I raised my eyebrows. “For what?”
Cade rose to his full height and walked back over to me. “Do you remember our school camp back in the sixth grade?”
I smiled at the memory. “Yep.”
Sixth grade camp was one of my few good memories from school. It was before I’d become a major social pariah, and it’d been fun as hell. Our grade had taken a bus to a camping ground in Bald Eagle state forest, and we’d walked short hiking trails, set up tents and completed various fun activities. One of the best things we did was on the second night there—our teachers had let us sit around the campfire and toast marshmallows while telling ghost stories. I distinctly remembered that Cade had sat near me during my story, and he’d hung on every word I said. Seeing as he was one of the cool kids, it had made me feel pretty good at the time.
“There’s a little fire pit out the back. Let’s get a fire going and toast some of these bad boys,” he said, pointing to the marshmallows again. “And we can even tell creepy stories. It’ll be fun, right?”
“Yeah. But will we be able to start a fire when it’s this cold?” I asked.
“Well, cavemen managed to do it back in the day, so I’m sure we’ll manage,” he replied with a wink.
I followed him out the back door of the cabin and spotted the fire pit. It was just beyond the small enclosed backyard area, and Cade walked over to a box that sat near a window. “Firewood,” he explained, loading some small logs and sticks into his arms. “Sorry, I forgot….can you go back inside and grab the lighter fluid and lighter from the kitchen? Fourth cupboard from the stove.”
“Okay, be right back.”
Fifteen minutes later, we had a roaring fire going, and we sat down on a massive log that had been placed near the fire pit.
“One marshmallow kebab coming up,” Cade said a moment later, removing a stick from the fire. It had five marshmallows pushed onto it, and it smelled divine.
He handed it to me, and I smiled and accepted it, raising it to my mouth. “Mmm…” I said in between mouthfuls of melted sugary goodness. “This is so good.”
I didn’t feel guilty for eating it. Once upon a time, if someone had called me ‘chubby’, then I would’ve deprived myself of any treat foods for two weeks and exercised like mad in an attempt to lose weight. I wasn’t going to do that now. Nicki’s words may have stung, but I wasn’t going to let those words control my life, and I’d realized a long time ago that I was naturally curvy, so no amount of starving myself and being miserable was going to make me rail-thin anyway. And why would I want to be, anyway? My body worked just fine, whether it was voluptuous or skinny, so I didn’t see why it was even an issue.
I smiled to myself at my train of thought. While I might not have been strong enough to defend myself back there at the party, I was taking steps, and accepting my body for what it was and refusing to let bully’s words affect my perception of that was one of those steps.
“What’s so funny?” Cade asked, seeing me smile.
The flames of the fire cast shadows and light in varying areas of his handsome face, and his blue-green eyes seemed brighter than ever.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Just being out here like this….it’s so nice.”
“Yeah, it is. Are you ready for your surprise yet?”
“I thought the fire and the marshmallows was the surprise,” I said, my eyebrows furrowing with confusion.
“It was only part of it,” he said, standing up. I went to follow suit, and he shook his head. “No, you stay sitting down, I just have to show you something.”
He moved behind me, grabbed my right arm, and then pointed it towards the night sky. Out here in the wilds, the stars were much brighter than they were back in the city, and I smiled as I watched them twinkle. Cade’s hand guided my arm, tracing an area of the sky, and when he was done, I looked over my shoulder at him.
“That’s the Aquarius constellation.”
“Yep. Your birthday makes you an Aquarius, right?”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
He tapped his fingers on the side of his head. “Not just a pretty face.”
I laughed. “Who ever said you were pretty?”
“Hey! Who’s the big bully now, huh?” he said with a grin. He sat down next to me and pointed at another part of the sky. “Oh, there’s Ursa Major.”
I smiled and looked at him. “How do you know all these constellations?”
“I know you love astronomy, and seeing as the stars are so visible out here, I thought you’d probably wanna do some stargazing at some point this weekend. So I read up on some stuff. Thought it might be cool for you to have a stargazing partner.”
“How did you know I love astronomy?”
“Two reasons. One, I remember back in the third grade, you’d always draw stars and galaxies on your papers. And two…I heard you talking to my brother about it. You’re both big old space nerds.”
“At least we’re not big beefy sports nerds.”
We spent the next few minutes laughing and teasing each other about silly things, along with looking up at the night sky and finding different constellations, and Cade finally pointed to another one and turned to me. “What’s that one, smart-ass?”
“Taurus,” I said. “You should know that…you’re a Bighorn, after all.”
“Bighorns are sheep, you idiot,” he said, playfully poking me.
I clapped a hand to my mouth at my silliness. “Oh my god. Of course they are. For some reason I had it in my head that they were bulls.”
“You might make a good doctor one day, but for god’s sake, don’t ever try to be a vet,” he said, earning him a playful elbow to the ribs. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask. Why are you so into astronomy, anyway?”
“Because of my father,” I said softly, glancing down at my snow-covered shoes. “He used to love it.”
“Where is he now?” he asked.
“He died when I was eight.”
“Oh, shit. Sorry, Charlotte. I thought your parents were just divorced and he lived somewhere else.”
