Stepbrother Protects (His Twisted Game Book Six)

by Chloe Hawk

  I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have let myself have any hope, not even for a moment. Because a second later the doorknob turned and my mom walked in without even knocking.

  I suddenly realized I’d told Graham to send my mom up without taking into account the fact that Cole’s apartment was a complete disaster area.

  Her eyes took in the scene in front of her coldly, running over the ruined television, the vandalized kitchen, the fact that I was still clutching a butcher knife in one hand.

  I set the knife down on the counter.

  “Well,” she said. “I see your brother is still hanging with the same crowd.”

  And then I knew. She hadn’t come here because she wanted to get away. She’d come here to yell at me, to try to get me on her side. Disappointment washed over me, swallowing up the tiny bit of hope I’d started to feel and replacing it with anger.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “That’s not a very nice way to talk to your mother.” She didn’t sound shocked, even though it was one of the first times I’d ever taken a tone with her.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not in a very nice mood,” I said.

  I saw the first tiny flicker of surprise flash across her face. Her lip looked even worse than it had before – I wasn’t sure if it was the lighting or what, but it seemed like it was getting worse.

  “Mom,” I said softly, suddenly feeling bad for being short with her. “You should really see a doctor for your lip. You might need stitches.”

  She waved me off, and I knew it was useless to argue with her. I’d been trying for years to get her to see a doctor when Gordon had hurt her, but of course she never would. Doctors would lead to questions, which would lead to cops, which would lead to more questions and maybe even an arrest. And obviously my mom couldn’t have that.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  She hesitated, looked around at the Cole’s ransacked apartment. “Avery,” she said. “You need to come home.”

  I almost laughed out loud. “Come home? You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. You’re not safe here, with Cole.”

  “I’m not safe at home,” I countered.

  “You’re safe at home, Avery. I’ve talked with Gordon, and he’s agreed to let you come back, no questions asked, provided you agree not to have any more contact with Cole.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “What Gordon did tonight was fucked up, Mom. He got that cop to intentionally provoke Cole, and then when Cole wouldn’t, the cop came after me. You do know that, right?”

  My mom swallowed, and I saw her shoulders slump just a tiny bit. I could tell she was tired – dark circles lined her eyes, and her face had lost a certain crispness that she used to have. “You know Gordon doesn’t mean the things he does. He’s had a hard life, Avery.”

  I wanted to point out that we’d all had hard lives, mostly because of living with Gordon all these years. But I knew it would be wasted words. I still had to try, though. “Mom, you don’t have to stay with him. You could come here and stay with Cole. We could get away from him. I have a job now, we could use the money to –”

  “You have a job now?” she asked, frowning, the wrinkles between her eyes becoming more pronounced. “What kind of job?”

  “Working for Cole,” I said. “I’m his assistant. At Buchanan Enterprises.” I name dropped the company just for effect.

  “Avery,” she said, her eyes darkening. She took in a deep breath and reached out, grabbing the side of Cole’s granite countertop so hard that I saw her knuckles turning white. “You need to come home with me.”

  “No.”

  “Avery!” Her voice was sharp, and I winced. My mom hardly ever yelled at me. She was usually the complete opposite – shutting down, refusing to talk or show any kind of emotion, even when it would be completely appropriate to do so. “I don’t know what is going with you and your brother, but you’re coming home with me tonight.”

  “Stepbrother.”

  “What?”

  “He’s my stepbrother, Mom, not my brother.”

  “Oh, good,” she said. “Is that how you’re justifying whatever it is the two of you were doing up in that room tonight? How you’re making it seem okay?”

  My face flamed with embarrassment. They knew. Her and Gordon knew what Cole and I had been doing upstairs. Had they heard us? We’d tried so hard to be quiet. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said softly.

  “I think you know exactly what I’m talking about,” she spat. “And you don’t know what or who it is you’re getting involved with, Avery. Cole has done very bad things in his life. Unspeakable, disgusting things.”

  “Like what?”

  She shook her head. “They’re things I won’t talk about, Avery. But they go way back, and you should not be here. He’s dangerous.” Her voice was firm, but a second later it softened just a little. “Please, Avery,” she said. “I need you. We can get through this together.”

  My heart ached for her. Yes, she was a grown woman making her own choices. So on one hand, you could say she wasn’t a victim. But on the other hand, she was a victim – a victim of being beaten down over all these years, of being so demoralized that she’d been convinced she couldn’t have a life without Gordon. She’d been with him so long she thought she deserved the abuse.

  “Mom,” I said. “You can stay here.”

  “I just told you, Avery, Cole is –”

  “He’s what, Mom?” I asked, my voice rising in frustration. “What is it? What is this horrible thing he’s done, Mom? Just tell me.”

  “Avery, please, he – ”

  The sound of the door opening echoed through the apartment, and suddenly, Cole appeared.

  The sight of him took my breath away. There was a cut on his jaw, the red line running ragged up his cheek. His right eye was bruised and swollen, the skin underneath it turning ugly shades of purple and red that faded into an angry tapestry. I longed to run to him, to wrap my arms around him and make sure he was okay.

