. Just me and you.”

I swallowed thickly, looking up into
Slade’s eyes. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, or what I was supposed to feel.
Relief that he hadn’t brought anyone home—the sting of old wounds opening once
again—and even a thrill as my stepbrother, the first man who’d ever touched me
in
that way,
was standing shirtless in my living room. It was so confusing, so
overwhelming, but I didn’t want it to stop. I
liked
the thrill.

I was so transfixed by Slade’s stare
and my own dizzying emotions that I hadn’t noticed he’d dropped his hands to
his belt buckle until I heard the sound of it coming undone. I gasped, taking a
step backward as he toyed with the button on his pants.
Holy shit. What is
he doing?

“Slade,” I began, but it was too
late. My stepbrother already had his pants unzipped. They dropped to the floor,
just like my stomach, and despite my best efforts, my gaze focused in on what
lay between my stepbrother’s legs.

Oh, God.
In
addition to his ego, his dick had gotten bigger, too.

Even though Slade was wearing boxer
briefs, the outline of his swollen member was enough for me to make a judgment
call. Its girth pushed through the form-fitting fabric, stretching it so that
it was almost see-through. It lay up against his hip, so long that the tip of
it was pushed up beneath his waistband. As I stared at it, I saw it throb, and
I answered that single pulse with one of my own.

I wet my lips. It had been so long…

“My eyes are up here, Iris,” Slade
said, taking a slow, steady step toward me. I dragged my gaze up his body to
see him smirking. That curl of his lips, that knowing flash in his eyes—I
wanted to call it presumptuous. Cocky. But I couldn’t. Not when I couldn’t keep
the rhythm of my heart in check. Not when I was feeling exactly the way Slade
anticipated I would.

“I never apologized for what I did to
you,” he said, the shadows playing over the swells of his abs, the hard planes
of his hips, his chest, his
cock.
“And if you’d asked me to years earlier,
I probably wouldn’t have. I was young and stupid and got it into my head that
the most important thing in the world was to break our little family apart. I
was angry at my dad for forgetting my mom. I was angry at your mom for sticking
her nose where it didn’t belong. But you? I was never angry at you, Iris.” He
licked his lips and continued his pursuit.

“You know why there’s no sexy little
bar slut in your apartment tonight, sis?” he asked as I backed up into the
wall. I was reminded suddenly of the room we’d found ourselves in at the
hospital, how I’d very nearly given into a twinge of dark desire there. Slade
put one hand on either side of my head, effectively boxing me in, forcing me to
stare into his blazing eyes. “She’s not here because she couldn’t give me what
I need. What I’ve been craving ever since your tight, goody two-shoes ass
walked into my hospital.”

His
hospital.
Goody two-shoes.
Anger flared in my chest and I inhaled it,
welcomed it, used it to clear my vision and see my stepbrother for what he
really was. He was an arrogant prick. He always had been, and he always would
be.

But was that all Slade was? Didn’t I
have fond, vivid memories of all the other things he could be? His tender
caresses. The heat of his mouth when it found my throat. The way he used to
steal kisses on my cheeks and forehead in the halls. Those were the memories
that gave me pause, that made me believe that Slade Jarvis wasn’t just my
dickhead stepbrother. I wanted to believe, so desperately, that what he’d once felt
for me was real, even if at the end, it had been tainted by anger at his
father.