Quid Pro Quo: A dark stepbrother romance

by Nenia Campbell

  “Why did you start photographing people like that? It's a little sick, isn't it?”

  “It didn't start out sick. I started out taking pictures of trees, birds. The usual shit. People were more dynamic. Interesting. I suppose initially it was about the intimacy of getting to know someone through the lens. And then it became about the thrill of catching their exploits on film.”

  Jay's mouth flattened. “I'm surprised your father didn't disinherit you.”

  “How was that going to look? His only son? He had his pride—that was another part of his conditions, that need to save face. No, it was always going to me.”

  What an arrogant psychopath. Nicholas parked in the driveway and Jay hopped out of it, holding onto her drink like she didn't know what to do with it. “I guess it's good your disgusting hobby benefited someone in the end.”

  “I'm actually a very good photographer,” said Nicholas. “If you're willing to sit for me, I can take a professional head shot that would run you about $100 in a studio. You should take me up on it. Your current LinkedIn picture looks like a missing person poster.”

  Jay shot him a dark look. “You're going to be a missing person if you come near me with a camera.”

  Her words elicited a feral grin that had her fingers tightening around the cup. “Feisty,” he remarked, in an appreciative tone. “Do you want to eat inside or outside?”

  Thoroughly unsettled, Jay nearly said, Outside, until she remembered that would mean eating by the pool. “Inside is fine,” she said.

  She thought he laughed, but when she looked in his direction, his face was carefully impassive. They went into the kitchen, where he dropped the cartons unceremoniously on the counter with the bar stools, instead of going into the dining room like she expected.

  Though she was relieved not to eat in that coldly formal room, Jay didn't miss that he'd chosen the stool in the middle, giving her little choice but to squeeze in next to him unless she wanted to grab her food and run.

  After breaking down and crying in his arms, she wanted to do exactly that. But she had her pride, too, and sometimes pride meant being stupid. She climbed onto the stool that faced out into the aisle across from the fridge, which made her feel a little less trapped than the corner.

  He slid her box at her. The sweet potatoes had turned golden brown at the edges with frying and had been lightly dusted with sugar. It was a riot of grease and delicate sweetness—exactly what she wanted after a hike and a cry, and even better with a creamy iced tea. She couldn't help closing her eyes a little, wanting to savor it, and when she opened them again, she realized she was being watched.

  Nicholas looked away abruptly, dragging her eyes to him, and then to his food, which was already gone. Even the crumbs. Incredulous, she glanced at his drink, which had been sucked down to the dregs. “That was fast,” she blurted. “You still bolt your food down like a little kid.”

  “With some things.” He reached over and helped himself to a handful of her food, to her annoyance. “Once in a while, I find something I really want to savor.” Without breaking eye contact, he slid one of the fries into his mouth, in a way that made her avert her gaze.

  She stared at her fries balefully as her glum mood returned. “Is this where you order me to come to your room?” she asked, trying to sound like she really didn't care.

  He reached over again, this time brushing a lock of hair out of her face. A ripple of sensation cascaded down her neck as he tucked it loosely behind her ear. “I want you to kiss me.”

  Jay felt another piece of herself fracture and threaten to break off. She nodded slowly and leaned forward, surprised when he pushed back against her chest.

  “Only if you're willing.”

  “I have a choice now?” she said dubiously. “I thought you got off on extortion.”

  “I didn't realize you put that much thought into what gets me off,” he said, dusting his knuckles down the front of her top before allowing his hand to fall to his knee.

  “What makes you think I'd want to kiss you?”

  “For starters?” He looked at her for a long moment before letting his eyes fall to her mouth. “The way you're biting your lip,” he said, which made her snap away from as if shocked.

  “No,” said Jay.

  Nicholas grinned. “If you don't like extortion, Jay, how do you feel about bribery?”

  Jay swallowed the fry she had been eating. “What?”

