I returned to the bed a few moments later before lying back down next to Charlie. She’d rolled over now, and I sighed and pulled the blankets over her before rolling over as well, facing the other way. I wasn’t even remotely tired, and I was still horny as hell despite the cold shower.
This was going to be a long night.
***
“What…what happened to my head?”
I opened my eyes at the sound of Charlie’s voice, squinting as rays of early morning sunlight peeked through the curtains. I rubbed my face before turning to her. Her hair was ruffled from sleep, and the small amount of eye makeup she’d worn last night was streaked under her eyes and down her cheek.
She was still a total fucking babe.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“My head. It feels like a truck ran over it. What happened?”
“Do you really not remember last night?” I asked, balancing up on one elbow.
Her expression remained blank for a moment, and then a look of pure horror crossed her face. “Oh, shit. Oh my god. I’m so sorry. I…”
I cut her off with a wave of my hand. “It’s cool. Don’t worry about it. I cleaned everything up and made sure you didn’t die.”
“Oh. Wow. Thanks,” she said softly, a crimson blush rising in her cheeks.
“No worries.”
“So why are you still here?” she asked.
I grinned. “Try not to be too grateful, Charlie.”
She shook her head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant, why did you hang around and help out when you could’ve just left? Any other guy would’ve hightailed it out of here the second I started puking,” she said.
“Like I said last night, I really like the room service breakfast menu here,” I replied. “So I stayed.”
She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Very funny,” she said. “But thanks again for staying and cleaning up. You really didn’t have to.”
“It’s fine,” I said gruffly, not wanting her to think I was some big hero or something. I wasn’t; in fact, most of the time I was a prick. I’d just done the right thing for once, that was all. “So you’re not a big drinker, huh?”
“Guess not. I only had four drinks over a few hours last night. That’s not exactly a lot, but it was enough to make me feel like I was trampled by a herd of elephants.”
I chuckled, and I was about to ask her if she felt up to eating anything for breakfast when my phone buzzed in my jeans pocket on the floor. I reached down and grabbed it, expecting it to be a message from my father, seeing as he was the only person I could think of who might text or call this early in the morning.
Lately, he’d been going on and on about some woman whom I apparently had to meet soon, and I’d been ignoring him for the most part, because I knew exactly what he was up to. He was a state senator as well as a successful businessman, and he’d been looking for a new wife for years now, ever since my mother left him for another man. He had presidential aspirations, and apparently voters liked candidates better when they presented themselves as a quintessential family person. Seeing as my mother had taken off and abandoned us when my brother and I were young, we’d been a single parent family for quite some time, and Dad had often expressed the wish to remarry and have the ‘perfect family’ again. For him, that meant kids who did everything he told them to, and a quiet wife who was happy to be subservient to his every demand.
Apparently he’d recently met some woman on a business trip, and they’d decided to get married. I doubted it would actually happen, because he’d been engaged to two other women within the last three years, and neither of those relationships had worked out, because they’d realized what a controlling bastard he was and left before the weddings could even be planned.
This woman he’d met—Emilia something-rather—was coming to town soon, and I was meant to meet her. I couldn’t remember exactly when, though. Next week maybe? Fuck knows.
I turned my phone screen on to see that it was actually my little brother, Evan, who had texted me.
Hey. You didn’t come home last night so I couldn’t remind you then, but remember we have that lunch thing today. 1 P.M. at the Fairview Ridge Hotel restaurant. Figured I’d message you in case you forgot, because Dad will be angry if we aren’t there.
I frowned and replied. What lunch?
He texted back immediately. We’re meeting his latest fiancée, remember?
Shit. I thought that was next week.
Nope. Today at 1. By the way, did you know she has a daughter?
Nope.
Dad sent me a pic when I asked what they looked like. Hold on a sec, I’ll forward it.
A second later, a picture message came through, and I clicked on it. To my complete and utter shock, Charlie was staring out at me from the photo, her arms linked with an older woman.
“What the….” I stared at the picture, and Charlie leaned over.
“What the hell?” she said, echoing me as she caught a glimpse of my screen. “Why do you have a photo of me on your phone?”
I looked at her before motioning back at the screen. “This is your Mom?”
She nodded. “Yeah...again, why do you have a photo of us?”
“Because apparently my father is marrying your mother. My brother just sent this photo to me.”
Charlie’s eyebrows shot up, and her face turned pale. “What?”
“My father is marrying your mother. Allegedly.”
Her eyes widened as it finally sank in, and she gathered up the bed sheets around her naked body, as if it would make any difference. I’d already seen it all the night before. “Oh god…so…Keith is your father.”
“Yep.”
“And you’re…you’re his son. So you’re part of the new stepfamily I moved here to meet and live with. You’re going to be my stepbrother.”
“Seems like it.”
“And you really didn’t know when we met last night?”
I shook my head. “Nope. All Dad told me is that he was engaged again, and that her name was Emilia. I had no idea she had a daughter, or that it was you,” I said. “I’m guessing your mother didn’t tell you much either.”
