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

Mom gave me her stern, offended look. I’d had that one a number of times before. Every day she realized her daughter wasn’t a little girl anymore, I’d get it. I wasn’t particularly badly behaved, and my parents weren’t the strictest, but every time I did something she felt offensive, I got that look. It softened into panic when she saw the contents of my drink swimming towards her across the table. A waiter was over to us before it had any chance of getting near her. In the commotion, I saw the boy look over. If I was carrying it still, I’d have dropped that drink a thousand times over. I melted. It was a fleeting moment. The very definition of momentary. And he didn’t exactly look at me so much as over towards me, at the table, where the white wine was shimmering amongst broken glass and the near handful of women cackling away like witches around a cauldron, but I felt that look (in massive non ironic inverted commas), I felt it as much as skin does a pinch, or a face a slap, and it woke up inside me a desire I never realized was ever there in the first place. I thought I’d been in love before, or lust, or whatever it is when you kiss someone for the first time, or hold hands, or let them fuck you in the master bedroom of the parents of someone you know, but this. Christ, I thought I might melt if I kept looking at him and explode if I didn’t. I chose the former, and found that I couldn’t take my eyes off him or anything that he did, even after I’d got up to do something about it. The way he held his drink, the casual way he looked around the room, the curve of his back, the position of his feet against the bar, fuck, even the lines at the edge of his plump and juicy lips, all of these normal innocuous things were absolutely mesmerising, and I was being more obvious about it than a face tattoo. I didn’t have a plan, I just knew that I had to go over. In my mind, I was already there.

  "Does anyone want another drink?"

  Clever huh? The old go and get another drink routine, sit up at the bar, start talking, make love, fall in love. A two for one marriage? I’m sure Mom could have gone along with that. Anyway, that wasn’t really what I was thinking. What I think I was thinking was little more than a primal need to go and talk to the most gorgeous man I think I have ever seen.

  I made a tit of myself sitting down, mostly because the seat next to this gorgeous man was initially occupied, so I moved to the other side of him dragging across an unoccupied bar stool, which was a lot heavier than I thought it would be, but something I couldn’t stop doing halfway through the process. I was red skinned when I finally sat down, placing it far too close to him initially, and spending what seemed like ten minutes adjusting it. When I looked up, all three bar staff were looking at me, my mother and her three friends too, and two other people at the bar, including the one I’d gravitated towards like metal to a magnet. The only ones who weren’t looking with mouths hung open were the ones who couldn’t see me from where they sat.

  "Are you ok?"

  It was Knox. Well, I know it was Knox now. Then, at that point, Knox was a future stepbrother living in a completely different state somewhere in the dingy recesses of my mind who wasn’t even called Knox, he was called Michael, Knox was a nickname that stuck after a childhood obsession with Fort Knox, and this was, well this was, the real Mr Perfect. Storm shaped eyes, that looked like world’s exploding, you could lose yourself in for hours. Perfect teeth, not manicured or whitened, or cosmetically enhanced, just naturally, absolutely perfect. Face like a God might have used as a perfect example of his work. A body to squeal for. I realized at this point I hadn’t said anything at all. All I’d done was look at him and gulp. I thought I was going to faint. Knox smiled. The corner of his lips turned up in a devilish gesture. He looked like he was about to say something else. My gut tightened and I felt tingles from my clit to my core. I did a quick mental check. Shaved in all the right places. Check. Clean, reasonably sexy panties. Check. First night stand acceptability in family history. Check. I was ready to go. I was, fuck the wedding party, fate had brought me here.

  "What can I get for you?"

  I felt the intimacy of the moment fade away as the voice of the bar tender pulled me out of my moment of fantasy.

  "Yes", I said finally, stumbling a little over a cracked voice. "I’m ok. Good, perfect, super, great. Super-great in fact. How about you? Are you ok?"

  Knox couldn’t help but laugh.

  "I’m good thanks. Thank you for asking."

  I’d fucked it up, I knew it. I took one acting class in college, and they told us if you could walk through a door confidently, without knowing what’s on the other side, you could be an actor. I was always far too self-conscious to walk through doors confidently. I was also very shit at chatting people up. I don’t think I’d ever done it before. I wasn’t sure what I was even doing then. I only went over because there was no way I couldn’t. I didn’t have control over it.

  "Can I get you a drink?"

  That, unfortunately, wasn’t Knox. I spun round to the bar tender, who at this point, was just getting in my way and said.

  "Can I have whatever he’s having”, because I thought it would make me look cool and desirable, and because I had no other ideas about how to impress him.

  The bartender smiled and began to fix me a drink. I don’t know if I was imagining it or not, but I could feel the heat between us like steam from a hot bath. I began to cool myself down with a used beer mat, inadvertently sprinkling myself with already spilled beer in the process. I didn’t look over to see if Knox had seen and if he did, he was kind enough not to mention it.

  "You like that exact spot?"

  "I’m sorry?"

  "You dragged the chair over from the other side, I thought it might be because you liked that side much more than this side."