  “What’s going on?” Cole asked when he saw my mom.

  “Avery?” my mom prompted.

  I looked between her and Cole. I’d never been in the place where I’d been forced to make a decision between my mom and my stepbrother. Actually, I’d never been in a position where I had to make a decision between my mom and anyone. The only time she’d been up against anything in my life was when it was either her or leaving my house. And every single time, she’d won.

  “She just came by to check and make sure we were okay,” I lied.

  “We’re fine,” Cole said. I saw his jaw twitch, and I could tell he was annoyed that my mom was here, that she was bothering me.

  “Well, then,” my mom said. “I guess I’ll be leaving.” She gave me one last long look, giving me a chance to change my mind. But when it became obvious I wasn’t going to, she turned and walked out the door without even saying goodbye.

  As soon as she was gone, I rushed to him. Cole put his arms around me, and a tsunami of emotion overwhelmed my soul. I was so glad he was here, so happy to see him, that I couldn’t hold it in. I started sobbing against his t-shirt, the fabric soft against my cheek, the hardness of his chest a reminder of how powerful he was, how safe he could make me feel.

  “Shhh,” he said, stroking my hair. “Shh, don’t cry. It’s okay.”

  I pulled back and looked up at him, wincing at the ugly bruises that clouded his face.

  “I came to the police station,” I said. “But they wouldn’t let me see you, they said you were going to be there until at least tomorrow. I came back here because you told me to, and I didn’t know who to call or what to do. I was so worried, I – ”

  He silenced me with a deep kiss, his lips pressing into mine. I felt my body sinking against his, his arms holding me tight as he turned me around and pushed me up against the wall behind us. We kissed for a while, until finally, he pulled back and rested his forehead against mine.


  “I missed you,” he breathed.

  “You just saw me a couple hours ago.”

  “A couple hours is too long.” His hand slid down my side, over my hip, slipping up under my shirt and grazing the bare skin of my stomach. His touch sent searing heat through my entire body.

  “Cole,” I breathed. “I was so scared. Are you… what’s going to happen to you?”

  “I’m out on bail,” he said. “We’ll see what happens next. But I have good lawyers.”

  I nodded, feeling choked up, the emotions overtaking me until it was hard for me to speak. The thought of Cole leaving, of him going away to jail, or being in trouble because of me, was too much to bear. And underneath all of that guilt was the selfish idea that if he got put in jail, he would be taken away from me. And this safe feeling he was giving me, the safest I’d ever felt in my life, would be gone.

  “Avery,” he said. “Look at me.”

  I looked into his eyes, and they burned with emotion. “It’s going to be okay.”

  I gave him a tiny smile. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This wasn’t how this was supposed to go.”

  “How what was supposed to go?”

  “I was supposed to be making sure you were okay, making sure you had everything you needed.”

  “You don’t have to take care of me, Avery. I can take care of myself.”

  His words weighed on me heavily, especially when I realized they were true. I didn’t have to take care of him, because he could take care of himself. He didn’t need anyone or anything. He was so controlled all the time, so in charge of his feelings and reactions. Meanwhile, I was falling further and further under his spell, getting so addicted to him that I couldn’t stand to be away from him for more than an hour.

  Yes, he’d said that he missed me. But it was different than the way I missed him. He was a master at stuffing down his feelings, burying them deep inside. Even if he did feel the same way about me that I did about him – and that was a big if – it could never the same. I believed that really had missed me, but if I were to walk out of his life right now, if I were to leave, his heart wouldn’t break.

  Mine would shatter into pieces.

  My stomach did a somersault, and acid burned at the back of my throat. I’d spent so much time after Cole left home trying to make sure I didn’t need him, that I could live my life without him. And now he’d only been back in my life for a short time, and I was already in way too deep.

  He’s done bad things, Avery. Horrible, unspeakable things.

  My mom’s words reverberated in my ears, intensifying the sourness in my stomach.

  Cole pulled away from me and took a step out of the hallway and into the apartment. When he saw what had happened, he froze. His mouth set into a firm line and his hands balled into fists by his side.

  “This is what you came back to?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yes.” I watched him carefully, not wanting to ask questions and upset him, but hoping that if I didn’t push, he might give me some information.

  But I didn’t get any.

  He didn’t scream. He didn’t freak out. He didn’t get angry.

  Instead, he just walked through the apartment, room by room, surveying the damage.

  When he was done, he came back to the kitchen and crossed the room to the bar area. He reached down and pulled out a bottle of something amber-colored and poured some of it into one of the only glasses that hadn’t been smashed.

  He downed the alcohol in one gulp and then poured himself another.

  He didn’t offer me anything to drink, and I didn’t ask if I could have some.

  Instead, I shifted my weight to my other foot. “Um, how did they get in?” I asked.

  “What?” he barked.

  “How did they get in? Because the doorman didn’t –“

  “There’s a back door,” he said. “It connects from the garage, but you need a key card to get in.”

  “So whoever it was had a key card?”

