Caulder has done what he needed to do, and if it turns out to be Henry, which Dante is almost a hundred percent convinced it is, he’ll find out soon enough. Breaking the news to Sash may be a little more difficult, but he has her now, that is never going to change.
He kisses across Sash’s shoulders, familiarizes himself with the star chart of freckles and moles that pepper her back, and slides his arm out from underneath her. Sash turns with it, desperate not to let him go so easily.
“What time is it?” she whispers, her eyes still shut against the swelling light.
“Early”, Dante says. “Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going?” she says, pulling him instinctively back to her.
“Nowhere, I’m right here”, Dante says, pulling himself upright.
He stays like that a moment longer while Sash rests her head on his thigh, curling up into him. When she’s fallen asleep again, he slides carefully out from underneath her, replacing his thigh with a pillow in the process, and heads out onto the terrace.
From here, he can see out towards the sea, the vastness of the pacific ocean beyond, which spreads out in the thin morning light like a silver blanket. Stood atop one of the largest buildings in the city, a hundred square meters of swimming pool and landscaped gardens around him, his queen still asleep in their chamber and the whole of the city below, Dante feels like a God. He feels completely invincible.
He showers, the memories of yesterday’s incredible fuck coming back to him so vividly his cock springs rock hard and the resistance of relieving himself becomes an even greater distraction than Sash’s father and the licentious photos he’s taken, pulls on a toweling robe and orders breakfast.
While Dante sips freshly squeezed orange juice, the sun still low but strong enough to dapple the terrace with warmth, he checks his watch. Twenty two hours of the twenty four are up. In a couple more, he’ll know the outcome of yesterday’s attack, and for Sash’s sake, he hopes he’s wrong.
“Did you order enough for me?”
Dante turns to the voice. Sash is stood in the doorway, one leg bent behind the other, her arm raised above her head to balance herself against the door frame. As she stretches, the hem of her T-shirt lifts, revealing the slight bump of her belly and a hint of her navel. She’s wearing expensive panties that are just about see through enough to drive Dante wild.
“You should be resting”, Dante says. “You had a major operation yesterday.”
Sash comes over to the table and sits down on Dante’s lap, her hand immediately going to a patch of bare thigh that sticks out in the gap where his toweling robe falls open.
“You said it wasn’t invasive”, Sash says, her hand snaking up to where she knows his cock will be.
“I was talking about what happened after”, Dante says. “I thought you might need to rest because of it.”
Sash is delighted to find that Dante isn’t wearing any boxer-shorts. She gives his cock a squeeze and watches his eyes light up as she does so.
“I’ve rested already”, Sash says, swinging her legs over him so she’s in a straddle. “I’m hungry for more.”
She spreads his gown so it spills into the chair either side of him.
“That right?” Dante says.
Sash bites her lip a little. As soon as he sees her do it, Dante wants to do it to her too. He can’t help but mimic the action and when Sash sees it she leans it for a kiss.
“Uh-huh”, Sash says, her tongue rich with his taste.
Dante pushes the T-shirt off her shoulder a little, exposing her clavicle. First he runs his finger over the delicate bone and then he goes to bite it. Sash squashes her head against his, the sensation too much to bear. She can feel him up against her, wanton and restless.
With a swing of her legs, she’s stood up again, Dante left to watch her, exposed and twitching. Sash takes a croissant, and without a word, stuffs the thing into her mouth. She smiles down at Dante, spins on her heels and heads back towards the french windows. Dante can’t help but smile.
“Where are you going?”
Her back to him, Sash shrugs her shoulders. Just before she gets to the door, she turns, the croissant in her hand now.
“I’m going to have a bath”, Sash purrs. “Want to come and join me?”
Dante is up before she’s even finished the sentence, chasing the squealing girl through the huge hotel suite and back into the bathroom.
On the table outside, Dante’s cell phone begins to ring, ‘Caulder’, coming up as the caller ID.
Chapter 9
There are bubbles everywhere. They climb up the side of the bath and ooze out over the top, drifting lazily to the floor. Sash breaks the surface of the water with her toes, lifts her leg into the air and observes the way the soap runs down her skin.
Dante watches his stepsister with admiration, a stolen moment in the natural fabric of someone else’s life.
“It’ll go wrinkled if you stay in for too long”, he warns.
The bathtub is a roll top victorian on pedestal legs, big enough to fit a whole family. Sash pulls herself towards the edge nearest her stepbrother, foam collecting in her hair as she goes.
“Come back in, and we’ll get wrinkled together”, she says, before splashing him with soapy water.
Dante takes the two small strides to the bathtub. He pulls his sister towards him and kisses her deeply.
Sash tires to pull him back into the water, but she’s not strong enough. Realizing she’ll just have to wait, she kicks away from him lazily, and stretches out on her back, pretending not to be bothered. With her ears underneath the water, the sound of Dante leaving the room comes to her in hollow thuds. She stays like that for a while, one hand on her belly, trying to discern what he’s doing by the way the sounds are interpreted by the bath tub, before she sits up, reaches for the control panel behind her, takes out the remote control and clicks on the TV. She’ll tell him over lunch, she thinks, when he hasn’t got a chance to run away. It’s not like another few hours is going to make much difference.
