Hard Bastard(147)

“No, listen. That ceremony was real.”

I laughed. Was she actually crazy or something? “No, it wasn’t. It was some stupid tourist thing.”

“Normally, yeah. But when I got home and tried to register to vote, I found out that I was legally married to some asshole I barely knew.”

She couldn’t be serious. She wanted me to believe that she and I were actually married, for real?

“There’s no way,” I said. “It was in Thailand. How would it be official here?”

“You dickhead,” she said, exasperated. “I’ve been dealing with this ever since I got back. Believe me, we’re really married.”

I stared at her for a long second and finally burst out laughing. It was the most hilarious and insane thing a girl had ever done to me, and I just couldn’t believe she was trying to pull it off. I had to admit that she was pretty impressive, but there was just no way I was married. Let alone to my new stepsister.

“Nice try,” I said, turning away. “Come on, let’s eat. I haven’t had a real meal in a fucking year.”

“Cole,” she said, still angry. “We chose the deluxe package. Remember that?”

I paused at the doorknob. “Sure, I remember.”

“But we didn’t get anything extra. Right?”

I nodded slowly. “Right.”

“Deluxe meant that it was real, not that it was anything special.”

I frowned at her for a second. Thinking back to it, I did find it strange that their special marriage package hadn’t come with any extras. But no, how could we even have known that? Maybe the deluxe package just meant the priest didn’t pass out drunk at the end.

“Good try,” I said again. “But if you wanted me to finally fuck you, all you had to do was ask nicely.”

She gaped at me as I opened the door and walked back inside.

My stepsister was fucking gorgeous. She was sexy and wild and passionate, and possibly fucking insane. Hardly the girl I remembered from paradise.

So why did I have a nagging feeling in the back of my mind?





Chapter 3





Alexa





How could he not believe me?

I’d been waiting nearly a year for that moment. I’d been thinking about it, dreaming about it, hoping for it. In my head, I would tell him about the marriage, and he would instantly apologize and beg to make things right. He would be so hurt that he let me suffer through this sham marriage for so long that he’d swoop me up into his arms and carry me off into the sunset to make sweet, tender love to me.

Well, maybe not that last bit. But I did expect some sort of apology, maybe even a little surprise.

Instead, he didn’t believe me. He thought I was lying!

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized his mother was Cindy. They had the same last name, after all. But there were no pictures of him and her together, and she never mentioned having a son in the press. I could never have imagined that they were mother and son, not in a thousand years.

As I stood there alone on the stoop, staring at the door, I felt angrier than I ever had in my life up to that point. How arrogant did he have to be to think a woman would lie about being married to him? What possible reason could I have for that? I was fuming, ready to storm inside and beat the living crap out of him.

He was so damn cocky, so damn full of himself. That asshole was probably thinking about how much of a psycho I was being or something. I was so mad I could scream.

And yet. seeing him again had dredged up a bunch of feelings, stuff I had thought was long-buried. As soon as his helmet was off and I got a look at his chiseled face, his muscular body, and his piercing blue eyes, I knew that I was happy he was back. I wanted him to take me up into my bedroom and make me feel the way he had back in paradise.

And then reality came crashing back when I realized that he was my stepbrother. And also my husband.

I took a deep, calming breath. That asshole really did think he was so amazing that somebody would lie about being married to him, but the joke was on him. All I needed to do was show him the marriage certificate, which I could easily print off my laptop.

Lunch came first. I had to get through the next hour or so, and then I could prove the marriage to Cole. And I couldn’t let Cindy and Dad find out about anything. For one, I had kept it from Dad for a long time already, but more importantly, they were dealing with enough scandal already. They didn’t need their irresponsible daughter married to her equally crazy stepbrother.

Except I wasn’t crazy. I was just married to my asshole stepbrother.

As I pushed open the front door, I could still barely believe that was true.

“Lots of hard work,” Cole was saying as I walking into the kitchen