  “Yes. Or they got one somehow.” He swirled his glass slowly in his hand, staring down at it thoughtfully. His face was a mask of concentration and he licked his bottom lip, a gesture I recognized from when he was younger and trying to figure out a particularly hard homework problem or trying to fix something around the house.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering him how he was then, just a boy, so full of life and promise, but just as jaded as he was today.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “We’re not staying here tonight.”

  “Where will we stay?”

  He grinned. “Avery, darling,” he said. “I think it’s time you got a taste of the good life.”

  **

  “This is our room?” I asked half an hour later as Cole led me into a suite at the Embassy Arms Hotel. The Embassy was one of the most exclusive hotels in the city, the kind of place that was written about in tabloids and featured in movies. And it didn’t disappoint-- the room was absolutely mind-blowing. I’d thought Cole’s apartment had been extravagant, but it was nothing compared to this.

  The room was huge, taking up a whole floor of the hotel, its floor-to-ceiling windows letting the lights from the city filter in through the glass. There was a circular bed in the middle of the suite that was covered with a soft-looking black bedspread and flanked on either side by shiny black nightstands.

  The bathroom wasn’t set-up like a real bathroom -- it didn’t have a door and its own separate entrance. Instead, a rectangular glass box ran down the middle of the room, with a tiled shower stall inside of it, a bathtub, and further down, behind a door, a toilet.

  A heavy gold curtain spanned the perimeter of the glass box – you could choose to take a shower with the curtain open, so that you could get the feeling of being outside, with the windows letting the city sky peek through. We were high enough up that no one would be able to see you, even from the buildings across the way, which were all much lower than the towering skyscraper that was the Embassy Arms.

  Outside, on the wraparound balcony, was a bubbling hot tub. Steam slid up from the water in curls before being swallowed up by the night.

  “Wow,” I said. “This place is incredible.”

  “I know.” Cole set our suitcases down on the floor – I still had the backpack I’d taken from our house in Jersey, and Cole had been able to find a few of his things that hadn’t been wrecked. “It’s mine.”

  I frowned. “What’s yours?”

  “The suite.”

  “You mean for the night?”

  “No, I mean, it’s mine. I own it.”

  “You bought this place?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know you could buy hotel rooms.”

  “You can buy anything if you have enough money,” Cole said matter-of-factly. He crossed the room and walked out onto the balcony, and after a second, I followed him.

  I stood next to him as he held onto the shiny silver railing. He stared out across the city, his face serious. I stared at his profile, at the strength of his jaw, the fullness of his lips, the way his hair faded perfectly against the smooth skin of his neck.

  I shivered at how absolutely gorgeous he was – at how strong his forearms looked braced against the railing, how sexy his broad shoulders were.

  “You’re cold,” he said.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Come here.” He reached for me, pulling me into his arms. I rested my head against his chest and closed my eyes, letting myself imagine just for a moment that we were a completely normal couple. That he was my rich, successful boyfriend who’d taken me to this hotel room as a gift, not that he was my stepbrother and we’d been forced here because someone had ransacked his apartment.

  “Cole,” I whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Who did that to your apartment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Best guess?”

  “Someone who works for Jeffrey. Looking for information so they can
cut a deal with the FBI and turn me in.”

  “Would they have found anything?”

  “No.”

  I listened to the beating of his heart through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. I could tell he was tense, and all I wanted was to make him feel better. “I want to make you feel better,” I whispered in his ear.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re tense.” I put my hands on his shoulders. The muscles were tight and knotted. I kneaded at his skin, trying to loosen him up.

  “I’m not tense,” he protested, sounding slightly annoyed that I was trying to imply he was upset. But he was upset – at least, underneath his strong façade, he had to be. There was no way that after everything that had gone on tonight he could have just been completely okay with everything.

  “Okay.” I pulled my hands off his shoulders and took a step back. But my touch must have excited him, because he grabbed me immediately and pulled me back up against him and pressed his mouth to mine.

  His fingers tangled in my hair, his other hand brushing against my face. He kissed me hard and deep, his tongue probing my mouth, his intent clear.

  When we finally broke apart, his blue eyes were blazing with lust and want. I loved the way he was looking at me, loved the way he made me feel when I knew he was about to get dominant with me, when I knew he was about to tell me what to do to him.

  The Cole that had been in bed with me earlier, the one who’d been gentle and tender as he’d made love to me soft and slow was gone. My domineering stepbrother was back, the one who’d taken me in a closet and fingered me, the one who’d made me strip for him in his office.

  “Get in the hot tub,” he demanded. “I want to see you wet.”

  I swallowed. “I don’t have a swimsuit.”

  “You don’t need a swimsuit.” His fingers moved around to my stomach, his fingers dipping under the waistband of my jeans and skimming my skin. “You’ll wear your bra and panties.”

  His fingers undid the button on my pants and slid the zipper down slowly. He kissed me again, his hands moving to my back, holding me strong and firm against his body. Then he slid his hands down into the back of my jeans, squeezing my butt as he kissed me. I was wearing thong, and his hands groped my bare ass cheeks.