Sash flicks from channel to channel, happy to idle away a little bit more time in the water, with or without her stepbrother. She passes cartoons, old films, soaps, shopping offers and the news channel twice before deciding to settle upon it, the New York skyline falling away behind the reporter, a distinct and incomparable reminder of home.
“…Found this morning by a pedestrian out walking their dog”, the square shaped reporter comments. Sash settles back into the water, having the TV on in the background enough to satisfy the momentary absence of her stepbrother. She turns water around her body and investigates the shape of the tap hole with her big toe.
“Lying naked, face down in the sand at the edge of the waterline”, the reporter continues. “On a stretch of Coney Island Beach hidden away from the multitude of tourists that flock their way further up the coastline.”
Sash rests her head on the edge of the tub, a wet flannel draped across her forehead. In the bedroom, she can hear Dante getting dressed. A boy like him or a girl like me?
“Grey and distended, the body could have been in the water for some time.”
A droplet of water gathers at the base of the tap and dives into the water. Dante pulls a shirt over rigid muscle. Bubbles pop and fizz against the rising steam.
“The young man has been identified as twenty one year old Jason Edwood Walker, a promising athlete from Harriet Avenue, Brooklyn.”
It takes Sash several moments before she recognizes the name. As if someone has suddenly just thrown a toaster into the water, her eyes pop open and she springs into action. She tosses the flannel aside and pulls herself towards the TV, sending huge waves of bath water onto the floor in the process.
A old college photo of a young Jason Walker dressed in his football shirt and crouching over a ball comes up on the screen. It is the same man Caulder had tied up in a warehouse under Dante’s instructions. Sash’s blood runs cold. The remote control falls out of her hand
and plops trivially into the water.
“Although the cause of death has yet to be determined, the police are deciding to treat the incident as suspicious.”
The color drains from Sash’s face. She can’t believe what she’s just seen. Until two weeks ago, she’d not had cause to say Jason’s name since they split up several years ago. Now he’s turned up naked on a beach, the cause of his death unknown.
She doesn’t know what to think. Or she knows what she is thinking and can’t believe she’s thinking it. Before she can decide how to process the information and proceed, the reporter has passed back to the studio, and something else, something even bigger is causing goose-bumps to break out across her skin, and her pulse to race so much her heart is skipping beats just to catch up with it.
“Back to our main news story of the day”, the slick haired anchor says, directly to the camera. “Billionaire businessman Dante Hix, owner of Hix Industries, amongst a huge number of other properties and investments across America, has been caught red handed with his stepsister Sash Cooper.”
“You heard that right, folks”, his female assistant says. “His stepsister. And we have the photos to prove it. Exclusive interviews with friends and family members coming up later in the show.”
“This is the front page of the New York Times this morning”, the anchor says, holding up the page to the camera. It is one of the more risque photos, with the more sensitive parts obscured by black censoring blocks. Above, in huge block capitals, the headline reads: BILLIONAIRE AND STEPSISTER SECRET AFFAIR. “And this is one of several photos, all of which you can see on our website.”
The anchor turns to his assistant. “What was he thinking?”
Before Sash has a chance to react, Dante takes the words right out of her mouth.
“Fuck”, comes the resonant scream from the terrace, so loud it could probably be heard all over the state of California. “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.”
***
Tess sits on the edge of her seat, Oliver on the floor to her left, playing away happily. In her hand she holds several photos of Dante and Sash, including some taken at the hymen reconstruction clinic and the Los Angeles hotel. In the background the TV drones on, a different news channel to the one Sash was watching, but exactly the same story.
“Now we’ll fucking see who wins”, Tess says. “Won’t we Oli?”
###
Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby 1
Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby 2
Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby 3
Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby 4
Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby 5
About Stephanie Brother
Stephanie Brother writes scintillating stories with step-siblings as their main romantic focus. She’s always been curious about the forbidden, and this is her way of exploring such complex relationships that threaten to keep her couples apart. As she writes her way to her dream job, Ms. Brother hopes that her readers will enjoy the full emotional and romantic experience as much as she’s enjoyed writing them.
Sneak Peak!
Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby 5
Wet hair lies against the fluffy thread of an expensive hotel gown that Sash wouldn’t even be wearing if Dante hadn’t put it on her. She watches him pace back and forth, cell phone pressed against his ear while she deliberately avoids her own, tears muddling with bath water and dripping down her chin to explode against the laminate floor. Jason Walker is dead. Not missing. Not injured. Dead.
She can hear the words as a wall of noise, senseless and foreign. When Dante finally finishes speaking, he looks at Sash as though staring at something he can’t understand.
“You need to get dressed”, he says. The third time he has done so.
Sash feels numb inside, but Dante’s too busy to notice. As soon as he’s yanked clothes out of the wardrobe and thrown them on the bed for Sash to pull on, he’s back on his cell phone organizing the intricate details of their planned travel back to New York. It’s there, in his home city, where he feels is the best place to work out how to proceed.
