Page 30 of All for Love

KODY

Mercedes was an independent contractor. She had no set working hours, and yet for someone who was always acting like her job was superior to all others, I’d expected her to get to the office by nine a.m. on a Monday morning.

I’d been wrong.

Nine had come and gone, and she still wasn’t here. Shaking my watch out from under my jacket, I checked the time again. 9:25.

My fingers started drumming on my desktop of their own accord. Waiting wasn’t really my style, but she and I had to talk about the week ahead. She was going to be working her way through the sales processes this week, streamlining the procedures and updating the policies.

I’d only found out about it this morning, and we needed to get a few things straight before she went for the jugular of my department. Okay, so it’s not the jugular, but still. It’s the backbone. The skeleton that the rest of the thing is built on.

When the door opened, I checked my watch again before looking up, ready to make her feel every minute she’d kept me waiting, but it wasn’t her. Kaden strode in, slamming the door behind him. “We need to talk.”

“About what?” I asked innocently, knowing full well that this was the reckoning.

He moved further into my office but didn’t sit down. Instead, he started pacing, ramming a hand into his hair, and shaking his head repeatedly. “About you and Mercedes,” he said flatly. “The truth, Kody. Now.”

I eyed him for a moment, wondering why he looked genuinely riled up about this. I’d known he would be pissed, and he was, but he was also stressed and worried. “Why? You already know the truth.”

He speared me with a narrow-eyed glare. “So you fucked her then?”

I shrugged. “Once or twice. It’s nothing serious.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” he snapped, his chest rising and falling fast as he finally came to a standstill behind the chair opposite mine. He wrapped his fingers around the back of it, squeezing so hard his skin turned white. “What were you thinking? She’s not the girl you screw around with.”

I leaned back in my chair, folding my hands over my flat stomach in an attempt to look relaxed, but I wasn’t. I was far from it, and the real reason I was holding my hands on my stomach was so I wouldn’t wave a fist and yell at him to back off.

“She’s not a girl. She’s a woman, and it’s not like I forced her. She wanted to screw around with me. Badly.”

A deep furrow appeared between his eyebrows and he was silent for a beat as he stared back at me. “I wasn’t suggesting that you forced her and I know she’s a woman. I also know that you’re both grownups who can do whatever you want with whoever you want. What I was trying to say is that she’s not the type for random hookups. This won’t end well.”

“There’s nothing to end and she’s a lot better at it than you seem to think. You don’t know everything there is to know about her. Let’s just leave it at that.”

He huffed out a breath, still gripping the chair as he lowered his head and inhaled deeply before glancing up at me again. “I wish we could leave it, but we can’t. She’s our stepsister, Kody.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And out of all the people in the world you could hook up with, you hooked up with the one woman you shouldn’t. The one woman who’s off limits to you. Why?”

I could’ve told him that it was precisely for that reason. She was the one woman I shouldn’t have had, but that wasn’t true. Sure, the fact that it was taboo had made it more fun, but that wasn’t why I’d done it.

I rubbed the back of my neck, glancing up at the rings surrounding the lights in the ceiling for a long beat as I thought it over. “Do you want the quick version or the whole story?”

“It’s a Monday fucking morning and we’re at work. Give me the quick version. We can talk about the whole story some other time.”

Nodding thoughtfully, I finally lowered my head again and looked into my brother’s stormy blue eyes. He really is pissed about this.

“It was a mistake.”

His eyebrows shot up and he laughed before his head started shaking. “A mistake? How does that happen? You slipped and fell into her vagina? How is hooking up with her a mistake?”

“I didn’t slip and fall into her vagina.” I rolled my eyes and laughed at him. “You said you wanted the quick version, and that’s it. It’s just a mistake.”

“It’s not funny, Kody,” he snapped. “Stop laughing. I’m dead serious. You don’t have sex with someone by mistake.”

I cocked my head. “What if you’re blind drunk?”

“You’re still doing it because at that moment, it’s what you want.” He released the back of the chair and pushed away from it to resume his pacing. “We’re not playing some game here. I’m not going to run through all the scenarios in which having sex could possibly be a mistake. Sex is an intentional act, and you intended on having it with our stepsister. More than once.”