I shook my head. “Nope. But it’s okay, you didn’t know.”
“Tell me about him.”
I looked up at the stars again as I spoke. “He was a really good man. He had this spark in his eyes, always curious about something and always wanting to learn more. After I was born, he became pretty interested in astronomy for some reason. He bought a lot of different instruments like telescopes, refractors, and so on. He even built some contraptions of his own. And every couple of nights, he’d take me out with him and share his hobby with me. We’d sit out there for hours, looking at all the different star formations.”
“That sounds really nice.”
I smiled. “It was. Nowadays, whenever I look at the stars, I remember all that, and I feel like part of him is still here,” I said. “Is that totally lame?”
“Not at all. Makes perfect sense,” Cade replied. “Sounds like your Dad was a great guy.”
“Yeah, he was. When he died, I was so young, and it really hit me hard. But then one day I made a promise to myself to try and live the rest of my life in his honor. So every day when I wake up, one of my first thoughts is that I’m living for him. That kinda helped me get through a lot of stuff earlier in life—like the bullying in high school—because no matter how bad it got, I wanted to work hard to keep my promise.”
“That’s a really good way of looking at things,” Cade said. “You were always a smart kid.”
“Thanks. So what about your father?” I asked. “You guys seem a bit…”
My sentence trailed off, and Cade nodded. “I know what you mean. We have a weird relationship. My Mom left when I was about thirteen, and Evan was only eight. So it was hard for him; he had to raise us on his own.”
“Your Mom just left?”
“Yeah. Took off one day, never contacted us again except to tell us she’d met someone else and was starting a new family with him.”
“Shit. That�
��s horrible.”
Cade shrugged. “It is what it is. Anyway, Dad changed a bit when that happened. He moved us out here—he was actually born and raised here, so it’s his home state—and ran for the Senate. He’d always been interested in politics, and I guess Mom leaving him changed his life enough for him to want to change his career too. He was already a really successful businessman, so it wasn’t hard for him to get elected. People around here respect him a lot.”
“Do you?”
“Sometimes. I know he wants what’s best for me and Evan, but he goes the wrong way about it. Total and utter control freak. When we were younger and school was out, we had a nanny to take care of us when he was at work, and he had five separate nanny cams in the house to spy on all of us.”
“Wow, that’s a bit of overkill.”
“Yeah. And anything we like, he shuts down—he thinks he knows best.”
“Like your football.”
“Exactly. He calls it my ‘hobby’ when it’s actually one of the only things I’m really passionate about. I even got a scholarship for it, so he didn’t even have to pay for my college tuition, but he still acts like a controlling prick about it. Always going on about how I have to go to law school after my Bachelor’s, and so on.”
“And really you just want to play football.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re really good at it.”
“Could be better, though.”
“That’s why you keep practicing,” I said. “And working out all the time. Seriously, you practically live in the gym.”
He grinned. “Yeah. And hey, if I ever get injured at a game, at least I’ll have a doctor for a stepsister to help me, right?”
I grinned and nodded, but as his words fully registered with me, the smile slowly faded from my face. Stepsister. That’s all I was going to be to him in just six weeks, when our parents officially got married, and while I knew that staying platonic friends was the right thing to do, it wasn’t what I wanted.
At all.
Cade grabbed a long stick and stoked our little fire with it, and then he turned to me. “Hey, I forgot. We’re meant to be telling ghost stories, like we did back at camp.”
“Okay, I’ve got a scary story for you,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“Once upon a time, a guy named Cade Blackwell looked in the mirror. The end.”
He snorted. “Hilarious,” he said. “Am I really that ugly?”
“Nah, you know I’m kidding,” I replied, licking melted marshmallow residue off my upper lip. “So what’s your scary story? I bet you a million bucks you can’t freak me out.”
“Game on.”
He leaned back and stretched his arms before speaking again. “All right, this is actually a true one. I came up here to Silverton Falls with Blake and Ben about a year ago, and we stayed in this very same cabin,” he said, gesturing behind us.
“Uh-huh.”
“And we decided to build a fire, right where you and I are sitting now. After an hour or so, we started hearing a rustling sound, but we ignored it. All kinds of small animals out here, you know, so we figured it was nothing to worry about. But it kept getting louder and louder….closer and closer.”
“Let me guess….a Sasquatch?”
“Nah, like I said, this is a real story,” Cade said. “So anyway, it kept getting louder, and we started to freak out a bit. But we’d all had a few beers, and I guess our sound perception was off. So we thought the sound was coming from over there.”
He pointed to the left, where there was a forested area, and then he continued. “But it was actually coming from the right, near where the cabin is. So we got up from the fire, backed away towards the cabin, and at the last second we turned around…..and right on the back porch was a huge grizzly bear, rearing up at us, getting ready to attack.”
As he spoke the word ‘attack’, he pounced, trying to scare me, but I just laughed and pushed him away. “Cade, there are no grizzlies in Colorado. Only black bears live here, and they’re actually pretty frightened of humans and tend to stay away. You’re going to have to try harder than that to scare me.”
His shoulders slumped. “Dammit,” he said. “So you can’t tell the difference between a sheep and a bull, but you can identify the different bear species in each state?”
