Stepbrother Outlaw: The Novel (Dark Steamy Stepbrother Romance)

by Craft, Lana

  Trent shrugged as a sense of familiarity crept its way over him. It was the same thing he asked Blair the day she left for LA, and her answer then wasn't any different than his now. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea," he said, rubbing his neck in an attempt to dispel himself from memory lane.

  A brief look of disappointment crossed over Eden's face but she was quick to regain her composure. She handed Trent his helmet and waved to him as she retreated inside, turning to look at him through the glass as he sped off. With a deep sigh, she entered her bedroom to find her mother curled up on her bed holding one of her childhood teddy bears. "Eden!" she exclaimed when she saw her, jumping up to pull her into a hug. "Christ." She wiped her matted hair out of her face and cupped her cheeks as she took her in. "Where have you been? Do you have any idea how worried we were? That man you were with. Where is he?"

  Eden watched as she paced over to the window and peeked out of the blinds, but by then Trent was long gone. "I want to be alone," she insisted, dropping her purse on the floor as she climbed into bed. The numbness that had swallowed her up was slipping away, and in its place, exhaustion felt like it was swallowing her whole. She didn't have time to deal with her mother. Not now. “Please?”

  Blair hesitated but for once, she seemed to take the hint. Thank god, Eden thought as she watched her move for the door. "Well alright then," Blair said, but her tone gave way to the fact that they would be having a nice long discussion later. She was anything if not predictable, after all. "I'll be downstairs with your father if you need anything."

  Eden watched her disappear from view, and then she heard the distant whispers of her and Ronald talking in the living room. She hated when her mother referred to him as her father. By all intensive purposes, he might have been, but Eden never shared that kind of bond with him. What they had was a business relationship. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Grief hit Eden like a brick to the face. She closed her bedroom door as her eyes brimmed with tears and staggered back into bed as her legs give way beneath her. She had been experiencing panic attacks her entire life but never any as bad as this. She tried to focus on breathing steady, but the strain was suffocating. An awful clarity settled over her. She shoved her face into her pillows to quiet the sound of the sobs that wracked their way through her body. Blair reentered the room a few minutes later and climbed in bed beside her, pulling her emaciated body against her own. She had so many questions, but right now, she needed to be a mother.

  She'd get the answers she was looking for later.

  Just not from Eden.

  Chapter twenty

  The road was long, winding, and familiar. Blair hadn't been here in years, but she had the directions memorized by heart. She pulled off of the gravel and into the grass, stepping out and descending through the trees she had frolicked in as a little girl.

  When she finally spotted the house, a rush of familiarity overcame her all at once. This was the spot where she had her first kiss, as well as one of her last meaningful ones. Taking her time, she ascended up the front steps, pushing open the front door. Empty liquor bottles littered the ground in every corner. She stepped over them, picking one up to examine it. She recognized the brand right away. It was his favorite kind, and the fresh paper sticking to the glass told her that he must have been here recently.

  Some things never change, Blair thought as she opened up the blinds and went to work on cleaning the place up as best she could. It wasn’t her mess and this wasn't her house, at least not anymore, but it had been once. The urge she felt to make it feel somewhat livable again outweighed her hesitancy. At the end of the day, this was one of the only places in the entire world where she felt the most at peace with herself. There was just something about the moss covered trees and isolation that she could lose herself in. It was an escape. She wasn't Blair, the mother of the infamous Eden Winters here. She was just Blair. The person.

  Blair paused, taking a moment to study each dusty photograph on the living room mantel. There was one man in almost every picture, but he was more of a boy at the time. Blair ran her fingers over his face and inhaled a sharp breath. She hadn't lived a single day in twenty years when she hadn't thought about him. There had been times when she wanted so badly to reach out to him, but she never did. It wasn't their parent’s divorce, or even the fact that she had gotten herself pregnant by another man on her slippery grasp for fame.

  More than anything, it was her fear of disappointment that kept her guarded. She didn't want him to feel disappointed in the person she had become, and she didn't want to feel disappointed by him either. Somehow that outweighed the fact that she shared a connection with him unlike any she'd ever know again.

  Blair took a deep breath, feeling her cheeks flush as she recalled the way his lips felt against her own the last time they ever touched. If what they had shared was wrong for any reason, then why did it feel like one of the only right decisions she ever made in her life?

  Blair thought back to her mother's heated words one of the last times she ever saw her alive, which was just a few days after Eden was born. "If that's his daughter," she said, nodding at Eden through the NICU window. "You owe it to her to tell him."

  Only Eden wasn't his. It didn't matter how much Blair wanted her to be. She couldn't change what was, but she lived with the shame of it all the same. It didn't matter that her mother knew what they had done. It wasn't just about sex with them. It never was. Something more had bloomed in the midst of heated whispers and forgotten promises. Sure, they had slept together, but even more important than that was the fact that they knew each other better than anyone else did.

