Stepbrother Beloved Read online

  Stepbrother Beloved

  Stephanie Brother

  Published by Stephanie Brother, 2015

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18, and all characters represented are 18 or older. This story contains explicit sexual content. The story depicts consensual sex between an adult woman and an adult man. The characters in this story are not related by blood. This story may contain unprotected sex.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  MAGGIE

  “WELL,” SHE said, “I think you’re being ridiculous. I mean, sure, he’s your brother. But step, Maggie, step.” She took a sip of her mojito. “And god is he hot,” she murmured, almost too soft for me to hear.

  Not that I needed reminding.

  One thing I like about my best friend Jamie: she’s never afraid to call it like she sees it. We were at a bar drinking mojitos and talking about Thanksgiving vacation. Tanner was coming home tomorrow. It had been months since I’d seen him, years since I’d spent any real time with him. And I missed him with the kind of pain that got worse once relief was finally in sight.

  “So did you meet anyone at school? All those freshman parties can be intimidating…but fun,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye.

  “I…I didn’t go to any of them,” I admitted.

  “What did you do, spend Friday nights studying or something?” Jamie was incredulous.

  “Well, yeah. You know how important it is for me to do well. I want to be climbing that corporate ladder like yesterday, and I’m going to need great grades to succeed the way I want to.”

  “Life’s not all about work,” said Jamie, taking a long swig of her drink. “But I think you know that.”

  I looked down at the floor, unsure of how much to tell. “I’m just…not in the market for a relationship right now,” I said. “And you know I’m not really a hook-up kind of girl.”

  “Mm hmm. I have a pretty good idea what’s stopping you,” she said. “But if I remember right, it was you who started the feud, right?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a feud, exactly.”

  “Okay then, what would you call it? Didn’t you call Tanner a useless hippie and throw a cupcake in his face?”

  Jamie made it sound funny, but I couldn’t laugh. Tanner and I gotten to be best friends as kids—our parents got hitched when we were ten. We built tree-houses in the woods, forts under the bed, and played games all day, every day. But now he was grown up, and still acting like a kid. Still spending all his time running around in the woods, not getting a real job or finishing college.

  “I just…I just think that when you get to a certain age, you have to act like an adult. You know, work for a living.”

  “But Mags, how is any of this your business? Why can’t Tanner figure out his life himself?”

  “Look, you didn’t grow up in our family so you don’t understand. Our parents were total screw-ups. They inherited a decent chunk of money and squandered most of it on stupid investments. Couldn’t hold down jobs because of drinking or acting like jerks. If there’s one thing they taught me, it’s that being responsible is important. It’s number fucking one. So seeing Tanner, of all people, meandering along with no focus…it drives me kinda insane.”

  “Mm hmm,” said Jamie. I could see my tirade had not convinced her. And I knew deep down I was being snotty about something that was just a distraction. The truth was that once we hit puberty, Tanner and I had not been able to get along. I would get bitchy, and he would disappear. Just being in the same room with him was so unsettling to me that I would blurt out stupid stuff, and god he could be so annoying with all his environmental Mr. Green talk. Recycling just wasn’t that interesting, not as something to talk about all day. I felt irked just thinking about how he used go on and on about global warming.

  And the thing was, we barely saw each other. He was always going off on long trips, hiking this or that mountain range, or at the boarding school he got shipped off to when he was thirteen. Those days of making our own little world of games and make-believe were long over. But we couldn’t seem to figure out how to have a relationship now that we were all grown up, in the rare times we were together.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, dear Mags, I think things would be going better for you if you’d just go ahead and get laid. He doesn’t have to be the love of your life, he really doesn’t. Just get that cherry popped and see if you don’t feel a little more relaxed about life.” She looked over my shoulder at a guy coming in the bar. “Take that hunk o’ beef right there,” she said, a little too loud. “He could probably rock your organized, neat little world and pump some joy into it, even if only for a night.”

  “I’m not looking for only a night,” I said in a low voice. Jamie periodically went on campaigns to convince me to lose my virginity—and actually, I didn’t tell her this, but I wanted to lose it. My body sure as hell wanted me to lose it. But I felt too loyal to Tanner to be with anyone else. Even though he had no idea how I felt about him.

  No. freaking. idea. At all.

  And I knew it would never work. It was wrong in ten different ways, so I was never going to tell him.

  Noon. That’s what popped into my head the instant I woke up, because that’s when Tanner was supposed to get home. I jumped out of bed and took a long hot shower, soaping myself in every nook and cranny, letting my hands slip and slide over myself, thinking only of my brother.

  My stepbrother.

  Oh god.

  But come on, we weren’t actually related, not by blood. I didn’t think a relationship with Tanner would be any different than one with a hypothetical boy who lived next door, who I’d grown up playing with. Whether our parents would agree, I didn’t know, or care.

  I love being naked in the shower, breathing in the steam, slippery as a seal. My fingers found my nipples and gave them a caress, then a pinch. I let my hands run down my ribs, swirl soap around my hips, and then between my legs. Yep, I’m a virgin, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done any exploring on my own. In fact I’ve been quite the Vasco de Gama when it comes to knowing my body and what it likes. My fingers parted my lips and I used a knuckle to rub against my clit, the skin on my back nearly burning because I had the hot water turned all the way up.

