Page 34 of Dark Creed

Taylor rolled her eyes and gave me her back, moving to the windows on the far side of the room. She crossed her arms as she gazed outside, at the world of night. “I don’t know him. I met him tonight—” That was the wrong thing to say to me, and she knew it, because right after that, she shut up.

“You brought astrangerhere? You were going to fuck someone you just met?” My chest rose and fell with indignation, and I was measured in crossing the length of the room and walking over to her. My hands flexed at my sides. Everything in me screamed for me to take her in my grip again and teach her another lesson about the difference between boys and men.

She whirled around, dropping her hands to her hips, standing in defiance. “Yeah, so what? I’m allowed to fuck whoever I want, Creed. You don’t get to tell me what to do. You’re not—you’re my stepbrother. You shouldn’t have done that! It’s none of your business who I want to fuck!”

“But it is. It became my business the day you came to me.” I stopped when I stood a foot in front of her. Everything in me was still worked up from our kiss, from feeling her body react to mine, how easily I’d brought her to an orgasm. I bet I could make her lose it again, even quicker this time. “Everything about you is my business.”

“Fuck you,” she whispered, though there was less defiance behind that sentence than her previous ones. “Fuck you for being such an asshole.”

“I’m an asshole? I was only trying to prove a point.”

“And what was your point?”

I stared at her, taking another step forward. She backed up until her spine hit the glass wall of windows and she had nowhere else to go. I set both my arms on the glass beside her head, boxing her in, and I leaned over her, slow in letting my bottom half pin her against the glass. She really did fit so well against me, it was unreal.

“He’s not what you need,” I whispered, my voice so low it was hard to hear.

She swallowed under the intensity radiating off me, but she had a comeback ready, “You seem to know all about me, so why don’t you tell me what it is you think I need.” She already knew; she just wanted to hear me say it.

The arms I had on the glass on either side of her head were sluggish in falling, so that my hands were now inches away from her head. “You need a man, Taylor. Someone who can keep you safe.”Someone who won’t take boys like that sniffing around with a grain of salt; but I kept that part to myself, knowing she wouldn’t like it.

“You’re my stepbrother,” she reminded us both. “You can’t be that for me.”

Was I still her stepbrother, even though my mom had died and I’d left her all those years ago? We were family in that way… or were we something else now? She’d grown up knowing me, trusting me, at times following me around the house like a puppy, showering me with unconditional love at every turn.

And then I’d left.

I wanted… fuck. What I wanted was complicated as hell.

My head dipped down, my forehead leaning on the glass above her head. She’d tilted her head back to gaze up at me, waiting to hear my response to that. “I want to be your brother,” I told her, meaning it. “I want to be your protector. I want to keep you safe from the horrors of the world and all the shit it can throw at you.”

My right hand dropped from the glass, moving to cup her face, her cheek. She didn’t try to push me away then, and as she gazed up at me, her anger at me was all but forgotten, along with mine at her for daring to bring that boy here.

“I want to be that person for you,” I went on. “But I want to be more than that.” The thumb on her cheek dropped to the corner of her mouth. It pained me to know how soft her lips were, how they felt when they were on mine. That mouth was addicting.

“You’re… we can’t. You can’t say those things to me. You can’t do those things. You can’t act like—” She turned her face away from me, ducking and slipping out of our position, starting to walk away.

My hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her back to me, colliding her chest against me. “Why not?” I demanded, staring down into those pretty green orbs. “Why can’t we? Why can’t I make up for the last ten years?”

“If you wouldn’t have left, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” she pointed out, but still I wouldn’t release her wrist and let her go. My other arm had curled around her back, holding her to me. “You’d be a brother to me. You still are—”

“Liar.”

“It’s not a lie. It’s true.”

“No, it’s not.” The hand I had on her wrist dropped it finally, but it rose to tangle in her hair. I pulled on her hair with a jerk of my hand, tugging her head back and eliciting a sharp gasp from her. “You kissed me back. Your body begged for mine. You whimpered for me, you came on my fingers. Do not lie to me and say I’m just a brother to you now.”

Even though her eyes were half-lidded and her lips had parted the moment I’d pulled her hair, Taylor still managed to say, “You are.”

“Liar,” I whispered back, lowering my head to hers.

“You’re my brother.”

“Stop lying to me. Stop lying to us both.”

“You. Are. My. Brother.” She whispered each word on its own, attempting to sound vehement in her denial of me, of what just happened, of how her body had responded to mine. “Nothing more.”

I didn’t know who she was trying to convince: herself or me. Either way, it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t having any of it. Not right now. Not after feeling her body squirm against mine. Maybe it was the adrenaline rushing through my system, or maybe it was due to some momentary lapse I’d come to regret in the morning, but seeing her with someone else had made something in me snap.

---