“Oh my God!” I heard one of them say. “That’s Trick Archer!”
Patrick waved, and they slowly approached us, looking rather nervous.
“Hey guys,” Patrick said. “Nice day, huh?”
“Sure is,” a short brunette girl said. “I had no idea you hiked!”
“Gotta stay fit and healthy somehow,” he replied, giving her that famous panty-melting smile of his.
The group giggled, and one of the girls pulled out her phone. “Can we take a picture with you to put on Instagram?”
“Of course,” he said.
I hung back and watched as they snapped some selfies with Patrick, and then one of them gestured to me.
“Come on, get in the shot!”
I headed over to them, and the brunette girl smiled as she took a photo of me and Patrick posing near a pile of rocks. “Thanks! You’re so cool.”
“No worries,” Patrick said. “Stay safe. There’s some pretty steep edges out here.”
When they took off in the other direction, I elbowed him. “Steep edges, huh? Didn’t seem too worried about them a few minutes ago.”
“Oh, hush.”
Once we got closer to the summit, we ran into another group of people who also wanted to take photos, and when they were done, Patrick turned to me.
“You were right about this being a good idea. There’s a lot of people out here, and they all seem to know who I am,” he said.
“Yep. And as we speak, they’re posting all over the web about how cool you are, and how you like good, clean outdoor activities.”
“I suppose that’s better than being photographed at six in the morning with four wasted strippers, like what happened a few months back outside the Foundry Club.”
I laughed. “It sure is better than that!”
We stopped for a quick snack and drink when we reached a cluster of transmission towers, and then we began to follow the trail to the right which descended to the end where we wanted to wind up.
“So,” Patrick said, turning to me a moment later. “We’ve spent so much time talking about me and what I want to do. What about you? You must have bigger dreams than being my relationship manager.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I used to have all these future fantasies when I was a kid, but now…now I’m not so sure.”
“Well, what did you want to do when you were a kid?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s dumb,” I said, blushing already.
“Pfft. It’s not dumb. C’mon, tell me.”
“I used to want to make nature documentaries. Remember all those David Attenborough ones about animals? I loved them,” I said, recalling the days where I’d spent hours marveling over the big cat videos my Mom had bought for me to watch.
“That’s not stupid,” he said. “I was actually thinking about getting into something similar. You know how I said I wanted to study something instead of just acting? My friend suggested I look into screenwriting. I think he’s right. It’d be cool.”
“Yeah, it would be,” I replied. “You should go for it. If I wanted to do the whole documentary thing, I’d probably need to go to film school or do some sort of college course too.”
“Why didn’t you go to college? You had awesome grades and always banged on about education being the best thing since sliced bread.”
I turned my face away and shrugged. “I guess after high school I never wanted to set foot in any sort of big educational institution again.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said, his voice tinged with remorse.
I turned to him. “Like I said the other night, it’s on me. It was my decision. I can always go to college eventually if I want to.”
“Well, if we both end up going, maybe we can work together on one of your documentaries one day,” he said, playfully nudging me.
“Yeah, maybe.”
We reached our final destination an hour later, and Patrick leaned over and stretched as I gulped down a bottle of water.
“It’s already four-thirty,” he said, checking his watch. “That took way longer than I thought it would. Fuck, my right arm is killing me for some reason.”
“I can drive home if you want,” I suggested.
“Yeah, that’d be good. Let me just stretch my legs a bit more before we head off.”
He pulled out his cell phone and leaned back against the car as I finished my water, and his face paled slightly.
“What’s up?” I asked, eyebrows furrowed in concern.
“Shit. We didn’t mention to those first few girls we ran into that you’re my stepsister, did we?”
“Um. I don’t remember. I thought we did.”
“Well, look at this.”
He handed me his phone, and my heart sank as I looked at the article on his screen. People on the internet worked pretty damn fast – there was an image of me and Patrick posing near some rocks on the trail, and it had already been shared, re-blogged and re-Tweeted thousands of times. There was a caption under the photo that read: Does Trick Archer finally have a girlfriend? Maybe this is what’s behind his recent personality change!
“Crap,” I said. I hadn’t expected our plan to backfire like this. “Call your agent on the way home. Tell him to release a statement saying that I’m your stepsister. We don’t want everyone thinking you’ve only changed because you met someone. That’s a total copout.”
“Okay,” he said, taking his phone back and scrolling through it with a frown. “There’s already a couple of comments saying they think you might be my sister, but I’ll call my agent anyway.”
I got in the driver’s side and stuck the key in the ignition before heading off, and as I glanced in the rearview mirror a second later, I saw a silver car trailing us rather closely.
“Do we know this person behind us?” I asked.
Patrick turned around and looked. “Shit. I recognize that car. That’s one of the paparazzi guys who’s always stalking me around. He probably saw the picture of us online and sat there waiting for us to appear, hoping to get a picture of us kissing or something, seeing as everyone on the internet thinks we’re together now.”
“What do I do?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just keep driving. If we ignore them, they’ll go away.”