  Then I had the inspiration of a lifetime. I got on my back, lying on the floor of the shower, so the water beat down on my pussy, and oh my god I wished I’d thought of it ages ago. The hot water was pulsating on my lips and clit and I rocked my hips into it, loving the feel of the hot water jetting on me. I could feel everything down there swelling, my breath getting shorter, and I stuck a finger in my vagina as deep as I can, hitting the back wall, and I could feel my pussy grip that finger as I slid it in and out, wishing it was more than a finger.

  I wondered what it would feel like, having a cock enter me, slam into me, and my breath got even shorter. I pretended the pulsating water was a tongue that couldn’t get enough of lapping me, and that thought brought me right to the blissful edge.

  I put my feet up on the tiled wall and let it happen, let the pleasure break over me, slowly moving my hips, imagining Tanner beside me, Tanner climbing on top of me, Tanner’s cock nosing up to my tender throbbing opening and then pushing inside, hard as a rock, and we’re both out of control, delirious and frenzied. The water is streaming off me, my body starts to tremble, and I’m trying to think of some other guy, a movie star, anybody at all…but it’s only Tanner I see, beloved Tanner whose touch I crave.

  The orgasm crashed over me and I was shaking and trying not to moan loud enough for anyone to hear.

  Oh, god, it was so good. I couldn’t wait to have real sex, it must b
e so amazing.

  But in the seconds after, my body still faintly spasming, it felt hollow. Lonely. I stepped out of the shower and toweled off. Once I’d momentarily satisfied myself, I was determined once more, for the millionth time, to enjoy seeing Tanner and getting to know him again as a friend and nothing more, and somehow find a way to keep my body from betraying me.

  Still, I got dressed paying more attention to what to wear than I usually do. Put on skinny jeans instead of a dowdy old pair of cords. A tight shirt instead of something baggy and comfortable. Some cool earrings I thought he’d like.

  It was still only 8:30 in the morning. What was I gonna do for all the long hours until he gets here? It’s not like we have the kind of parents you want to hang out with. My mom is a jerk, to be honest, and if Tanner wasn’t coming home, I’d have stayed at school and studied through the Thanksgiving holiday. She’s the kind of person who gets angry, I mean really angry, at any little thing. You never know what’s going to set her off. All you can do is try to avoid her as much as you can.

  And my stepfather, Tanner’s dad? He’s not much better. He drinks too much and is usually slumped in an armchair sucking down beers and watching sports on TV, not talking to anybody. But he’s like an unexploded bomb ticking away, because at some point—you can never guess when—he’ll explode, raging at someone on TV if we’re lucky, and someone in the house if we’re not.

  It’s a miracle those two ever got together—a real testament to the idea that there’s someone for everyone. It’s not like getting a stepfather improved my life, even a little bit…well, except that maybe there was another target for my mother to aim her poison at. The best thing about that marriage was Tanner coming into my life, for sure. On rainy days we played Monopoly for hours, and I even think that’s what got me interested in a business career, trying to win against the unbeatable Tanner. Even as a kid he wasn’t interested in money, but he crushed in Monopoly anyway.

  And when it was sunny, he took me outside, patiently teaching me how to shoot an arrow with a bow he made himself, or showing me how to track deer in the woods behind the house. Before Tanner and his Dad came into our lives, I was alone with my crazy mother, since my father disappeared before I can even remember. And while I’ll probably never get over his abandonment, a little part of me understands. If I’d been able to leave my mother, I might done it too, and to hell with the consequences.

  These parents of ours are a big reason Tanner and I got so close. We clung to each other during the storms; he was my safe place, my protector. We knew, even when we were arguing fiercely, that we had each other’s back. But then we were separated, and childhood was over, and everything changed. In his absence I wondered all the time who he was turning into, what kind of man was he going to be, but we had no chance to get to know each other again, thanks to school and his endless trips into the wild.

  What he doesn’t know, and I’m determined he never will, is that my love for him goes way past stepbrother and stepsister. Way past. I long to run my hands over his sculpted chest, to touch my lips to his tender mouth, even…even wrap my hand around what I imagine must be the most beautiful cock in the universe…these thoughts are practically all-consuming, but I know none of it can happen and I have to get control of myself.

  But still, I can’t stop myself from standing at the window, praying his battered old car covered with hideous bumper stickers comes rumbling down our street. Anticipating the moment when I see his friendly familiar face light up when he sees me.

  The last time I saw Tanner was in August. I was getting ready to go off to college and he was packing for one of his crazy wilderness trips. He stood in the doorway while I was making a pile of all the stuff that had to get squeezed into the car, stuff I’d saved up for and lovingly picked out, like matching towels and bathmat, and a little rug, plus a lamp with a pretty shade.

