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“Hey, Sis!” a rough baritone calls from across the room. “What are you doing here? Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

I groan as a volley of chuckles goes up around the room, and turn to see Emerson Sawyer, my blue-eyed nightmare, striding toward me. He’s easily six feet tall, with broad shoulders, a tapered torso, and effortlessly defined muscles. His mop of shaggy, chestnut brown hair is artfully tousled, a stray lock swooping across his forehead. He’s making jeans and a crimson tee shirt look as good as a three piece suit, and has a lit cigarette cradled in his full, firm lips.

Naturally, my personal nightmare looks like an absolute dream come true.

“Don’t call me that in public. Or ever,” I tell him, crossing my arms to hide the fact that my heart is slamming against my ribcage at his approach.

“Why not, Sis?” he grins rakishly, taking a long drag of his smoke.

“Because it’s creepy as hell,” I reply, exasperated, tucking my long, ash blonde hair behind my ears. “And it’s not even true. ”

“Sure it is. For all intents and purposes,” he shrugs.

I’ve known Emerson Sawyer for nearly four years, now. Or, rather, I’ve known of him for four years. Our Connecticut town has two elementary schools that feed into the same high school. Emerson and I attended separate grade schools, which were pretty starkly divided between the richer and poorer families in town, but ended up at the same high school together. I noticed him the very first day of freshman year, when he mouthed off to our sex ed teacher for taking a hard line in favor of abstinence (the most characteristically Emerson thing ever).

He, on the other hand, had no idea I existed. Until this year, that is, when both of our lives—personal and social—got turned upside down.

“What’s the matter? You ashamed to have a brother from the wrong side of the tracks?” Emerson presses, jostling me out of my thoughts.

“Don’t put that on me,” I snap back, “As if you can stand having a prissy rich girl for a would-be-sister. ”

“You are kind of a bummer,” he says flatly, “But if it makes you feel any better, it’s your personality I hold against you, not your money. ”

I stare wordlessly at Emerson, knocked into sullen silence once again by his masterful putdown. By now, but Emerson has figured out exactly how to get to me.

About two months ago, I got the shock of my life when my widower father, Robert Rowan, announced that, after four years of refusing to date, he had just met the new love of his life. Her name was Deborah, he told me. They’d met at AA and “really hit it off”. He talked about her incessantly, stayed out all night like he was a teenager again, and generally weirded the hell out of me.

After just two weeks, Dad told me that he was in love, and wanted to introduce this Deborah to me as soon as possible. I begrudgingly agreed to be around for dinner the following night to meet his mystery woman. We lost my mother Sandy to a terrible car accident just before I started high school, so the idea of a new woman in my father’s life was a little hard to swallow. Still, I did my best to put on a happy face and be as supportive as possible. I’ve never been very good at saying “no” or standing up to my dad, so it’s not like I had much of a choice.