  Blair didn’t want anyone to chalk up what they had shared, no matter how brief, into something dirty and wrong. Instead, she chose to believe the reality she needed to be true. That they were just two people who had grown up together, and in turn grown together. That in the end he wasn't all that different from all the other men who had blown through her life like natural disasters. There with an impact and gone the next.

  It was the kind of scenario fit for a daytime soap, but that didn't change the fact that sometimes late at night, Blair would find herself wide-awake and unable to stop thinking about him. She missed how at home she felt in his strong arms. She missed his sarcasm, his honesty, and even to some degree his cruelty. All those things made him who he was. They kept him going through each one of his parent’s hasty marriages and every other disappointment that came his way. And that which he couldn't numb himself, he drowned in liquor.

  Blair missed it all, the good things and the bad. She wiped at a layer of dust on a picture she hadn't noticed at first and perked up when she realized it was one of them. Sort of, anyway. Her mother had taken it on her prom day. She went with an all-star linebacker whose name she couldn't even recall now, but it was Trent who she was eyeing in the picture. He was standing off to the side with his strong arms crossed over his chest and his usual annoyed expression etched across his face. Blair smiled. He never could stomach the idea of her with other guys.

  When she heard a noise, Blair set down the picture and focused in on it. It sounded like a car but the engine was clunky and grating, not to mention way louder than it should have been from the road. She stepped outside and squinted towards the end of the driveway, but it was dark out and she couldn't see that far into the distance. Remembering the flashlight on her phone, she stepped off the porch and held it in the air as she made her way towards the gravel road ahead.

  “Whose there?” Blair called out, feeling her voice crack. She could sense that someone was watching her and a thin layer of goose bumps surfaced on her flesh. As she started to turn back towards the house, two dim headlights appeared in front of her, but they didn't belong to a car. They were too close together and small.

  Blair stumbled forward as she tried to crane her neck to focus in on them, slipping on a patch of wet grass in the process. "Ow!” she cried out, reaching down to grip her ankle. She had landed on it all wrong. Graspi
ng hold of a tree for support, she attempted to pull herself to her feet, but the strain associated in doing so made it difficult.

  “Maybe I can help.”

  Blair jumped, scrambling to shine the light on her phone in the direction of the voice. When she saw him, her heart skipped a beat in her chest and she inhaled a sharp breath. His hair had a lot more grey in it, but it was definitely him. There was no mistaking those piercing blue eyes and the way they seemed to yearn for her as they took her in. As he stepped forward, Blair got a good look at him and froze.

  Though he had been athletic in their youth, these days he was more like a Viking. His large frame was all muscle, and tattoos covered his tan flesh where there hadn't been any before. It was his eyes that really got her though. While they had once been so full of life and emotion, they were now vacant and empty, like a battery that had long since lost its charge. He was also covered in scars, one of which ran from his right temple down to the curve of his jaw.

  For a moment, Blair couldn't believe that he had once been handsome in a boyish way. He might even still be, underneath all the decay, but his eyes give way to a life that’s been anything but easy to live.

  “Trent,” Blair whispered, uttering his name for the first time in decades as her heart slowed to a dull thump behind her ears.

  Finally, she was home.

  Chapter twenty-one

  Trent stepped away from his bike and bent to help pull Blair to her feet, allowing her to take hold of his shoulder. She stumbled against him, gripping his shirt as she attempted to find her footing in the grass. Rain was a rarity in Southern California, but it came as no surprise that it began to pour the moment they met eyes. “Hi,” she whispered, finding a sound deep within her throat that only halfway resembled her voice. It wasn't enough to explain everything that was coursing through her mind, but it was the only thing she could think to say in the moment.

  Trent remained quiet, bending to inspect her ankle. It was swollen but it wasn't broken. Regardless, he heaved her up into his arms, carrying her inside and setting her down on the couch before she could protest. Blair watched as he switched on a light and entered the kitchen, removing a pack of ice from the fridge and handing it to her with a rag.

  "Hey,” Blair spoke up, saying the first thing that came to mind. She had a way of doing that when she was nervous. "I...I didn't know this place still had electricity.”

  Trent glanced at her as he peeled off his drenched t-shirt, exposing his chiseled chest. Like fine wine, he had only gotten better with age, but in a lot of ways Blair could see that he was still her same old defiant stepbrother. Trent brought his shirt into the kitchen without speaking and rung it out into the sink, hanging it over a chair to dry as she soaked him in. His body was rock hard and accentuated by tight columns, with veins bulging from the most enticing of places.

  "Trent," Blair spoke up, averting her gaze from his body. She couldn’t look at him if she wanted to get any answers. It was too distracting. "Just how is it that you came into contact with my daughter?" It was the question that had been weighing heavy on her mind since she returned home, but as usual, Eden was in no rush to give her any answers. When Trent didn't respond, she pushed him further. "And would you like to tell me what happened between the two of—"

  "Nothing," Trent interrupted, cracking open a bottle of liquor from his backpack and taking a long drink. He waved a hand at her. "Is that why you came here after all this time? To ask me a bunch of questions about your kid?"