“I’m selectively dumb,” I said with a smile.
“Well, I don’t know how to scare you, but I’ll keep trying until I manage to freak you out,” he replied. “I’m trying to remember that creepy story you told us that night at camp, but…”
I shushed him and held up a hand, my ears pricking up at the sound of crunching twigs. I peered over at the forested area, and Cade whispered at me. “What is it?”
“Didn’t you hear that?”
“Nope. Maybe my story really did freak you out.”
“No, I heard something,” I insisted.
“Probably just the wind blowing through the trees,” Cade replied. “Don’t worry, this whole area is pretty safe.”
Just as he said that, I heard more twigs snapping, and Cade’s eyebrows shot up.
“Okay, you definitely heard that, right?” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied, putting a finger to his lips. “Stay quiet.”
More twigs snapped, closer this time. Every hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and Cade slowly stood up. “I’m going to go take a look,” he said.
“Let’s just go inside,” I said, yanking on his jacket.
“Nah, I just want to make sure,” he said. “It’s probably just a small animal making the sounds, but I wanna make sure there’s no one from the party drunkenly poking around in the forest. I’d hate for them to get lost and freeze to death.”
He had a good point, and I nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll come with you and help.”
“No, you stay back just in case,” he said.
He trudged towards the nearby tree line, disappearing into the forest for a few seconds, and he called back at me from within the trees a moment later. “Yep, look at this little critter go! He’s heading your way!”
There were more twig-snapping sounds, and then a large squirrel dashed out before making its way up a nearby tree.
“I thought squirrels were only awake during the day,” I said.
“Yeah, they usually are. I guess this little guy got confused,” Cade called back. “Anyway, there we go. The sound was just a—”
He was suddenly cut off mid-sentence, and I leapt to my feet as I heard a scuffling sound, and then Cade’s voice again. “Shit! Charlotte, help! It’s a fucking…”
He was cut off again, and I dashed over to the forest, heart pounding. “Cade! What is it?”
I had mental images of a huge Bigfoot attacking him, or some other awful kind of creature, and I spotted him only seconds later….alive and unhurt. He was totally fine. The bastard was grinning right at me, and I narrowed my eyes. “Cade! I thought you were being attacked!”
“Told you I’d freak you out, one way or another. You owe me a million dollars.”
I stomped over and shoved him. “Prick. That was really scary!”
“But it was funny, huh?”
I pushed on his chest again, hard. “No! Not funny!”
He grabbed my wrists before I could shove him again, holding them tight in his strong grip, and suddenly I became all too aware of how close we were. I stopped struggling, and Cade lowered my wrists before moving his mouth down to mine. His lips devoured me, hard and fast, and his tongue dived into my mouth, searching out mine. I let him do it, needing to feel all of him. The pulsing sensation in my core quickened, and I closed my eyes, savoring the moment.
I tried to think, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to, because if I did, I’d know that this was totally wrong.
He finally released my arms, threading one hand roughly through my hair while the other gripped my ass. Pulling my hips harder against his, he assaulted my mouth like he was a starved man. He sucked on my bot
tom lip and then turned his attention to my jaw and throat in hot, frenzied kisses, and a legion of butterflies took flight inside me.
And then I kissed him back.
Chapter Fourteen
Charlotte
Oh god…I’m kissing him back…
I pulled away and gasped out a few words. “Cade…we have to stop.”
“Why?” he growled.
I knew we needed to, but the logical part of my mind quickly vanished again, and I forgot why I’d said that. I was totally lost.
I grasped his hair, holding him to me and pulling his face back down to mine, and his left hand ran up and down my back, rubbing me through my jacket to keep me warm. His lips crushed down on mine again, and I moaned into his mouth, needing more. Pressure was quickly building in my core, and Cade groaned, a deep masculine sound that made me tingle like crazy.
I didn’t want this to stop.
Ever.
His mouth was still on mine when he picked me up, and I gasped as he began to carry me out of the forest and back towards the cabin. “It’s too cold out here,” he explained, pulling away for just a few seconds before bringing his lips back to mine.
Kicking the back door open a moment later, Cade brought me inside.
We didn’t make it to the bedroom.
He set me down on the cool surface of the kitchenette counter and stood between my legs, and with a fevered frenzy of hands, my clothes disappeared until I was left in nothing but underwear. I looked at Cade, my eyes smoldering as I removed my bra and threw it on the tiled floor, and he returned my gaze, putting his hands on either side of my hips. Then he moved down and yanked outwards, the quick motion startling me. I heard a tearing sound, and then I was finally naked, feeling a tickle of fabric as my ripped panties dropped to the floor.
I moaned, feeling the strength of his hands as they moved over my body, gentle and caressing, my breasts the main object of their focus. His fingers spread, running over my nipples, which quickly stood to attention, and he leaned forward and kissed me again. My core flooded with wet heat the second his lips touched mine again, and another groan slipped from my mouth before I had a chance to stop it. Cade’s hands moved through my hair, gripping and pulling, and his mouth tasted me, tongue dipping inside as I eagerly responded.
Tease - A Stepbrother Sports Romance Page 10