AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I pushed out of the bar, leading her out. I held open the door for her as I muttered, “It’s nothing.” The last thing I wanted to do was explain to her that, according to Jeff, stepsisters were fuckable.
No. That was a line we definitely couldn’t cross.
Chapter Three – Taylor
His car was nice. Clean and new, all sleek and black, just like the suit he wore. He helped me inside, and all the while I had to make sure I never took out my bloodied hand and keep my hoodie neckline up to cover any possible bruises.
Oh, there’d definitely be bruising, but I was hoping to hide it from him.
“Nice car,” I remarked. I didn’t even know what kind it was. It probably cost more than an entire year’s salary for some people. “What do you do?” I didn’t know if Creed could afford this because he inherited everything from his mother or if he managed to get some fancy job downtown.
He got us on the road, looking quite at ease behind the wheel of this expensive vehicle. And, as much as I probably shouldn’t say it, he looked good, too. I could imagine him driving this, wearing a suit much like that, on a business trip, with pitch-black sunglasses on his face.
“Security,” he said after a while.
“Must be a lucrative business,” I muttered, turning my head to gaze out the window, watching as the city blocks passed by. I caught myself wondering what Dad was doing, but the moment I realized it, I pushed all thoughts of him from my mind. I was mad at him, for real this time. There were some things I could forget, some things I could forgive, but the way things had escalated tonight…
There was no going back, no undoing it. Things could never go back to the way they were before. I couldn’t forget, and I definitely couldn’t forgive him this time.
“Where do you live?” I asked, slow to turn away from the window and watch Creed instead. Looking at him, at least my thoughts weren’t on my dad. No, they were on my stepbrother instead, on the man that he’d become.
“In a nice high-rise downtown,” Creed said, flicking his dark eyes over to me. “You’ll be safe there, and you can stay however long you need to.”
All this time, he’d been so close. And here I’d thought he’d left the freaking state after his mom died. All these years Creed had been so close by, and yet he’d not once come to visit? It made me sad. It made me angry. It made me so many things.
“You don’t have any bags,” he pointed out, bringing me out of my thoughts. “Why?”
“Oh, I, uh…” I let my eyes fall to my lap. “I didn’t grab anything when I left the house.”
“Do you want to go back to get anything?”
“No!” I said the word a little too quickly, because Creed shot me a questioning look immediately after. Softer this time, I said, “No. I don’t want to go back and see Dad right now. I need some space from him.”
We were at a red light, which let Creed turn his head to me and lean over the center console. He studied me intently, intensely. “Did something happen between you two? Did he do something to you?” When I didn’t say anything, when I couldn’t even look at him, he let out a sound I could only describe as a growl.
Yeah, agrowl. What was even weirder was the fact that it sounded completely natural coming from him.
“Taylor,” he said, but he had to look forward because the light had changed. “You can tell me if he did something. If he hurt you—”
“I’m fine,” I said, though I could tell my heart wasn’t in it.
Creed made a sharp right turn. It was like he was driving more erratic now that he had the suspicion Dad had done something to me. I mean, he wasn’t wrong, but let’s not get into an accident because of it. “What did he do? You said before he got angry when I left. Did he hit you? Did he—”
“I said I’m fine,” I repeated, more firmly this time. “I don’t want to talk about it, Creed.” I glimpsed at him, watching him grind his teeth. He held onto the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles had turned white. “I just don’t want to go back there. Not now.”
He didn’t say anything to that, but I could tell he was trying to calm himself down. Even out his breathing, no more growls, and his hands weren’t so tight on the wheel. He turned us into a parking garage, in the lower levels of a high rise—which I took to mean was where he lived… where I’d be living for a while. He input a code to lift the bar to allow us inside.
I didn’t know what living with Creed was going to be like. He might be my stepbrother, but we hadn’t seen each other in so long. Sure, there was familiarity between us, as there was between family members who hadn’t seen each other in a while, but living with him was going to be different.
I mean,lookat him. He wasn’t the teenage boy I remembered. He really wasn’t a boy at all anymore, and now that I was older, I was keenly aware of that fact. Was it wrong to think he was hot?
Yes. Yes, it was definitely wrong.
Creed parked the car and turned it off. He’d never put on his seatbelt, so he didn’t have to unbuckle before he turned his top half toward me. His eyes were even darker with the lack of light—the parking garage wasn’t the most-lit place around, even dimmer than the inside of that bar.
And those eyes of his… I swore, they saw right through me.
“We will run out tomorrow and get you anything you need,” he said. “But I need you to tell me what happened, Taylor. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me—”
