Tease - A Stepbrother Sports Romance

by Caitlin Daire

  “It’ll work,” I said, my voice firm. “It just has to.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Charlotte

  It was almost go time.

  Nicki and I were up in my room, making sure the last-minute details of our plan were ironed out while Cade distracted Keith down in the basement. We’d figured it would take about forty-five minutes for them to be done, so Nicki and I had hurriedly placed the small webcam she’d bought for us in Keith’s study while they were busy—one which was small and innocuous enough to not be noticed for quite some time—and now Nicki was sitting on my bed with my laptop, frowning as she hurriedly typed away on the keyboard.

  “Everything okay?” I asked, trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice. I was a wreck, but I couldn’t let her see that. She didn’t know the real reason we were doing this; didn’t know what Keith had done, and now wasn’t the right time to tell her all about it.

  Now was simply the time for action.

  Nicki looked up at me. “Yep, it’s all good. The camera feed is all hooked up via the Wi-Fi,” she said. “Sorry, I just have my ‘concentration’ face on. I always look mad when I’m focusing on something.”

  I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “Okay, cool. So it’s all…” I waved my hand towards the website she had up on the screen, and she nodded, knowing exactly what I meant.

  ”It should work perfectly. But…” She chewed on her lip before continuing. “You guys made it sound like Keith is having an affair or something, and you just want video evidence to show your Mom. But the way you’ve asked me to set this up, in this exact way….it’s not an affair, is it? It’s something else.”

  Nicki wasn’t stupid, and considering everything we’d asked her to do with my laptop, it was obvious that there was a deeper issue here, rather than us simply trying to catch Keith lying about a mistress or something similar.

  “He’s done something bad. Really bad,” I said.

  Nicki nodded. “I figured. But don’t worry, I’ve got your back. I won’t say a thing to anyone till it’s over.”

  I smiled at her. “Thanks.”

  I knew now that I’d definitely made the right choice in forgiving Nicki and moving on from our past issues. She was doing her best to make things right and earn back my trust, and that was a big step. She couldn’t change the past, and neither could I, but we could control our future.

  “I think I hear them moving around downstairs,” she said, sitting up straighter. “You go deal with it, and I’ll keep things running smoothly in here.”

  “Okay. Thanks again.”

  I dashed downstairs and met up with Cade and Keith in the living area, where they were chatting about Keith’s friend Bob and dusting themselves off after being in the basement. I knew how hard it was for Cade to act normally around his father right now, and I gave him a tight smile and a nod, which I knew he’d correctly interpret to mean ‘you’re doing great, keep going’.

  “Hey,” I said as I stepped towards them. “All done?”

  “Yep, Bob will be here soon to pick up his new collection,” Keith said, patting Cade on the back. Cade visibly flinched.

  “I was wondering if we could talk privately in your study for a moment, Keith,” I said, keeping my tone and expression congenial.

  “Of course. Cade, can you go outside and make sure the—”

  “He’s part of this,” I said. “It’s about all the media stuff around your campaign.”

  Keith nodded slowly. “I see.”

  We wordlessly trudged towards the study, and when we arrived in it, I made sure to stand in a position that ensured Keith would have to be visible to the camera when he faced me.

  “So what’s up, kids?” he said. “The journalists harassing you too much?”

  “Not exactly,” Cade said. “We’ve been hearing rumors, and they’ve made us wonder about some things.”

  “Go on.”

  “Some people are wondering why the security at the wedding was so lax. The security detail let an armed man in, after all. An armed man with no invite.”

  Keith sighed and rubbed his chin in exasperation, and I had to commend him for his acting skills. “I know. Incompetent fools. That security company is shutting down after what happened, thank god, and honestly, I’ve considered suing them for what they did.”

  “And yet you haven’t,” Cade said, his gaze unwavering. “Because that’d draw too much attention to things, right?”

  Keith looked confused for a second, and then he smiled. “Right. The last thing this family needs is more attention and drama. That’s what you mean, I assume.”

  Cade nodded and gave him a thin, tight smile. “Sure,” he said. “The other rumors are about Felix Adamson. Something about him not actually being crazy. Something about hm being paid off by you or someone on your campaign team.”

  “Paid off? For what purpose?” Keith looked horrified, and for a second, I thought we’d gotten it all horribly wrong, and that he was actually innocent in all this. He was that good at playing pretend.

  Cade continued. “Charlotte also overheard an interesting phone call of yours a while back. Sounded like you were talking to Greg Sanders about hiring someone called Adams….but that could’ve been Adamson. You also used a slang term for a pistol somewhere in that conversation.”

  Keith turned his gaze to me, and I saw all the confirmation I needed in his eyes—a flickering look of resentment mixed with anger. It quickly disappeared, replaced with his usual charming, happy expression, but I knew it had been there.

  I knew Cade had seen it too.

  Keith finally let out a laugh, one that was slightly too forced to be real. “What are you talking about? Is this some college prank of yours?”

  “I heard you talking about getting someone a ‘burner’,” I said, finally speaking up. “I thought you meant something else at the time. A burner phone, perhaps. But then today you informed me that to you, that word is a slang term for handgun.”

