Knox: A Stepbrother Romance (A Standalone Stepbrother Romance Novella) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue or...

  Chapter 1 or...

  Chapter 2 or...

  Chapter 3 or...

  Chapter 4 or...

  Chapter 5 or...

  Chapter 6 or...

  Chapter 7 or...

  Chapter 8 or...

  Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby (Part 1)

  Knox: A Stepbrother Romance (A Standalone Stepbrother Romance Novella)

  Stephanie Brother

  Published by Stephanie Brother, 2015.

  Knox: A Stepbrother Romance

  (A Standalone Stepbrother Romance Novella)

  Stephanie Brother

  © 2015 Stephanie Brother

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author's imagination.

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Knox: A Stepbrother Romance (A Standalone Stepbrother Romance Novella)

  Prologue or... | Fate. Where it all decided to begin.

  Chapter 1 or... | Mr Perfect. How Mommy met my new step-daddy.

  Chapter 2 or... | Knox. The night I made a dick of myself.

  Chapter 3 or... | Marriage, a sentence not a word. The day they made it taboo.

  Chapter 4 or... | Where the truth lies.

  Chapter 5 or... | That night, where fate fucked me over.

  Chapter 6 or... | Meet my demons.

  Chapter 7 or... | This better not be a fucking dream and if it is, don’t you dare wake me.

  Chapter 8 or... | The after and the now.

  About Stephanie Brother

  Giving My Billionaire Stepbrother A Baby (Part 1)

  Also By Stephanie Brother

  About This Book:

  Knox. Like Fort Knox, right? Impossible to break into.

  I know what I want may be technically legal, but what I want to do to him? Maybe not.

  When Dad disappears and Mom remarries, the last thing I expect to get thrown into the dowry is a panty melting, sexy-as-hell step-brother. I guess that’s what Cory means by fate.

  Of course, It’d be alright if every time I looked at him I didn’t feel what I did. I have no reason to either. I mean, it’s not like he’s athletic, or particularly well endowed, or completely fucking drop dead gorgeous, is it?

  I guess it’s a good job he can’t be mine, because if he could, lord knows he’d survive at all with what I want to do to him.

  Maybe the best things in life are the things you’re never meant to have.

  Right. Until you work out how to get them that is.

  This is an unapologetic standalone stepbrother romance novella designed to be devoured in one sitting.

  ***

  I see that look he gives me before he sweeps me up in his arms to press those magnificent lips against mine. Suddenly we are somewhere more private and loose clothing gives way to smooth skin and lustful secrets kept hidden inside. I can smell him. I run my fingers across his chest, trace the smooth lines of muscle, the indents, the pockmarks, the history. I swirl the yolk of my finger around the sensitive nub of his nipple and tease it against his waistband, letting it dip in underneath every so often, inches away from his waking manhood. Dark, brooding eyebrows. Thick forearms and powerful thighs. I’m pressed against him, my skin burning with wanton desire. I squeal lightly as he nibbles my ear, runs his hand down my spine, out across my bum. Squeezes it gently. Teases me. Takes me into him.

  Prologue or...

  Fate. Where it all decided to begin.

  There are certain special moments that happen in a person’s life, after which point they look at themselves and say, without doubt and whether good or bad, “I’m a different person now”.

  Sometimes we can see them coming, and sometimes, like raindrops from a cloudless sky, they take us completely by surprise. We just know that they are special moments because of the way we feel about them, either a millisecond before they actually happen, during, immediately afterwards or a glorious, panty-wetting combination of all three. They tell us that everything will change and there is literally nothing that can be done about it. Some people experience a handful of these such moments, some others go their whole lives without experiencing a single one at all.

  As much as I wanted it, craved it until my heart ached with a desire I felt would consume me entirely, I never, in a million and one years, thought my stepbrother would be one of them. I never thought he would be my most important mark.

  “You never get what you want, Alice, when are you going to realize that. Life isn’t fair. It never has been and it never will be.”

  Substitute Alice for your own name, and I’m sure you’ve heard that said a gazillion times. Isn’t that what parents around the world all tell their children when something happens they didn’t want, or something they wanted more than anything else didn’t happen? I grew up with that rattling around my head every time bad stuff seemed to stick to us like glue. And stick it did. It became a slogan in our household to use as a go to excuse when things didn’t go our way. “Life isn’t fair.” I even used it myself a few times.

  Life wasn’t fair when Dad lost his job, and then it wasn’t fair when he used the money they’d saved for my college fund until he found another one. I get it. Shit happens and sometimes you have to find another way. Dad found it at the bottom of a glass and then at the bottom of a bottle, but that’s another story. I’d been told that life wasn’t fair and we never get what we want so many times before, I was beginning to believe it.

  I’m just glad someone else wasn’t listening either. That’s this story.

  Chapter 1 or...

