Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: Over the Shed

He didn't tell me he couldn't.

He stood in the doorway of my little apartment with the swamp cooler rattling behind me and his hands still in mine.

"Ask me again," he said.

"What?"

"Ask me again tomorrow. In daylight. When you're not drunk on a sign."

"I've had one beer, Lucio. Yesterday."

"You're drunk on a sign."

"I'm a little drunk on a sign," I admitted. "Ask me anyway."

He looked at me for a long moment in the light from the yard.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Rox. Are you sure."

That was twice.

He'd asked me twice.

Nobody on the Hill had ever asked me anything twice, except whether everything was all right at the bank.

"I'm sure," I said. "Ask me a third time and I'm throwing you off the roof."

He gave a low, quiet laugh.

Then he pulled his hands out of mine.

He leaned on the door frame.

"You know what they'll call it," he said. "On the Hill."

"Say it."

"The Don and his stepsister."

"I'm not your sister."

"I know that. I never once called you that, did you notice?"

"I noticed."

"Ten years of Sunday dinners. I called you Rox and I passed you the bread and I left the room when you laughed." He rubbed his face. "They won't care that it's no blood. They'll say I waited till my father was in the ground."

"Did you?"

"I waited till you were twenty," he said. "And then I waited six more years because you were my father's wife's daughter and I was supposed to be a decent man."

I stared at him.

"Then I sat you down in his study and asked for your kidney," he said. "So I'm not a decent man. I'm just the one who's here."

"You're the one who held the ladder."

"For seven hours. That doesn't buy anything."

"No," I said. "But I'm not selling anything tonight."

He went very still.

"So say it," I said. "What they'll call it. And then tell me if you care."

He looked at me.

"The Hill can call it whatever it likes," he said. "As long as you're the one who says what it is."

I pulled him inside by the front of his shirt.

I pulled him inside by the front of his shirt, and his hands went to my hips like they'd been waiting ten years to land there.

The door clicked shut behind him.

The swamp cooler rattled in the window, but the room was still hot from the day.

I didn't stop walking backward until the backs of my knees hit the bed.

Then I undid the top button of his shirt.

"Rox," he said.

"Stop asking."

"I wasn't going to ask."

I undid the next button.

His chest was warm under my palms, and I pushed the shirt off his shoulders.

He let it fall.

I put my mouth on the bare skin over his heart, and his hands came up slow and spread over my back.

"You're shaking," he said.

"Good."

"Why is that good?"

"Because it's not a sign."

I pulled my tank top off over my head.

He looked at me, all of me, in the gold light through the window.

He looked like a man memorizing something he'd been told he couldn't keep.

"You don't have to be gentle," I said.

"I know."

"Then don't be."

He reached out and put two fingers under my chin, tilting my face up.

"Who said I was going to be gentle?"

I stopped breathing for a second.

"Good," I whispered.

His mouth came down on mine, and this time he didn't stop.

He didn't stop and he didn't pull back and he didn't say not while you think you owe me something.

He kissed me like he'd been holding his breath for a month.

His hands went to the button of my jeans, and he worked them open and pushed them down over my hips.

I kicked out of them and my boots.

Then I was standing in front of him in nothing, and he was still in his jeans, and I could see his cock hard through them.

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