  “So you were eavesdropping on my private phone conversations, misheard something, and now you’re accusing me of….what, exactly?”

  Keith’s voice had gone cold, and his eyes dangerously dark, but I didn’t shrivel away. Cade and I knew he was guilty, and we needed to make him slip up; needed to make him admit his culpability in some manner so that the camera could capture it.

  I took a deep breath. “You know what we’re accusing you of. Because you know what you did,” I said.

  “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,” Keith said with a shrug. Christ, he was a good actor. “Now, I don’t have time for whatever this silly little game is. Please leave now. I have work to do.”

  Cade took a step forwards. “Let me spell it out for you. We know these aren’t rumors. We have proof that you and your campaign team hired Felix Adamson to shoot your own son in order to boost your image, and we have no issue with taking that proof to the media.”

  It wasn’t true; we didn’t have any solid proof. But Keith didn’t know that.

  “What are you talking about?” he said sharply, his eyes narrowing.

  “One of the security guards you paid off to let Adamson into the ceremony that day…he’s saying he might come forward. Says the amount he was paid wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get hold of you, so he approached us to give our family a chance to pay him more for his continued silence,” Cade lied. “He told us everything, Dad. And like I said, we have no issue with taking this to the media….unless you make it worth our while to stay quiet.”

  Keith was silent for a long moment, studying both of us in turn. If he was truly innocent, then there was no way he’d offer us anything—because he’d know for certain that we didn’t really have any proof, and that we were making everything up.

  Unfortunately for him, he took the bait hook, line and sinker. “How much?” he finally said, his voice stiff. “How much to make this all go away?”

  “The security guard wants an extra fifty thousand to keep his mouth shut
. And Charlotte and I want two hundred and fifty thousand. Each. I also want the house in Aspen.”

  “Fine,” Keith replied, his eyes gleaming. He obviously thought he’d just dodged a huge bullet. “You can have the money and the house. And Evan and Emilia are never to be told of this indiscretion, obviously.”

  Gotcha, you bastard, I thought. It broke my heart to imagine how Evan and my mother would feel when they saw all of this, but they needed to know—they needed to see that he was the type of man who would refer to having his own son injured as an ‘indiscretion’.

  “I’ll need all of this in writing,” Cade replied, still keeping a straight face for the time being.

  Keith nodded. “Of course,” he said, as if this were a simple business transaction. “You know….you’re a lot more like me than you’ve ever wanted to admit, Cade.”

  “No, I’m not,” Cade replied, his hands curling into fists by his side. “Because unlike you, I didn’t just essentially admit—on camera—to hiring someone to shoot my own fucking son so I could have a better chance of becoming president.”

  Keith’s face blanched at the realization that we’d been recording this conversation, but he managed to stay relatively calm. “Cameras and recordings can be destroyed. You’ve both gotten what you wanted, so I trust you’ll be happy to do so as part of a good faith agreement.”

  He actually had the audacity to smile right then, and I suppressed an urge to slap him right across the face. Instead, I simply looked back at him, my lips breaking into a triumphant smile of my own.

  “I guess it’s too bad this isn’t being recorded in the traditional sense,” I said. “The little webcam we have over there is actually live-streaming this conversation to YouTube and sharing the video on Facebook. Our friend is making sure of that right now. And once something is on the internet like that, it’s never coming off. It can’t be edited or destroyed like a regular recording.”

  Keith’s mouth dropped open, and Cade picked up where I’d left off. “And in case you didn’t figure it out yet, Dad, we don’t really want any money. We just wanted to hear you admit what you did, and by offering us the money, you did exactly that. An innocent man doesn’t offer to pay bribes. This video will be enough for the police to launch a formal inquest,” he said.

  Keith froze where he stood. He’d clearly never been caught out by anyone before, and he definitely hadn’t been expecting to be screwed over by two nineteen year olds, let alone family members.

  “This is all a misunderstanding. A mistake,” he said, trying to backtrack. “Where’s that camera? Turn the fucking thing off now!”

  Cade took another step toward his father. “You always acted like I wasn’t good enough because I didn’t want to follow in your footsteps. But I am good enough. In fact, I’m a hundred times better than you, you scum-sucking piece of shit.”

  Keith shrank back at the look in Cade’s eyes. “Stop. I…”

  “You had your own son shot,” Cade said, his voice deadly soft. “You hurt my brother.”

  Suddenly he shot forward, and my eyes went wide as he attacked. The guttural punch he aimed at his father’s abdomen bent his figure, and Keith’s winded puffing as he tried to catch his breath sounded like a cross between a smoker and a dying zombie. As he tried to rise back up to his full height, Cade struck again, using his left hand to grab him around the neck as he backed him up against a shelf. With his right fist he delivered blow after blow to Keith’s face, and my knees almost caved with fear as I watched him squeeze his father until his knuckles were white.

  “Cade, stop!”

  This wasn’t part of the plan. Our only plan had been to make Keith admit to what he’d done and live-stream it to a video site so that thousands would see it before it was taken down, making it impossible for him to do any damage control or twist the story in any way that might make him look innocent. But beating the shit out of him? That was all Cade’s on-the-fly idea.

