Hard(34)

And I wasn’t letting her get away.





Lesson plans.

Safe, innocent lesson plans.

They were time-consuming. They were boring. They were due at the end of the week so I could present something to the school where I’d be observing.

But teaching kids their A-B-Cs wasn’t taking my mind off of S-E-X.

I was new to teaching, but I knew that would get me fired quicker than if I revealed my step-brother was the object of my forbidden desire.

I groaned. Who was I kidding? I used the step-brother excuse to stay away from Zach. If I forced myself to believe what we did was wrong, then I wouldn’t end up in his arms again. That humiliation was the only thing preventing me from grabbing a pen-knife and notching his bedpost for him.

Zach was a player. He was an asshole. I had to watch my every word around him or he’d twist it into something sexual and promising.

Except he had the prowess to justify his teasing.

And he knew it.

Lesson plans.

I meant to focus on my lesson plans.

I bit my lip. I loved the education program, the prospect of teaching, and the thought of working with kids. But unless I was huffing the glue I reminded myself to buy, no way could I use phonics lessons to forget what happened in the pool.

I sighed. I once thought the shower attachment was divine. Now every morning I eyed the Jacuzzi tub.

Bad idea. Just bad. Humiliating. Regretted.

Delicious.

No one touched me like Zach. No one stirred me like him.

No one nearly drowned me in literal pleasure and whispered innuendoes in my ear until I collapsed in his arms.

And no one was idiot enough to bolt from the pool, lock myself in my room, and pray the bikini hadn’t fallen off as I bounced to safety.

But, for Christ’s sake, one of us had to be responsible, and I wasn’t talking double-checking to ensure I took my pill in the morning. We had to be adults. We had to forget all about the sex. Since Zach was a meathead who spent every available hour harassing me, training, or eating, I’d be the one to take charge.

We had to end it.

Whatever it was.

The games. The flirting. It was time to make a plan for him to move out as soon as he deployed so we could get on with our lives. I had four months until I graduated and received my trust, and they would be spent fully-clothed and respectable. If we had to act more like strangers than family, so be it.

But, of course, I checked my makeup before I went down the stairs. And my hair. And I wore a sweet little pair of panties I tried to convince myself matched my outfit.

You know, like how any girl would prepare to talk to her step-brother.

Zach hung out in the theater more often than should have been fair, but I let him have the room as I mostly occupied the library. Zach wasn’t watching TV or playing a video game. He laid in the dark and quiet, dressed in the t-shirt and shorts he used to work out.

He collapsed over the couch. His long, toned legs kicked out over the arm.

I hadn’t made an effort to hold a real conversation with him since the incident with the pool jet. I didn’t even know what to say.

Hey, so that was better than drowning! Or maybe I don’t normally hump inanimate objects, but for you, I’ll make an exception.

I owed him an explanation. I knew we needed to hash it out like adults.

Hell, I probably should have thanked him for the mind-blowing orgasm.

Instead, I said the stupidest thing I could think of.

“Don’t sit on the furniture with your shoes on.”

Zach didn’t move his arm from over his eyes. He grunted and kicked the tennis shoes off his heels. One nudge of his legs dropped the shoe to the floor. The other he decided to launch into the nearby lamp.

“Oh, that’s great.” I stood the floor-lamp up, brushing the dust from the shade. Uh-oh. There was quite a bit. “Now we have boot-prints over everything.”

“Hire a maid.”

His voice muffled over his arm. He didn’t look at me while we talked. Fantastic.

“Do you really want a maid here?”

“Yep. And a personal chef. And a landscaper. What are you waiting for?”

“It’s…in the process,” I shrugged. “I have to figure out how my dad managed all this.”

“Easy. Open wallet. Pay butler. Let him oversee the estate.”

Couldn’t he see how weird that was for me? I wasn’t throwing money at a problem to make it go away.

…Unless it was him and the inheritance I planned to buy back.

That didn’t count. It was completely different.

“I haven’t decided on anything yet,” I said. “We can do something temporary.”

“Temporary?” Zach snorted. “You can’t take care of this house. It’s a full-time job, and you have the money to hire the army it needs to stay in shape.”