  “That’s quite a pile,” he said, glancing at my things. He was bare chested, wearing hiking shots and boots, his beard scruffy. His intense green eyes swerved over to meet mine, and I let my gaze sweep over him again, lovingly taking him all in.

  He was gorgeous as ever.

  “I like nice things,” I said, and it came out all prim but I didn’t mean for it to. This was an old argument for Tanner and me. He was all about not having too much stuff, about traveling light, and I wanted to surround myself with beautiful things. I wanted to make lots of money and he said he didn’t care about it at all. We’d gone around and around on it so many times, we knew exactly how to hurt each other, feel disappointed, keep pushing until somebody stalked off too mad to continue.

  I had sworn to myself not to do that, not that day, when we were saying goodbye for almost three months. When he was younger, he’d been packed off to boarding school, so we’d had a lot of goodbyes to deal with.

  I never managed them well.

  I stayed up my room for hours, partly to avoid the ’rents and partly to watch for Tanner. Okay, mostly to watch for Tanner.

  The first three months of college had been brutal in a lot of ways, but one good thing was that all the work distracted me from thinking about my brother. Stepbrother. I was pretty sure I had an A average so far. God knows I’d put in the hours, barely seeing the sun at all, just parked in the library with my laptop and a stack of textbooks, working my ass off. I was going to make sure I did everything I could so I could get a great job once I got out of school. Or if not great at first, at least something steady with the promise of advancement.

  The idea of a steadily swelling bank account made me grin. It would mean getting out of this crazy house for good, and give me the feeling of security that I’d never, ever had.

  I stood there by the window like an idiot, peering out between the tacky curtains my mother insisted on, expecting Tanner’s ugly-ass orange beater to come around the corner any minute.

  I watched the usual parade of cars go down our street: lots of Toyotas, a few Fords, a truck, a couple of Priuses. Then this bad-ass SUV came into view, a black Lexus. It had mud splashed up the sides, and it looked awesome, like one of those ads where the vehicle is driving in the wilderness where no vehicle, maybe even no person, has ever been.

  And that Lexus pulled right up to the curb outside our house, and Tanner hopped out.

  I swear my heart practically jumped out of my body and the car was immediately forgotten. I didn’t think about anything but seeing him. I tore downstairs to the front door, forgetting all about how I’d planned to act cool.

  “Tanner!” I yelled as he came through the front door.

  “Namaste, Margaret,” he said, the faintest hint of a smile on his beautiful lips. He was the only one allowed to call me by my real name—I liked it, actually, though I never let on.

  “What, so you’re a yogi now? And my name happens to be Maggie,” I said, sticking my nose in air, joking.

  “Is that right,” he said, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek. He had never done that before, and god, it practically knocked me back against the wall, the combination of feeling his body heat and his earthy, masculine smell. I closed my eyes, dizzy for a second, overwhelmed with how good it felt to be close.

  “Mom and Dad home?”

  “Oh they’re out, off to a round of parties,” I said.

  Tanner cracked up, knowing full well our parents never went anywhere and for sure didn’t get invited to any parties. “So it’s just you and me then,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders and pulling me close.

  I melted. I absolutely melted.

  In a flash I could see all those times as kids, huddled up in some fort we’d made in a closet, how he made me laugh by imitating his dad. How he made me feel safe from my mother’s fury.

  And at the same time, I’m right here, right now, his rough cheek brushing mine, his hair falling into my eyes, and I get hit with a surge of lust so powerful I almost jump his bones right there in the front hallway of the house, not caring who would see or hear, not caring that I had no idea how to
do it, or if he would even want to.

  Suddenly he pulls away, and his expression goes from warm to cool, just like that.

  “What?” I said. It wasn’t like him. It was usually me who runs all hot and cold, while he stayed the same, always steady, always strong. I was worried he could read my thoughts, could see plain as day the ravenous need I was feeling for him…and wanted nothing to do with it.

  Distractedly he looked down and let his arm drop from my shoulders. My heart sank through the floor. All these feelings—I try so hard to push them down—but when they insist on bubbling up, it hurts for him to shove me away.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled. “I better go say hi to the parents. Make me lunch?”

  “Make your own lunch.” I glared at him, even in my hurt and irritation seeing how he’s gotten even more buff. His skin was glowing, his chest almost bursting out of his well-cut shirt. He looked incredible.

  Wait a freaking minute. I hadn’t noticed before. His clothes were nice, almost trendy. He was wearing a tight shirt that made his chest look massive, and I could see the muscle definition in his shoulder and his abs. What was Tanner doing dressed in something other than some raggedy T-shirt anyway?

  I followed him to the family room where Mom and Dad were hunkered down over Doritos and beer. They didn’t get up when they see him, rude as usual.

  Still stung by his withdrawal, I fled up to my room and closed the door. I actually wished I had studying to do. Because stuff in a textbook, it all makes sense. You know what you’re supposed to do and you can just do it. It’s not all messy and complicated, where what you want to do is wrong, and hurt and pain are around every corner.

  Oh, Tanner. Why can’t it be simple? Can’t we just live together once I finish school? Just as brother and sister, sharing a house but not a bed?