  "Yes!" I flummoxed, grabbing for a life line. "Exactly. It’s too dark over there, I can’t see properly. I always have to drag the chairs around in bars, you know, try and find the best spots. The clearest ones."

  "Do you have a problem with your eyes?"

  "No, I-"

  A drink landed on the bar in front of me. "Too Taboo."

  I looked up at the barman. "What?"

  "It’s what he’s drinking. What you asked for. Too Taboo."

  "I’m Michael by the way", Knox said when the bartender had disappeared off to serve another customer and I’d tasted the first few sips of what was deemed ‘Too Taboo’. "It’s lovely to meet you."

  “Yeah”, I said, holding his hand and kind of nodding and smiling like an escaped mental patient. I thought, if I could just look into those eyes for long enough...

  Knox looked down at his hand. I was still holding it. Actually, rather embarrassingly, I wasn’t just holding it, I was caressing it. Again, this is not like me, so I don’t know what came over me. I am not unfamiliar to the world of sex and mating rituals, I just prefer not to partake in them in the same way many women, and men for that matter, of my age like to do. What I mean by that is that I’m not a slut. And I don’t mean to say that caressing someone’s hand is a sign of being a slut, it’s usually a sign of being obvious and forward about what you want. There was nothing conscious about what I was doing, and when I think back on it now, I feel like everything I was doing I was doing completely subconsciously, as though driven to it by some other force. Some people close to me might have said it was fate, I like to think of it as lust or internal desire. Knox looked a little embarrassed when he realized, but not quite as embarrassed as I did, when I did.

  Then I pulled my hand away so quickly I nearly knocked over my drink. Perhaps it would have been better if I had. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have drunk it quickly because I was nervous and trying to find sense in what I was doing sat there, and did what I did. That might have saved what will be a lifetime’s worth of embarrassment. Instead, I wrapped my lips around the straw, again trying to do it as suggestively as possible, and sucked my tabooness down.

  “What do you think?”

  ‘Could there be a more perfect person in the world for me?’ is what I thought. I thought, which is admittedly rather shallow, ‘even if Michael
has less brain power than a slug, even if he eats his dinner on all fours like a pig, I could still lose myself in those dreamboat eyes, those rock hard abs, that shadow covered bulge...’ Then I thought, and I blame this on the drink, ‘I wonder what his cock looks like?’

  My ex-boyfriend, like ex-boyfriends all over the planet, was a complete and utter douche. It’s the reason he’s my ex-boyfriend and not still my current one. We were together for six months, and not once, in all that time, did he ever give me an orgasm. His selfishness in the bedroom wasn’t the only reason he was a terrible partner either. He just didn’t seem to know what being in a relationship really meant. He didn’t seem to understand the concept of sharing, or doing stuff together beyond fucking, an activity he seemed to enjoy immensely and me hardly at all. It only lasted the length of time it did, because I was too stupid not to get rid of him sooner. I guess that’s something I inherited from my parents. I bring him up, only to indicate that my lack of satisfaction in previous relationships, matched by the immediate attraction I felt to Knox, might go some way to explaining the way I found myself behaving, which was definitely out of character for me. Then again, in this small town in the middle of nowhere, I’d never seen anyone so attractive walk into this bar.

  “It’s, wow, it’s kind of strong. I like it”, I said, making sure to take another generous sip.

  “It’s taboo”, Knox said, leaning towards me until his shoulder brushed mine. “The best things always are.”

  If I didn’t know better, he was flirting with me. He’s denied it to the hilt since, but I’m sure there was something going on, much more than he likes to admit. We didn’t know who we were. Maybe that’s the immediate attraction our parents felt for each other. Knox has got to be bullshitting me if he says he was just being polite. I know flirting because I’ve seen it enough times. You get to be able to read people after working in a bar. Studying psychology has nothing on the real world - perhaps it was a blessing Dad needed to use my college fund, to feed his habit.

  “Are you here alone?”

  And with that single question, the world came crumbling down around me. There are a hundred other things he could have said that would have made this different. A thousand maybe, that all could have led to the same conclusion. I wonder how different it would have been if neither of us found out until the following day. Until what could have happened, happened. But Knox says he’s not like that, and I know I’m not too. Even though it runs in my family. Perhaps because it does. But then I can’t help to imagine what could have been. I see Knox and I the only two drinkers in the bar. 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.

  It could have been like that. Instead I pointed to the wedding party behind me, still cackling away like old woman in a knitting circle, explained what we were doing here and watched the color slowly drain from Knox’s face.

  It took me a bit longer to work it out. A few more eager gulps of my ‘Too Taboo’, desperate to finish it before it was pulled away from me.

  “You’re Alice?” Knox said, and the big fat dollar coin dropped. Actually, it didn’t drop so much as come tumbling out of the sky like a meteorite with the force of an atom bomb. “So you’re my new sister?”

  Chapter 3 or...

  Marriage, a sentence not a word. The day they made it taboo.

  “Fuck”, said my internal voice. “Fuck, fuckity, fuck.”