I pressed my foot down on the accelerator, speeding up slightly in the hopes that the silver car would get off our asses, but it sped up as well. My heart thumped loudly in my chest as I carefully steered us along the road, checking the mirror every so often. I’d never had to deal with anything like this in my life, and I wondered how Patrick could stand being followed all the time. God, no wonder he’d always acted out so much in the past couple of years. He was probably sick to death of being trailed and scrutinized no matter what he did.
The winding road was lined by short bushes, and beyond that was a steep drop to a valley that lay below. I suddenly had a horrible image in my head of plunging over the edge, and I glanced in the mirror again.
“Shit. They’re still right up our ass.”
“It’s okay. Just keep going,” Patrick said, leaning over and rubbing my thigh. “We’ll be fine.”
As he spoke, a motorcycle coming in the opposite direction veered right into our lane, and I shrieked and slammed on the brakes. The silver car behind us was too close to brake in time without smashing right into our back, so they veered to the left to try and go around us instead. I heard a grinding metallic sound as they misjudged their distance and inadvertently sideswiped us, and I screamed as I lost control of the car.
They’d knocked us all the way off the road. We rolled right over the edge, and I shielded my face in a reflex action as we plummeted. It all happened so fast I could barely register it.
Then everything went black.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PATRICK
The car finally stopped moving, and I opened my eyes and looked over at Lucy. She had a small cut on her head, and I leaned over to her to see if she was okay. As I did so, the car began to r
ock slightly, and a chill ran down my spine as I peered out the window and realized where we were. There was a ledge just off the edge of the road where we’d gone off, and below that was a plunging drop into a deep valley. We’d been lucky. We’d only fallen onto the ledge and rolled the car, but now we were in a dangerous situation. If we moved too much, the car could roll again and send us to our deaths. There was no way we’d survive the drop into the valley.
“Shit,” I muttered.
Lucy’s chest was slowly rising and falling, and I let out a sigh of relief as I realized she was still breathing. The shock had probably made her pass out. Or maybe her head injury was more serious than it looked. Fuck.
There was only one way out of this.
Maneuvering myself very carefully so as to not rock the car, I craned my neck and looked around. Lucy was on the side closest to the edge. If I could somehow grab her and quickly pull her out of the passenger side where I was, we might have a chance at surviving this.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I mumbled as I slowly opened my door. This better fucking work, or I’d never forgive myself.
I carefully undid Lucy’s seatbelt, and she groaned as I slowly wedged one arm under her arm. Her eyes were still closed.
“This might hurt a bit,” I said. “But it’ll only be for a sec.”
She moaned deliriously again, and I held on as tight as I could before leaping out of the passenger door, dragging her behind me. As I pulled her out of harm’s way and lay her down on a bed of moss and grass, the car did exactly as I suspected it would do. Our weight shift had caused it to rock violently, and it rolled over and plunged directly downwards into the ravine. I cringed at the sound of scraping and crashing metal, not even wanting to imagine what would have happened if we’d still been inside.
I crouched down next to Lucy.
“Lucy,” I said. “Wake up. Please.”
She stirred at my touch but didn’t open her eyes, and a deep voice called out to me from up on the road. I looked up to see that it was the motorcycle rider who’d veered into our lane. I assumed the paparazzi in the silver car had taken off, not even bothering to help us or take responsibility for what they’d caused.
“Hey, are you guys okay down there?” the man called out.
“I hope so,” I said, looking back down at Lucy’s chest. Her breathing seemed steadier now. “Can you call 911 for me?”
“Already did,” he replied. “Sorry man, a bug flew into my eye and I swerved into your lane. Then those fuckers who were tailgating you tried to swerve around you when you braked so they wouldn’t crash into you. Knocked you right off the road. If they hadn’t been so far up your ass it wouldn’t have happened.”
“I know,” I said, gritting my teeth. He was trying to help, but I was so fired up with adrenaline that I wanted to punch him in the face. I knew it wasn’t entirely his fault. He hadn’t meant to swerve into our lane, and if those paparazzi fuckwits hadn’t been right on our tail, we wouldn’t have gone off the edge…but still, I wanted to hit someone.
Anyone.
He began to clamber down the steep edge and slowly approached us.
“Your girlfriend all right?” he asked, seeing her lying on the ground next to me.
She’s not my girlfriend, I almost said, but it seemed pointless to mention that. Not only that, I honestly didn’t mind people thinking she was my girl. Something about it just felt right.
“I think so,” I said, watching as her chest rose and fell in short breaths. “How long until the ambulance gets here?”
“Should be any minute, man,” he replied. “I’ll go back up to the edge of the road and wave ‘em down when I see ‘em. By the way, I got the license plate details for that other car. I’ll tell the police when they get here.”
I watched him walk away, and Lucy moaned softly. I knelt back down and stroked her face.
“Lucy,” I said as she slowly opened her eyes. “Help’s coming. You’re gonna be okay. I promise.”
She tried to raise her head and nodded weakly. “I know,” she replied. “I only hurt my head a little bit. I think the shock just made me pass out. I thought we were going to die.”