  “Would you be willing to kiss me if I knocked an hour off your debt?”

  “Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “I really want to stick my tongue down your throat now.”

  “Three hours.”

  “Nick,” she said.

  Nicholas arched an eyebrow. “Four hours.”

  She let out an uneasy breath. That was $20,000—he was willing to pay that much to kiss her? “Eight hours,” she said.

  His other eyebrow shot up. “Really.”

  “Someone foolish enough to pay someone twenty thousand dollars to kiss them would probably be foolish enough to pay forty thousand.”

  “Jay, you bad girl.” A smile curved his mouth, slow and predatory, and he pushed his empty cup and carton aside. “Are you trying to shake me down?”

  “Actually,” she said, putting her hands in her lap, “I think what I'm doing is called bid rigging.”

  Nicholas laughed but his smile dangerous. This was the ruthless, take-no-prisoners side of him that she saw at work. “Eight hours,” he agreed, “if you kiss me right now.”

  “Fine.”

  She tugged off her baseball cap, loosening her bun. She saw him draw in an anticipatory breath as she scooted towards him on the stool. He still wasn't quite close enough to kiss, so she braced herself by putting her hands on his thighs and leaning in to cover his mouth with hers.

  It felt different being the one to make the first move. Even her ex had usually been the one to kiss her first instead of the other way around. She opened her eyes to find him looking at her and snapped, “Close your eyes.”

  “For forty grand, I should be able to look at what I bought,” he murmured, but his eyes slipped obediently closed. Jay looked at him for a moment, studying his face. Even in his late twenties, it was still a little boyish, but the curve to his mouth was more arrogant than mischievous and his smiles never seemed to meet his eyes.

  Despite that, or maybe even because of that, he was an incredibly attractive man.

  Jay kissed him again, taking a hand off his thigh to cup his face with her fingers and her belly flipped when he leaned into her touch. She traced gentle fingers down the hollow of his jaw as his mouth, which had been still, began to move against hers. She could feel him holding himself back and that scared her, because she could still remember what he was like when he didn't: it was like plunging headlong into deep water and being unable to breathe.

  All of that dark passion was roiling beneath the surface and she could feel it now, waiting to consume her if she'd let it. When she tremblingly allowed her tongue to enter his mouth, he made a sound that appeared to be involuntary, low and forbidding, and then his hands were on her waist and he was kissing her back as if a dam inside him had burst and all of his restraint were pouring out in a hot and violent torrent. His tongue stroked over hers in a vicious sweep, turning her mouth into a lake of hot, dizzying sensations that had her hand clenching into a desperate fist on his thigh.

  He pulled back, catching her lower lip between his teeth and sucking on it gently, before again pressing his mouth to hers with a scratch of stubble that stung too sweetly to be pain, parting her lips and proceeding to subsume her wholly. When Jay opened her eyes, he was watching her with half-open eyes, a dull gleam sparkling in their frozen depths that looked nearly drug-induced; the intensity of his gaze under the lights was arresting.

  “Kiss me like that again,” he whispered, “and I'll knock off half the debt.”

  Jay let out an alarmingly unstable breath. “That's five million dollars.”

  “I
know.” He began unbuttoning his shirt and she stared, paralyzed, at that widening triangle of sun-bronzed skin and dark, curling hair. When it was open to his collarbone, he shot her an arch look before yanking the fabric over his head and letting it fall to the floor.

  Her fist jerked and she felt his hand close over it, and her other hand, which was hanging uselessly in front of her legs. He placed her hands on his body as he leaned in to kiss her, which made her shudder a little because his chest was warm and firm, all hard planes and sharply defined edges beneath that light dusting of coarse hair, and touching him felt good. She could feel the muscles beneath his flesh contracting under her touch and by the time she reached his stomach, her fingers were shaking and seemed to have gone numb at the tips.

  “Nick,” she whispered.