  Mr Perfect. How Mommy met my new step-daddy.

  My name is Alice. You already know me. I’m the all American girl with the perfect smile and the cheerleader tits. Except I’m not, I’m not even close. I’m the girl that gets lost in a crowd, the one that blends in with the background until you forget I’m there. When I look at my Mom I see where all of that comes from. I am an only child from the womb of another, my mother impregnated by my father at twenty one, after finding her alone at a house party and having just about enough wherewithal in his drunken state, to convince her to join him in the master bedroom. This is the story she would tell me every time she felt like there was a reason to do so, and it is an explanation of my existence I have no reason to disbelieve. It is as good as any other, because the end is the same anyway. After twenty one years of as loyal a marriage as he felt capable to provide for her, when his only daughter - the result of that stolen fuck in someone else’s private chamber - was old enough to cope on her own, he decided enough was enough.

  My mother was heartbroken, naturally. For all his deviations, and there were a few, believe me, this was a milestone moment she didn’t see coming. She was distraught, angry, incapable of the application of any meaning to what had happened. She blamed the job, the destructive spiral into drinking, life itself. She was
beyond consolation, and she was as miserable as you can possibly get, despite clearly being on a better path, until Mr Perfect came out of nowhere to save her. Mr Perfect and the son that looked like a gift from a higher echelon of being. Every time I think about him I feel my stomach knot and blood rush in toe-curling pulses to every super sensitive nerve ending in my body. I could fill pages and pages on the explosion of color that makes his eyes look like star charts of spilled paint, or how the muscles of his torso lead mine so hypnotically and lustfully to the bulge that sits so suggestively between his thighs, but I feel like I’m digressing and I’ll get to that when the rest of the story that leads to it is told.

  I’ve always felt a little sorry for my mother. I don’t dislike my father and I don’t think he’s a bad person, it’s just he was never the right person for Mom. He made a mistake, was a little unlucky and then stuck around for twenty odd years to do the right thing and make up for it. I guess in that time he felt like he might have fallen in love with her, or at least the idea of her, and perhaps at some points he did. I have fond memories of my childhood, and I don’t remember ever thinking, until I was old enough to understand what that really meant, that he didn’t actually love her. I feel sorry for my mother because I feel like she’s never allowed herself to reach her full potential. She’s happy again now, but I wonder how long that will last. I wonder how perfect Mr Perfect really is. I wonder, too, how much my mother is happy to settle for second best. Third best, perhaps.

  As long as there is someone to cuddle in the dark of the night, someone to be there, who am I to judge? It’s not like we decide who we get to fall in love with. Maybe she actually loves him. Maybe she loved my father too, and not just the idea of him.

  My mother met Cory, or who I like to refer to as Mr Perfect, because of his love of fake tan, greasy unkempt hair, and his uncanny resemblance to Curt Hennig, the former American professional wrestler of the same nickname, while on a friends bachelorette party, dressed like a cheerleader. This is not normal for my mother. She doesn’t often go out, let alone go out in fancy dress. The little that she did go out with my dad, changed to nothing at all after he left. It was months before she felt either the need or the confidence to get herself back out into the world.

  You know the all American smile and the cheerleader tits? Well it turns out she’s got them. She’s just never had call to use them before. I don’t know how Patty convinced her to come along to something so debaucherous, let alone get her to wear what she did, but however she managed it, or for whatever reason my mother decided was enough to forgo whatever crap telenovela was on that night to drink cocktails and prowl around like a forty year old slut, she is not the only one indebted to her. Without fake tan and varnished teeth, I would never have laid eyes, or anything else for that matter, on Knox.

  Mom didn’t come back that night. It was the second time in her somewhat lacklustre sexual career that she’d had a one night stand. As a role model, she was a pretty poor example. It was the afternoon of the next day that she tried to sneak quietly through the front door, hoping I wouldn’t catch her out. She couldn’t stop smiling when I confronted her, and spilled the beans in far too much graphic detail when she had calmed herself down enough to speak. I didn’t even press her. All I wanted to know was where she had been and whether she was alright. She has never been one to keep a secret my mom, happy to tell a story if she has one. It was another week before I saw who I had a completely different mental image of in my head. It was like looking at a camel, after someone had described the majesty of an elephant. It was a couple of months after that, my mother no longer the woman she had been when with my father, who was now, by the way, so far removed from our lives that we didn’t even have a picture of him in any of the family albums, that Mr Perfect decided to propose to her. Without even thinking about it, my mother said yes.

  At this point, I knew very little about Cory apart from the fact he was an out of work builder, he favoured denim jackets and large belt buckles, he drove a clapped out sedan and he smoked roll ups so thin they looked like toothpicks. I didn’t know whether he was a suitable suitor for my mother, nor anything else about his family situation.