  Blair was quiet for a while as she studied her hands. He had a right to ask that. She couldn’t act like he didn’t. "No, she finally said. "It's just...I've just never seen her like this before, Trent. Not before you. I don't know what to make of it but I have this nagging suspicion that you—”

  "What kind of mother are you?"

  The question made Blair lift her gaze to his. She frowned and shook her head, feeling her chest tighten under the intensity of his tone.

  "She's a fucking junkie, B. All those pills…and the coke. God. How could you let that happen?"

  Blair started to defend herself but no words would come forward from her mouth. The hurt in her eyes was palpable, as if Trent had reached across the coffee table and slapped her. Her face quivered under the weight of it, but he made no attempt to comfort her. He wasn't her lifeline anymore than she was his. What he said was the truth, and whether she liked it or not, she needed to hear it.

  Trent sat down on the edge of the coffee table and shook his head. "What happened to you?" he whispered, speaking more to himself than to her.

  This was it. The disappointment Blair had been dreading. She always knew it would happen when they crossed paths again. She just never expected it to sting this bad. "You don't know a thing about me," she snapped, feeling tears brim over in her eyes. "I suggest you do us both a favor and stop acting like you do. You don't know what it's like, being a mother to a girl like Eden." She shook her head and hesitated as she wrung her hands. "No one does."

  Trent didn’t answer. Instead, he exhaled a deep breath and turned to meet eyes with her. He always was a fan of tough love, but now it just seemed cruel. Regardless, that didn't stop him from continuing. "A girl like Eden?" he challenged. "Did you ever once stop to consider that you might be the reason she turned out that way?"

  "Did you fuck her?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "You heard me, Trent." Blair cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes at him, pushing back the tears that threatened to spill over onto her cheeks. "Did you fuck my daughter?"

  Trent shook his head in disbelief and let out a strained laugh. Out of all the things she could have asked him, why did it have to be this? "No," he replied, but his voice cracked an octave, giving way to the fact that he was lying.

  "Unbelievable." Blair shook her head and breathed out a sigh, turning to stare at nothing in particular. "So...what? You couldn't have me so you went after my kid, is that it?"

  "B," Trent tried, finding what remained of his voice. "I didn't know she was at the time."

  "Bullshit."

  "No, I’m being honest. I saw the similarities...I’ll admit…but I didn't put it all together. If I had I never would have let it happen."

  Blair soaked in every detail of his face as he spoke, feeling an unmarked rage flood its way through her. His features were sharp and angular just like her own, with a light dash of freckles that highlighted the curve of his cheekbones. It was no wonder they so often got mistaken as blood siblings when they were kids.

  Trent's voice tapered off into a whisper until he was no longer speaking at all. Blair watched through her haze as he patted his ratty jeans for his cigarettes and slid one out from the pack. He crossed the room to light it with a burner on the stove, exhaling a wave of smoke into the air as they met eyes. Neither one of them spoke. Instead, they allowed the soft patter of the rain against the glass to engulf them. Every now and then Trent would clear his throat as though he had something to say, but it never reached the surface.

  For what felt like an eternity, they remained that way. Trent didn't ask her any questions about why Eden turned out the way she did, and Blair didn't push him for answers on what transpired between them.

  Blair closed her eyes but otherwise remained completely still as a chill crawled its way up her spine. Her daughter and the only man she ever gave a shit about had run off together. Trent was right.

  What kind of mother was she?

  Trent's eyes came alive as they studied her, lighting up his face. There was a fire behind them. It was almost as if he was daring her to say something, to break his spirits more than they already had been. There was no coming back from this and he knew it. As tough of a pill as it was for him to swallow, whatever he and Blair shared ended twenty years ago. There wasn’t any them.

  At least not anymore.

  Trent breathed out a deep sigh. He couldn't take the quiet a second longer. "I'm sorry," he said, because he was. Not just for what happened between him and Ede
n, but for not heading the red flags when he saw them. Of course she was his daughter. Deep down, he knew it the moment he first laid eyes on her. Now, regret was the only thing he had left.

  Blair flicked her gaze up to meet his. The way the moonlight leaking through the blinds hit his face made his scars stand out against his flesh. "Me too," she whispered, her eyes never leaving his.

  As the storm began to worsen and the rain began to sound like pellets hitting the glass, Trent took a step forward and shook his head. He started to say something but thought better of it, reaching down to move a loose strand of her hair behind her ear. It was an all too familiar gesture and one that made Blair's heart catch in her throat. She looked up at him and knit her brows together in confusion as he hesitated with his hand hovering just a few inches away from her cheek.

  “I'm sorry,” Trent whispered again, pulling away from her and stepping back to kill his smoke.

  Blair blinked and wiped at a stray tear that managed to snake its way down her face. She started to ask him if he intended on pursing things further with Eden, but she thought better of it right away. That wasn't something she wanted to know.