  He pulled her into his lap, making the stools wobble dangerously. He stood, still holding onto her, and set her down on the counter, and the chill of the granite on her ass through her track pants sent a shock pulsing through her. He stepped between her spread legs and freed her hair from its tight bun, dropping the scrunchie on the floor with his shirt as he wove his fingers through her hair. Jay had forgotten how good it could feel to be consumed—so good that you didn't feel the pain of it until you were already long gone.

  She let him take her shirt off, and he broke from her just long enough to get it over her head, leaving her shivering in just her sports bra. His palms rasped against her skin and each touch seemed to slough part of her away. Her nipples were hard and aching, and he touched them, so roughly that she found herself whimpering, melting under another incredibly forceful kiss as he slowly lowered her back against the counter until she was pinned beneath his hips, with his chest bearing down on hers with each heavy breath, and her desire burning as hot and golden as a candle.

  He looked down at her, tucking that strand of hair behind her ear that had first captured his attention. She might have thought him unmoved, had she not been able to feel the press of him against her belly or see how large and dark his pupils were as his eyes swept over her face.

  “I'm leaving now,” he informed her, as she struggled to breathe. “Not because I want to, but because I need to, and because I want you to remember this when you come to me—because you will come to me, and when you do, I want you to fuck me the way you just kissed me.”

  Jay stared at him uncomprehendingly as he bent to grab his shirt from the floor and, after flashing her a closed-lipped smile, left without looking back.

  When she heard the creak of his footsteps on the stairs, she heaved out a breath that felt like a shard of glass as she stared up at the can lights over the bar.

  Fuck.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  2017

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  Jay stood in front of her bathroom mirror, adjusting her clothes. She was wearing her favorite high-waisted skirt, this time paired with a polka-dot blouse that had a bow above the keyhole neckline. It was sleeveless, so she wore a sweater over it, doing up just enough buttons so the ruffly bow peeked out like a jabot. She fiddled with the loops, trying to make it sit exactly right as she avoided her own eyes in the mirror.

  Last night, she had touched herself while thinking of him.

  She knew it was terrible of her, but body memory was an entirely separate faculty from reason and she had been sorely lacking in reason for years, it seemed, because that ardently possessive kiss had left a searing tension in her lower belly that wound inside her like a metal cable. When she finally slid off that counter on unsteady legs, she felt like she might snap.

  So Jay had locked her door, sticking a chair under the handle for good measure, and stripped down to her underthings in bed. Covering her mouth with her free hand to ensure that she couldn't be heard, she had brought herself to climax several times, hips bucking beneath her sheets in something too desperate to be pleasure. It had almost been enough.

  She had showered afterwards, changing into her pajamas and going downstairs. She made herself dinner as if nothing were out of the ordinary, within a stone's throw of the counter that he had nearly fucked her on, and when he had come into the kitchen to heat up his own meal, she managed not to look over at said counter, carrying on a discussion with him in a normal voice. And even though it had been disgustingly civil, there had been a strange undercurrent rippling through all of their interactions as if he knew exactly what she'd been doing on the other side of her door.

  She fed Carbon and grabbed her purse, heading downstairs. Nicholas was dressed in the outfit he had worn when he sat down with her in that vegan diner and first outlined his Faustian bargain. The charcoal jacket and black pants even made him look a little Mephistophelean.

  I want you to fuck me the way you just kissed me.

  It was so easy to hate him when he was a bastard. When he was playing mind games, when he was being arrogant and cruel, and mocking her in that voice that could shift to cold just as easily as it could to scalding, it was so, so easy to hate him—and hate him, she did. A lot.

  But when he commanded her to do bad things in that same voice, with just the faintest hint of tenderness lighting up that rich darkness like a midnight sky fading to the dawn—

  Then it was a lot harder not to give in.

  She no longer had a strong foundation to stand upon from which she could safely hate him. After years of living apart, he no longer felt like a brother, and he would likely leave her in tatters when he was through with her. She could already feel her resistance crumbling to rubble all around her. She would be crushed under her own meek attempts at defiance.