  "He’s got a son from a previous marriage", Mom said. "A bit like the reverse of you and me. Don’t you think that’s got to be fate?"

  She’d got quite spiritual since meeting Cory, something else that seemed to define him. We’d never spent much time together ourselves until Mom had accepted his marriage proposal, and I made a point of trying to get to know him better. If he opened up for Mom, he did the opposite for me. He wasn’t unlikeable, just a little bland. When I look at Knox now, I feel like he’s come from a completely different person. What Cory did talk about an awful lot before the wedding was fate. How it was fate that had got them together, fate that had sent his wife’s car hurtling off the turnpike in the middle of a freak snowstorm, fate that had put him in that bar in the first place, fate that had cost him his job and nearly his life and fate that was going to save it. I wondered if fate was the reason he left bronze marks on the sofa cushions, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Mom seemed happy, and Cory might have been a little odd but he definitely wasn’t a serial killer and that was good enough for me. And he had a son a couple of years older than me, even though said son lived on the other side of the States. For the first time in my life I’d have the brother that I always wanted, even though we were too far away to ever get together, and I couldn’t see anything at all wrong with that.

  Chapter 2 or...

  Knox. The night I made a dick of myself.

  "He can’t come, work or something. You know how it is. It’s a long way and a lot of money."

  Cory smiled at me and dug his hand into a bowl of peanuts.

  "It’s your wedding though darling. Our wedding."

  Mom was cooking. She was in a flap, not just because she was getting married tomorrow, but because she was burning the potatoes she’d already had in the oven for three hours. I would wager that nobody apart from my mom has ever burned whole jacket potatoes. She’s not a natural cook. It’s at meal times I miss my Dad more than anything else. He didn’t do much right, but he did know how to control a kitchen.

  "He’ll get here when he can, or we’ll go there when we can. It doesn’t matter, hon. Getting married is all that matters, you and me, right?"

  "It matters, doesn’t it Alice?"

  The smoke alarm beeping didn’t give me time to answer. While Mom fought to turn it off, the plastic casing sticking like it always had, Cory held the back of the chair in case she fell. When everything had returned to normal, relatively speaking, the topic of Knox had been replaced by something more practical. The wedding itself.

  It was going to be a small affair, with only a few key friends and family members present. My mother had never got on with her parents, who had moved away to Florida to start a senior’s dating agency as soon as their only daughter had left home. I had seen them a handful of times growing up, and once after Dad had left. If they were invited, which I don’t think they even were, I doubt they would have come anyway. Cory was close to his mother, who was still battling on after ninety one years, who, despite a pantheon of medical conditions, any one of which should have already killed her, intended to be there to support her son in his fourth marriage, and he had an uncle and a cousin who said they would try to show up. After that it was the very few friends they seemed to have collected between them.

  At this point it might be a good idea to point out that Cory, hence the fake tan and bright white teeth, is a little older than my mother. And by that I mean like a lot older. Today, the day before the marriage, was also the day I found out he was getting married for the fourth time, even though the second and third were to the same woman - Knox’s mom, the one that went off the turnpike in a snowstorm.

  After I’d cut the burnt parts off the potato, I was left with a spoonful of fluffy, perfectly cooked deliciousness. It was like cracking open an oyster to find a
pearl inside. I watched Cory and Mom make faces at each other and I nearly barfed. How could two people that looked so wrong for each other seem to be that much in love?

  ***

  It wasn’t a bachelorette party, because there weren’t enough of us. Mom said she didn’t believe in them anyway, despite the fact she’d met her current husband on one, deciding that the rules were different for the person getting married. Cory said he had nothing planned, beyond a fake tan application to tart himself up, and a few whiskies with the boys in town. Over the little time I’d known Cory, I knew this to mean enough alcohol to feel the heat on your skin, but not enough to mess up your hair. He wasn’t quite as wild as the way he dressed made him seem. If they planned on a stripper, Cory seemed like the kind of person to politely watch for a while and then take a back seat while he let everyone else get to the front. He had more chance of ending up in the casino, and because gambling was still illegal in our state, it meant he had more chance of ending up at someone else’s house playing blackjack for nickels. Either that or out in the backyard wresting chairs. That was the other thing about Cory, he had way less money than Mom did, and Mom had way less than average. It was already pretty much agreed that when the wedding was over and Cory and Mom were ‘official’ in massive ironic inverted commas, Cory would move in. Wait, Cory and his pooch would move in. Fate I guess would get the blame for that, life not being fair, the reason. So Mom, Patty, Claire, Yolanda and I, who made up the female side of the wedding party, went out to one of the bars in town that Patty had the expertise to recommend. It was there, my mind distracted for a moment by a movement through the doors towards the bar, I saw the love of my life, and dropped my drink so dramatically on the table it smashed into about a thousand pieces.

  "fuck"

  "Alice! Language."