Protect & Serve(62)

“What can I say? I like to make a spectacle of myself,” he chuckled again. It was a sound that had angered me so when we were teens together. The way that he could turn anything into a joke.

Tristan always seemed to have that arrogant smirk on his face, as though he was always one step ahead no matter what. It drove me insane when we were younger, always acting like he knew everything, and yet all the while utterly oblivious to the fact that I had harbored the deepest crush for him than anyone else I’d ever known.

It was an illicit thing, of course. For all the inbreeding that had plagued the royal lines in the past, the aristocracy was doing its best to rid itself of that image now. The fact that Tristan and I weren’t blood-related hardly mattered when reputation came into play. So I’d weathered the storm of my hormones and tried not to think too hard about my stepbrother’s lilting accent, the mischief in his eyes, or the way his lean muscles rolled when he took off his shirt to go swimming in the lake near his father’s estate.

But then, there was that one time—that fleeting moment we’d had before he left for the military. The night I’d been certain Tristan was going to undo me, a silly little eighteen-year-old virgin, right there in the pantry well after we were supposed to be in bed…

I physically waved the memory away. No. Now was not the time to think of that. We were adults now, and we knew better. Or I hoped I did, anyway.

“You certainly do,” I said, trying to compose myself with all haste. “And still, after all this time, you think that you can just come and go? Leave for years at a time, and not expect me or anyone else to bat an eye?”

I hadn’t realized that my temper had gotten the better of me, my face still tingling from all the blood rushing to it. Even I was shocked by the suddenness of my ire, so many old memories brought up at once had apparently been more than my self-control could handle. I had been holding these feelings in for all this time, bottled away with the hope that I’d never need to confront them ever again. I never realized that my stepbrother would ever return, not so suddenly, at least.

I cleared my throat and straightened my blouse before addressing him again. “Is there a reason you’ve broken into my office at the godforsaken hours of the morning?”

“Well, when I broke into your apartment you weren’t there,” he said, his admittance of his own wrongdoing had me boiling again already, and yet that errant bad boy, blasé attitude that he always seemed to flout also had a more… arousing effect, as well. “I thought that if you weren’t at home then you’d be at this posh new office of yours, working until the break of dawn. That was always the way you did things, after all. Valedictorian. Top of your class, and all that.”

I hated how after all of this time he still could affect me in the most intimate ways, simply by being in my presence. I wanted to slap him with all my strength.

“What do you want, Tristan?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest, staring daggers at him from across the room. He was so gorgeous I couldn’t deny how I’d want to drag him back to my flat and tear every bit of those clothes off. It was too bad I also wanted to put him through a blender and burn him in an incinerator. Why did we always crave the people who had always been the worst for us?

“I need your help, otherwise I wouldn’t be breaking in like some common criminal,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“If you’d have answered me, then I would have opened the bloody door!”

“But that wouldn’t have been any fun,” he sighed, shaking his head. The urge to punch him only rose higher inside of me. He was such a damned asshole that I could hardly stand it.

“What could I possibly do to help you, Tristan? You’ve never needed my help in the past. Why start now?” I set my jaw, my eyebrows furrowed in an attempt to look stern, though every time I looked into those gorgeous eyes I wanted to melt into the floor.

“Because I need something that only you can help me with, Gwennie.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped, my cheeks filling with color. “I told you never to call me that!”

“Which is why I do it,” he said in a sing-song voice. I wanted to scream.

“You’re not making a good case to get my help, Tristan. Whether we’re family or not, I don’t like being toyed with,” I said. “If you want to do business, then we’ll talk business. No games.”

I watched as his perfectly groomed eyebrows rose, and a shocking expression of... admiration spread across his face before his shoulders slumped ever so slightly. If I wasn’t so determined to be the kind of hard-ass who could stand up to him, I would have been surprised… and practically drooling at the way he looked in that suit.