“Where the fuck have you been?”
I stared at her, completely taken aback by her fury. I’d had plenty of chicks get pissed when I didn’t call them back the next day, but this was something different.
“Good to see you too, princess,” I said.
“Don’t give me that shit, you asshole.”
I laughed. Her anger was comical in its intensity. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call. You know how things are.”
“No, you idiot, you jerk, you, you—”
“Asshole?” I finished.
“Yes, asshole!”
I laughed, shaking my head at her. “I know being with me is an experience, but you seem a little too angry.”
“It’s not that, you idiot! Don’t you know?”
I cocked my head at her, confused. “Know what? I’ve been in the damn jungle for the last year.”
She took a deep breath. “The jungle?”
“Training. I’m a fighter, remember? I haven’t had Internet, email, phone calls, or pussy since I last saw you.”
She looked at me silently for a second, still clearly fuming but getting herself slowly under control. “So you don’t know?” she asked.
“Did you have my baby or something?”
She rolled her eyes. “God, no. Thankfully.”
“Please. You’d be honored to have my kids.”
“Listen to me,” she said seriously. “Remember that wedding ceremony?”
“Sure,” I said, getting nearer to her. She reacted the way I remembered, like being close to me was a fucking drug. And honestly, it felt the same damn way to me. All the memories were rushing back all over again, but there she was, right in front of me, still as fucking sexy as I remembered. “But I’m more interested in what happened after.”
“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 Three: 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.