I squeezed her hand. I didn’t want to tell her how close we’d come to almost rolling right off that edge along with the car. Not yet. Unfortunately, she turned her head to the side and immediately noticed that the car wasn’t there.
“The car…” she murmured. “It’s gone. Holy shit. What happened? How did I get out?”
“I’ll tell you all about it later,” I said, leaning right over her and scraping her hair out of the blood on her forehead.
Her eyes widened. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked. “You…you saved me. Again.”
“Again?”
“You helped me with Jimmy the other night, and now this…God, Patrick, I get it. You’re sorry about high school. You don’t need to drag me out of a car that’s about to roll off a cliff just to prove it.”
She gave me a cheesy smile, and I grinned. “Making jokes already? Guess you really are all right.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Really. You saved me.”
And then something incredible happened.
She kissed me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LUCY
Still dizzy from hitting my head earlier, my fingers found their way to Patrick’s hair, and I pulled him closer and pressed my lips up to his.
I’d officially lost my mind.
All I could think of was how he’d come to my rescue twice now, and having his muscled body so close to mine made every inch of me tremble. His mouth felt so perfect on my lips, and nothing in the world could change that. As his tongue slid into my mouth, his hands roamed all over my body, stroking, caressing and worshipping my curves. His touches were possessive, needy and voracious, and I felt wetness instantly soaking my silky panties.
If there was ever a more ridiculous time to be suddenly realizing my feelings for a man, it was now. I’d almost died. We’d almost died…and yet the thought of our close call made me crazy with lust. Perhaps it was all the adrenaline pumping through my system from the shock of the accident.
Or maybe I really had gone stark raving mad.
He broke away a second later and looked deep in my eyes. “Lucy…” he murmured.
He looked like he was about to say something else when a man called down from above us. “Hey, guys? Ambulance is here!”
I grinned sheepishly as Patrick helped me to my feet, and a few paramedics joined us on the ledge a moment later. We couldn’t say anything about our embrace in front of them, but the expression in his eyes told me everything I needed to know. Whatever I was feeling, he was feeling it too.
Patrick pulled out his phone in the ambulance and called my Dad, Julia and my Mom to let them know what had happened. We arrived at the hospital fifteen minutes later, and my Dad came bursting through the doors as a doctor led me into an examination room to check my head.
“Dad!” I said, shocked to see him. “How’d you get here so fast? Patrick only called you a few minutes ago.”
“I…er…I was in the area. Thank God you’re okay, Princess. When he told me what happened…God, I had no idea what to think. You’ve really been in the wars lately. First Jimmy, and now this.”
He squeezed my shoulder, and I smiled. “I’m okay. Really. I just bumped my head a bit. There’s only a little cut.”
“Is Patrick okay? He sounded all right on the phone, but you never know.”
“I think so. He pulled me out of the car just before it went over the edge.”
“I know,” he said, nodding. “I heard the EMTs talking about it. I’m going to go find him. I’ll be back in a sec.”
He returned to the examination room ten minutes later, Patrick trailing behind him. All of a sudden, everything felt incredibly awkward. Dad considered Patrick to be family, and if he ever knew that we’d just passionately kissed on the edge of a road…well, crap, he’d probably kill us. That wasn
’t exactly how family members behaved, to say the least.
“The doctors say he’s fine,” Dad announced, and I felt my cheeks turn pink. The thought of Patrick’s hot lips on mine was addictive, and the guilt only made it worse.
“That’s good,” I said.
I tried to avoid Patrick’s gaze, but I could feel his eyes burning into me from across the room.
The doctor who’d been checking me out came back over to me from her computer. “You’re fine too, Miss Martinez. You’ll have a nasty bump for a few days, but it should heal up just fine. Make sure you keep the area around the cut clean. We don’t want any infections.”
I nodded, and she handed me a piece of paper. “You’ll probably have a nasty headache for a while, so I’m prescribing you some strong painkillers. When did you last eat?”
“A few hours ago.”
“These need to be taken with food, so go and grab something to eat after you’ve picked them up and take two. Then take one tomorrow morning, and another in the late afternoon if pain is still persisting. They might make you feel a little loopy, so I’d suggest you take the day off work tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
We were about to head out of the room when Dad held his hands up.
“I should warn you two. Someone already broke the story of what happened back there, so there’s probably a lot of press waiting outside.”
“What?” Patrick and I said in unison. I could tell what he was thinking. Had someone seen us kissing and taken a photo? Could it have been the biker?
Dad looked confused. “Yes, they broke the story of how you just saved your stepsister’s life, Patrick. You’re a hero.”
Oh, duh. Of course. That story had broken. Thank God. I felt my cheeks turn even hotter, and I avoided eye contact with Patrick again as we headed over to the dispensary to get my prescription.
“Princess, I have to go,” Dad said, checking his phone a second later. “The police are tracking down the paparazzi guys who were in that car, so I’m going to go deal with that. I’ll see you at home later. I got someone to bring a car for you, so you can take that. I had my guy park it by the two tall trees near the bus on the far end of the parking lot. Go and get something to eat like the doctor suggested. Patrick, you’ll go with her?”
Trick - A Stepbrother Romance Page 9