“Nothing, except his first name and his job. Oh, and the fact that we were suddenly moving all the way over here to live with him.”
“I didn’t even know you guys were moving in. I thought his fiancée was just coming here to Fairview for a meet and greet.”
“No, we’re moving into your Dad’s house.”
“Well…shit.”
There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Charlie’s face fell as she looked at my bare chest. “God, Cole, what the hell are we going to tell them about what happened between us last night?”
“We don’t have to tell them anything,” I said before wrinkling my nose. “And wait a minute…did you just call me Cole? How drunk were you last night?”
“I thought that was your name. That’s what you said.”
I shook my head. “Nope, I said Cade. That’s my name.”
I expected her to simply shrug it off as a simple misunderstanding, as she’d obviously totally misheard me when I introduced myself the night before, but instead, her eyes widened further, and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh my god...I knew you looked familiar.”
“Huh?”
“You’re Cade Blackwell.” The way she said it made it sound like an accusation.
“Yeah…” I replied slowly, unsure where she was going with this.
“You used to live in Philadelphia.”
It was a statement, not a question. I nodded. “Yeah, ages ago. We moved out here six or seven years ago. Did your Mom tell you that?” I asked, assuming my father might’ve told his new fiancée some details about our lives.
“No, apparently my Mom hasn’t told me anything,” Charlie said.
She jumped off the bed and started rummaging through a suitcase for some clothes before getting dressed as fast as possible and mutterin
g to herself.
“What’s going on?” I said. “How did you know I was from Philly?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Oh, of course you wouldn’t remember me. I don’t think you ever really looked at me or knew my full name. I was just Charlotte the Harlot to you.”
Oh, shit….
It was all coming back to me now.
“Remember now?” she continued, glaring as my eyes widened in recognition.
“Charlotte Rubio?”
“Oh, so you did know my name, after all.”
“Of course I did. We went to school together,” I said. “Shit, I can’t believe it! When I first saw you last night, I thought you looked familiar, but I had no idea it was you. What a coincidence, huh?”
“I guess you could call it that,” she said, her voice stiff.
I grinned. “Hey, do you remember old Mrs. Prince from our art class?” I asked. “We had a lot of fun in that class, huh?”
Charlotte looked incredulous and didn’t respond, so I kept going, figuring she was just shocked by the crazy coincidence. “By the way, are we gonna order breakfast?” I said.
“Are you frickin’ serious?” she finally replied. “Don’t pretend like we’re old buddies or something! Leave!”
She picked up my clothes and threw them right at me, and I stared at her, my forehead creased with confusion. “Why?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Because I’d rather have breakfast with a giant squid than you,” she said. When I still looked confused, she snorted with derision. “I guess you already forgot, because your life was always so perfect and easy, but you made my life a living hell, Cade!”
I frowned. I remembered pulling some silly harmless pranks on her and teasing her a bit by calling her the stupid Charlotte the Harlot nickname, but we’d just been dumb kids playing around. I didn’t remember making her life a ‘living hell’’ like she’d said. “What? How?” I asked.
“You know what you did, you fricking asshole! Or did you conveniently forget about all that?”
“I really don’t remember doing—”
She cut me off. “Oh, of course you don’t, because it didn’t mean anything to you. You just thought it was funny to torment me. And even though you left after the seventh grade, it didn’t stop, even once I started high school. Everyone else just picked up right where you left off, because you taught them all that I was the one they could all victimize and pick on. Better me than them, huh? God, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you right away. And I can’t believe I almost slept with you!”
Jesus, I’d obviously hit a nerve, because she was really on a verbal rampage. “Charlotte, I—”
She cut me off again. “Just get out, please.”
I hastily put my clothes on. “Fine, I’m going,” I said, taking a few steps towards the door before turning back around to face her. “But you know we have to have lunch together today, right? Seeing as we’re going to be family and all. So we should probably—”
She launched a pillow at me like a missile. “I said out!” she screeched.
I quickly dodged a second pillow and headed out of the room, and when the door closed behind me, I leaned back against it and grinned, grateful that my father had just so happened to pick the mother of an old schoolmate to marry; a schoolmate who just so happened to have grown up to be a sexy little spitfire.
This was going to be a hell of a ride.
Chapter Four
Charlotte
My chest heaved as I watched the door close behind Cade, and I took several deep breaths before returning to the bed so I could lie down. My head was pounding from the hangover, and I closed my eyes, wondering how the hell I was going to handle being related to Cade.
I knew some people might think it was incredibly childish of me to react the way I had just then, and maybe it was, but I couldn’t help it. I really hated Cade Blackwell. What he’d done to me back in school wasn’t just silly playground teasing—he’d seriously made my life miserable, and even the thought of him and his so-called ‘pranks’ made my chest constrict with anxiety as awful memories came pouring back in.