  “We're having an all-hands meeting this afternoon to discuss our OKRs,” Nicholas said, in lieu of a greeting. “When we get to the office, I'm going to send you a PowerPoint presentation to read over, and then I want you to double-check the spreadsheets. No need to correct any of the formulas—just let me know if anything looks wrong, or if one of the slides doesn't work.”

  “Um, sure. I can do that.”

  His eyes flickered over her, from her hair to her heels, and she instinctively braced herself for the inevitable taunt. “All of the figures I'm going over are from last quarter, so none of the acquisitions you've fielded for me are included in this data set. But I've been glancing over some of the preliminaries and I have a feeling that the numbers will be much, much better next quarter.” Her chest began to flutter as he walked closer, in a way that struck her as distinctly predatory, but he bypassed her, picking up his briefcase from the counter. “Nice work.”

  She folded her arms. “I told you I was a serious professional.”

  “So serious,” he said, with mock solemnity. “Sometimes when I look over at you, sitting at your desk, you look like you're planning on strangling someone.”

  Jay glanced at him. “Maybe I am.”

  Nicholas grabbed his keys and herded her out the door. “You always did like it rough.”

  Jay coughed and began spluttering. “Excuse me?”

  “No need.” She saw his cheek lift, like he was smiling, as they walked out to the car. Clearly enjoying himself. “I don't mind,” he added, swinging in behind the wheel. “If you want me to fuck you a little harder while I've got my hand around your throat, you don't have to be coy.”

  “I don't,” she said, in a barely contained voice.

  “Oh, did you want to put your hand around my throat? That might work. I'm just not sure how you could maintain a good enough grip while I'm g—”

  “Nobody's hands are going anywhere,” she said, coloring when he gave her a sideways grin.

  “Now that's just a lie, blue jay—unless you want me to tie you up again.”

  Her water bottle crinkled as her hand tightened on it, and she saw that he noticed, too. She let out a breath and stared angrily at her lap, feeling much too hot, while he laughed.

  “This isn't funny and I don't appreciate you winding me up before we get to the office.”

  “You're thirty-one,” he said, still chuckling. “
And you're still such a fucking prude.”

  “Shut up.”

  That just sent him into a fresh gale of laughter. Jay decided to ignore it, cranking down the car window to feel the breeze upon her face. “You are such a bastard,” she said, tugging her hair to one side so it wouldn't get all windblown. “I don't even understand how you can run a company when you're such a child.”

  “You'd be surprised how often people think about that,” he said, sobering.

  “No, I wouldn't.”

  “It comes up all the time in negotiations. It doesn't matter that I wear a bespoke suit, or that I went to the West Coast equivalent to an Ivy—I consistently get clients who don't expect me to read the contracts they give me and then try to fuck me in the fine print.”

  “Like that man who tried to give you half a percent?” she asked, finding herself reluctantly drawn into the conversation. At least he had moved on from the subject of her prudery.

  “Just like him.”

  Jay stared out the window. “So what do you do about it?”

  “I fuck them back.” He rolled up her window, his eyes never leaving the road. “I'm not sweet about it, either. By the time I'm finished, they're usually hurting. After that, we either renegotiate on my terms or I send them on their way. Nobody ever underestimates me twice.”

  It took Jay a moment to speak. “That sounds a little like a warning.”

  Nicholas parked the car but he didn't respond right away. He seemed to be thinking over what she'd said. “You still see me as a younger brother,” he said eventually. “I think that's the excuse you give yourself to hold me at a distance: telling yourself I'm still a boy. But I'm not.”

  “I know you're not a boy,” she said, her voice tight. “You've made that resoundingly clear.”

  “I'm a man,” he said, as if she hadn't spoken. “With a man's goals and a man's desires.” He paused. “And a man's burdens.”