When a few moments pass and he notices Sash still hasn’t moved, he puts the call on hold and quickly comes over to her.
“Darling”, he says, his finger under her chin. “We need to get back to New York and sort this out.”
Sash stares into his eyes. He couldn’t have. Not her brother. Not Dante. It has to be a coincidence, a piece of bad luck woven into their story.
“Sash”, Dante says again, “I know it’s a shock, baby, but we need to go. I thought this was what you wanted anyway, huh? To tell the whole world?”
Baby. Having him say it sends shivers up and down her spine. On the TV in the background, the news story continues. Crowds collect outside Dante’s sleek black office tower and people in the street give opinions. At Sash’s family home, Tracy refuses to comment, both on the whereabouts of her husband and the relationship of her son and step-daughter.
Sash nods. She braves a smile. She pushes the thoughts to the back of her mind and wipes the tears away from her eyes. Baby.
“Ok”, she says finally. What she feels is nothing like it.
She takes the toweling robe off and lets it drop to the floor like swept snow. In the mirror she catches a glimpse of her belly, the light hitting it in such a way it seems to be accentuated. There is no stopping what’s coming for them both, and soon enough she’ll be showing.
Sash pulls crumpled clothes over sticky skin while Dante waits patiently, fielding calls as they come into him, barking orders and refusing questions.
In the elevator, they stand side by side, the words burning Sash’s lips as they descend. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant.
“Are you ready for this?” Dante asks.
When she turns to look at him, he’s already turned himself, his eyes tilted downwards, sharp and hungry like a hunting wolf. Is he enjoying this?
Sash doesn’t know what to say. When she opens her mouth, the only words she wants to come out of it are the words that seem like they’ll never come. Because of that, she wonders for a moment whether it’s true.
Before she even has a chance to form a single sound, the elevator indicates they are at the lobby, and the doors slowly slide open.
It hits her like a train coming out of a tunnel in the countryside. One moment absolute silence, the next a cacophony of pushing and screaming. Dante takes his hand in hers, fights his way through the collected paparazzi, follows the guided instructions of terrified hotel staff and makes his way through to the private corridor behind the concierge’s desk, that will eventually lead them through the kitchens, laundry room and staff’s private quarters, and out to a driver at the back of the hotel.
Sash can hear them scuffle behind her. More than once she feels someone pull her arm, only for Dante to pull it back the other way. She feels like one of the fish in the tank in the antechamber to his office. Flash bulbs sting her eyes, while Dante and several other staff members do their best to protect her.
Outside, a huge crowd have gathered. Here, general public stand shoulder to shoulder with journalists, cell phones primed and ready to upload any salacious content immediately to social media. Dante refuses to answer questions. For Sash, the whole thing is completely bewildering.
Eventually, they push their way past the gathered throng and force their way inside the waiting car. Surrounded by people, Sash feels less safe here than she did in the lobby. Like this, she feels completely trapped. Some of them have banners, some pound on the car windows with their fists, others smile like lunatics and try to take selfies.
“Drive”, Dante orders.
As the car revs, jerking forwards threateningly, the crowd begin to part. Up ahead, police officers are beginning to arrive on the scene, already far too late to make a difference. At the window by Sash’s side, a woman is screaming fiercely.
“Sick”, is all Sash can’t make out. “Fucking sick.”
Spit explodes against the windscreen just before the car pulls away. As they make their way out onto the street, a huge crowd trying to be controlled by the police behind them, the driver makes streaks with it in the hands of the wipers.
Sash’s heart is beating much more wildly than she realized. Looking at him, Dante seems to be less affected. Distracted by something else, he stares out of the window, losing himself in the peaks behind the city line.
How the fuck is he going to deal with this one?
In New York, Alex stares blankly at the unfolding news, flicking from time to time to other channels hoping a bigger story will come along to mute it. On her desk is a spread of several morning newspapers, all of which have run with variations of the same headline, ranging from mild surprise to complete disgust. There are profiles of Dante and Sash, intimate details of their lives, half of which have clearly been fabricated, and promises of more juicy tidbits to come in subsequent editions.
In short, it’s a complete fucking shit storm, and one Alex is not happy at all about having to put out, especially since Dante was so convinced that his head of public relations would do it for them.
Stepbrother: Alpha Billionaire (excerpt)
Stepbrother Alpha Billionaire
I have dreamt of this moment for most of my adult life. I was never the prettiest or the most popular, or even the cleverest girl at school, I was always just Cass, the one on the outside looking in. Never the Prom Queen or the Fairy Princess, just the one that slipped by without being noticed. I never thought I’d be here doing this.
There is an urgency that descends upon us like a desperate hunger. I can feel it burning inside me and I don’t know how much longer I can resist before it takes me over. I want to claim it before it passes me by. I want him before he changes his mind. Before I change mine.
Fuck the immoral. Fuck the taboo. Felix and I aren’t related to each other. If we’d got together before our parents did, nobody would bat an eyelid.
“Take me to your bedroom”, I whisper insistently into his ear. “Now.”
Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby 4 Page 5