  To be fair, I couldn’t exactly blame him.

  Blood dripped from Keith’s nose as Cade drew his fist back, and I shouted again. “Cade! Not like this!”

  I didn’t actually have any sympathy for Keith; I just wanted him to spend a long time rotting in prison, which meant he needed to be well and truly alive. Cade finally pulled back and let his father slump to the floor in defeat, and his chest heaved as he tried to regain his composure.

  “You’re lucky she’s here,” he hissed towards Keith, who said nothing. He knew he was done. His career and life as he knew it were over from this moment onwards.

  I heard a sound at the study door, and I turned to see Nicki entering the room, holding my laptop. “It’s done,” she said, shooting a dark look towards Keith. Until a moment ago, she’d been watching the scene unfold from the laptop upstairs, so she knew exactly what he’d done. “An hour from now, at least two million people will have viewed that video.”

  “What video? What’s going on?”

  We all looked back at the door at the sound of the new voice in the room, and my heart sank. It was Evan.

  “What’s going on?” he repeated when no one responded for a full thirty seconds. “What happened to Dad?”

  What happened, indeed?

  Cade walked over and put a firm yet comforting hand on his little brother’s shoulder. “Evan, you should sit down. There’s something you need to know.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Charlotte

  The next two weeks seemed to flash by in an instant. Everything happened so quickly that it almost felt like nothing was going on at all, and yet, everything had changed.

  The video we made had gone viral within hours of Nicki streaming it, and within two days, Keith’s offices in Denver and DC were being swarmed by the media as well as put under investigation by the respective District Attorneys. Keith, Greg, and two other political consultants had been remanded without bail for the time being, and two of the security guards who’d been paid off had come forward and admitted their guilt. Soon, a case would be built against the whole lot of them.

  They’d be going away for a long time.

  For the time being, we could hardly leave the house—there were journalists camped outside it twenty-four hours a day, hoping to secure interviews with either myself or Cade, seeing as we’d been the ones to expose Keith to the world. We weren’t giving interviews, though, at least not anytime soon, for a number of reasons. Firstly, we didn’t think we were particularly genius-level smart for catching him out, which was how the media was currently painting us. We simply had access to more information as family members, which had allowed us to figure out what Keith was up to. After all, a non-family member would’ve been far less likely to overhear Keith’s calls, or sit down at lunch and chat about guns with him.

  Secondly, we didn’t want the attention right now. All we wanted to do was spend time with my Mom and Evan, to offer them the comfort they needed in a time like this.

  The worst part about all of this had been seeing their faces when we told them.

  Mom had been inconsolable for three straight days when she’d found out what her new husband had done, and Evan was devastated to learn that his own father had done something so awful to him, all in the name of building his already-successful political career even further. We’d spent hours talking it over with the two of them, and we’d finally agreed on one simple fact—we were all much better off without him.

  The marriage couldn’t be annulled, but Mom was actually grateful for that, because legally being Keith’s wife made it much easier for her to begin the process of getting sole custody of Evan while they began the divorce process. Evan didn’t have any other parents, seeing as his father would soon be rotting in jail, and his mother hadn’t been around since he was very young, so it made sense for my mother to take care of him. I was over the moon when she told me what she was planning, because in the few months that I’d known Evan, I’d really come to see him as a little brother to me as well as Cade.

  Right now
I was on the third floor with him, playing around with my telescope. It was a Tuesday evening, and while we couldn’t go outside and use it, we could easily open a window—one which faced well away from all the journalists and their vans—and observe the sky through the window. I knew this was one of Evan’s favorite things to do, and he did seem much cheerier than usual as he pointed out different constellations through it.

  “I think I can see Taurus,” he said, squinting. “Hey, you can take photos with this thing, right?”

  “Yep, there’s a camera add-on. Just click the blue button on the right side… yep, that’s the one.”

  “That’s so cool. Where did you buy it?” he said as he took a couple of photos of the constellation he’d spotted.

  “I didn’t buy it,” I said. “My father did, and he added the camera fixture himself. He was really interested in stargazing too.”

  “Oh. I wish my father had been interested in the same stuff as me,” Evan replied softly. “Maybe things would’ve been different.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I simply placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. He pulled away from the telescope and looked at me.

  “Do you think I might end up like him one day? I really don’t want to. But you obviously took after your father in some ways, like having the same hobbies and so on. I’m afraid I’ll do the same.”

  I shook my head. “You’re nothing like him, Evan, and you never will be. Wanna know how I know that?”

  “How?”

  I ruffled his hair. “Because you said you don’t want to be like him. That’s all anyone needs to hear to know for sure that you’ll turn out just fine.”

  He smiled. “Thanks, Charlotte. You’re a really good sister-in-law, you know.”

  My forehead creased with confusion. “Don’t you mean stepsister?”

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “Once our parents are divorced, you won’t legally be my stepsister anymore, and I figured you and Cade will probably get married one day, seeing as you two have been—”