It had started out pretty innocently, all the way back in the second grade. He’d done silly, harmless things like sticking toy rats or spiders on my desk to scare me, and on the playground he’d chased me and tried to pull my pigtails whenever he saw me. I didn’t resent him for those things; lots of kids did stuff like that, and it wasn’t exactly traumatizing. In fact, the prank rats and spiders were actually pretty funny and made me giggle a lot whenever I found them.
What I resented him for was how things escalated over the next few years to the point where I’d become a social outcast by the time I was thirteen. See, Cade came from a rich and powerful family, and even as a child everyone could tell he was going to grow up to be handsome as hell. As a result, he’d always been one of the confident popular kids, whereas I was always shy and quiet by nature. The other kids in school eventually noticed how he called me names and targeted me for his pranks all the time, and that was enough to get it into their heads that I was a nerdy loser—every school had one kid who was the butt of every joke, and in my school, it ended up being me.
Especially after Cade’s worst prank.
Really, up until that one, it hadn’t been so bad. I hadn’t been popular, but I’d still had friends, and I’d just had to deal with the occasional aforementioned silly prank or teasing, mostly from Cade. But everything changed one day in the seventh grade. Without me noticing, Cade placed a little packet of corn syrup on my chair on a day I’d worn white shorts to school, and when I stood up to see why my backside was suddenly wet, everyone started shrieking with laughter. Some idiotic friend of Cade’s had then screamed out, ‘Ew, she has her period!’ as if having periods was something girls should be ashamed of—even though in this case, it was just dark red syrup—and after that I was known as ‘Period Girl’ around the school, which was way worse than ‘Charlotte the Harlot’, which was the previous nickname Cade had bestowed upon me.
By the end of that year, I was well and truly a social leper. I ate alone at lunch almost every day and spent as much time as I could hiding in the library to avoid being mocked and teased, and the other kids would avoid being seen with me in case my ‘loser’ reputation tainted their own reputations. As a result, my old friends dwindled away until I had none.
When I reached high school, my previous reputation followed me, seeing as most of the kids I went to elementary and middle school with went to the same high school as me. Cade and his family had moved away by that point, but it didn’t matter—the social damage was done, and I was still the one everyone chose to pick on. On top of that, high school kids were way nastier than younger kids, and the middle school bullying soon morphed into incredibly hurtful cyberbullying and horrible rumors being spread about me all the time. Even when I was still a virgin and had never been kissed, I was called ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ on a regular basis, and I was even accused of trying to seduce my English teacher.
At one point, some of the mean girls even tried to make a video of me go viral on YouTube—a video of me having a used tampon thrown at me. That was when I’d finally snapped and stood up for myself. I was done with being a victim, and it was about damn time I grew some stones.
I didn’t need to be rescued by anyone. I needed to rescue myself.
The day after that video was uploaded, I went right up to the girls and confronted them about how pathetic they were for doing such disgusting things. It worked. At first, they all snickered and called me a stupid bitch, but afterwards one of them came up and apologized, promising to get the video taken down. After that, the teasing lessened, and whenever anything was said to me by anyone, I kept standing my ground and making sarcastic, snippy comments to bite back at them. That was enough to make my peers gain a little bit of respect for me.
By the time my senior year came round, things had changed. I wasn’t a total loser anymore, and people actually spoke to me with
out saying nasty things or giving me weird looks. But all the years of previous bullying still haunted me. I had constant nightmares about my previous treatment, and every day, I woke up in a cold sweat, just waiting for it all to begin again. To this day, I still found it very hard to trust anyone, even now that I was in my second year of college.
I was well aware of the fact that all the later acts of bullying were carried out by other kids, not Cade, but as far as I was concerned, he was the one who’d started it all by making me a social outcast in the first place with the awful corn syrup prank, and I could only imagine how much better my earlier life might’ve been if he hadn’t existed. So call me petty, but I couldn’t stand the mere thought of him even after all these years, and I was ashamed of myself for not immediately recognizing him last night. Those sinful eyes hadn’t changed a bit, and the way my stomach twisted into dreadful knots at the memory of him also hadn’t changed.
Too bad I had to live with the prick soon…
It was the unluckiest coincidence in the world. Out of all the men my Mom could’ve met and decided to marry, it had to be Cade’s father. Perhaps they’d bonded over the fact that they were both originally from Philly; who knows? But it was happening, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“Charlotte, honey?”
Speak of the devil—my mother was knocking on my door.
I trudged over and opened it, and she gasped as she took in my slovenly appearance. “Charlotte! What on earth happened to you? You look terrible!”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said sarcastically. “I had a rough night, that’s all.”
“Was it because of the flight here yesterday?” she asked. “I always feel a little nauseated after being on a plane for a few hours.”
I nodded, not wanting to reveal the real reason I felt like crap. Imagine how that conversation would go... Mom, I went to the hotel bar and drank an outrageous amount of wine before inviting a guy back to my room—a guy who was essentially a stranger—and hooking up with him. Oh, and then it turned out that he wasn’t a stranger. He’s an old school enemy of mine, and he’s your future stepson….surprise!
Tease - A Stepbrother Sports Romance Page 3