  I had tried to sleep, couldn’t, and was now pacing up and down the room like a general the day before the last days of a war she’s bound to lose. I tried to convince myself I hadn’t been that obvious, but elements of the night kept flashing back to me to tell me otherwise. The looks I gave him. The way I held his hand. The chemistry between us. Ok, so we didn’t talk that much, but I’m not an idiot. There was definitely something going on between us. He had to have felt that too, right? I cursed my luck, climbed back into bed and tried to forget all about it. I’d had embarrassing moments in my life before, and I knew that they persisted only for the amount of time you thought about them. At least that’s what a teacher told me once to try and make me feel better after I’d spent half a morning with a dark patch of period blood obviously staining my whiter than white school skirt. Why the fuck did Mr Perfect have to be Mr Perfect’s son? Why the fuck did Mom have to get there first? I had half thought about suggesting we do something about what there obviously was between us before Mommy and Daddy decided to make us siblings, but the moment had already passed, in as much as any moment could have been said to exist at all, plus, the longer I left it, the more embarrassed and the less convinced I felt. The Too Taboo was making my head spin. Knox being there was too.

  “What are you doing here?” I had said to him after I’d found out who he really was, and it came out like an accusation. I’ve had bad luck with men in the past, but this just took the biscuit. Mr perfect turns out to be my long lost brother, according to fate. Ok, step brother, which isn’t technically illegal I have to add, but which is, allegedly, completely frowned upon.

  He had, apparently, come for the wedding, and not for me. He was staying in a hotel nearby, this was the first bar he’d found, and he was here drinking, and not with his dad celebrating, because he was planning on surprising him on the day of the wedding. I mean how cute and entirely inconvenient is that? I guess it was just my bad luck to pick someone I would soon be related to. At least he’d be going home soon, and I could forget all about him. I held onto that thought as I struggled to get myself to sleep, my brain trying to work out possibilities of how I could get what I wanted, while everything else went ahead as planned. Thoughts that spun into scenes that lost themselves in dreams and desires and left cold sweat on the pillow on the morning my mom was to marry the father of the man I felt like I was falling in love with, who in turn was soon to be my stepbrother. As sleep finally took me under, I felt like a little girl who had just met her prince, only to have that prince stolen out from underneath her by a princess who had far more legitimate connections to the gorgeous bachelor than I. A prince marrying his little sister? I don’t think that was in the Hans Christian Anderson anthology. Well fuck them. Fuck them all.

  ***

  “If there is anyone present here today, who knows of any lawful reason why Cory and Felicia cannot be joined in marriage, please speak now, or forever hold your breath.”

  I know I shouldn’t have, but I looked at Knox. I guess what I mean by that is that I shouldn’t have looked at him in the way that I did. Looking at him would have been fine, and what he saw and what everyone else looking saw, was a proud daughter looking over and sharing a moment with a proud son, but that wasn’t the meaning of the look I was giving. I didn’t want my Mom to give up a chance of happiness for what could have been nothing more than a ridiculous crush, but part of me knew it wasn’t just that, and part of me wanted to see him look back and tear through pew and aisle to sweep me up in his arms. Mom looked nervously into the small congregation while Cory held her hands sweetly. I could see she was crying, and I knew she was looking for Dad, but he wasn’t there. Hardly anyone was. Certainly no-one with any intention of stopping them, and why would they? Cory scrubbed up pretty well, although under the lights he looked like a bronze statue. Mom looked magnificent in a second hand wedding dress she’d bought from eBay and adjusted at home. But the star of the show, and
I know everyone knew it, was Knox. Knox looked like he had come from a completely different planet, where everyone turns out perfectly all the time. He looked even better than he had the night before. I’m a sucker for a guy in a suit anyway, but Knox took my breath away. Just one look and he knocked me out flat. How the hell was I going to cope with this explosion of emotion that was bubbling so forcefully inside me? How could one person do that to another?

  I kept his secret through fitful sleep and all the way through the morning. At the bar, Mom hadn’t even come over to us, so she had no idea who it was I was talking to for a good portion of the night, silently cursing my luck under my breath while I did so. He came to the house just before we took the car to the church, and Cory couldn’t believe it when he saw him, falling over himself to give his only son a hug. I imagined myself doing the same.

  “I thought you weren’t going to come”, he said, choking back tears.

  “Well, you know, I wanted to surprise you.”

  Cory was quick to introduce us all. Mom held out her hand but Cory was more encouraging. “Oh, give him a kiss, he’s going to be your son as well after all!”

  Mom took Knox into her arms and kissed him on the cheek. When she let him go, she looked a little flustered. I must have been crimson when Knox turned to me.

  “Hi”, I said, keen to maintain the secret he’d asked of me. “I’m Alice.”

  I stuck out my hand but Knox ignored it. “Hi Alice”, he said, and gave me a squeeze so perfect it made me want to die in his arms. “I’m Michael, but you can call me Knox. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder. I slid my hands down his back. I imagined all the ways I’d like for us to take each other, and then Knox slowly pulled away from me, that devilish curl of his lips enough to tell me he might just want it too, or at least he knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “In as much as you have exchanged the marriage promises, and have witnessed the same before God and man, by the authority vested in me, and in accordance with laws of God, I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”