Almost Stepbrothers

Chapter Four: OCD Crazy

Jack

My father was apparently having some kind of late mid-life crisis. The man had hardly looked at another woman since our mother died, but all of a sudden he was all over Denise Drake. Dating her was one thing, but why the hell did he have to move her into his house?

I hate change and everything that goes with it. I’m forced to deal with it on a professional basis, but at least my home should be stable and peaceful.

Phoenix had quietly suggested that it might be time for us to move out and get our own place, but I thought that this was the worst possible time for us to leave the old man to his own devices. Who knows, if we turned our backs, that woman might bleed him dry and leave him penniless.

I didn’t even like the looks of Denise Drake. She was too thin, too fragile looking. And I bet that was part of the appeal to my father. She had that classic damsel in distress air about her, combined with some kind of nostalgia for days gone by. He was in a vulnerable mental state right now, and I was one-hundred percent certain she was taking advantage of him.

And the kid was luggage my father probably hadn't anticipated. The last thing we needed was to have some entitled, moody teenager underfoot all the time.

That kid might have been a bit older than I first guessed. When she pulled back that hoodie at the restaurant and I’d seen her face, I’d almost tripped over my own feet. She had that sweet, wide-eyed, innocent look that was anything but. Under any other circumstances, I might have been intrigued, even if she was a little too young. But considering that her mom was doing my dad, she was definitely off limits.

I stripped off my dress shirt and placed it in the laundry before heading to the bathroom. I was just about to reach for the handle when the door jerked open and a small, slightly damp woman crashed straight into my chest. She bounced back like a pinball and probably would have tipped over if I hadn’t caught her shoulders. Her eyes ran down my body in an unashamed appraisal.

I had a good look too.

She definitely wasn’t a kid. She was petite, but her body was fit and lean, like a professional athlete, with all the right curves in all the right places. Her breasts were barely concealed under a thin silky top, and I could see her n*****s beading up. Her hair was hanging in a long wet curtain around her hips, and immediately I had a fantasy of fisting my hands into those long silky strands as I bent her over and took her from behind.

It was such an intense vision that I felt myself growing hard.

Whoa boy! I reined that stallion in immediately. I cast that fantasy out of my mind and assessed her coldly. Considering the shameless way she was looking me over, she was probably a cheap trick, just like her mother. I covered any trace of attraction I still felt with pure sarcasm. “Like what you see?”

She looked me right in the eye. She had dark brown eyes the color of milk chocolate. She shrugged her slim shoulders, making her breasts rise and fall under that scant nightshirt. “Meh, I’ve seen better.” Her voice was cool and dismissive. “ Goodnight, Jack.”

And then she walked back to her room and shut the door firmly. The sound of her lock turning was like an insult to my ears. Did she think I was going to go break down her door to get to her? As if she was that irresistible?

Pshh.

And what did she mean, seen better? I looked down at my body with a frown. I’d never had any complaints before. It only went to prove that she was a stuck-up snob. I brushed away the lingering feelings of desire and stepped fully into the bathroom. The air was still steamy from her shower, and it smelled sweetly of mint and sage.

Not only did my bathroom smell like her, but her girly s.hit was all over the place. Everywhere I looked, she had polluted the space. A hairbrush with bits of her hair still dangling from the teeth was on the counter, and she’d left the cap open on her body wash. I had to pull the bottle out of the shower and close it before I went OCD crazy.

She’d even put her toothbrush in our cup. There was something weirdly intimate about the three brushes sharing that cup, almost like we were already a threesome partnership. “Oh, hell no,” I muttered, taking a clean plastic cup from the cupboard and dropping her toothbrush into it. I moved it to the other side of the sink, far away from ours.

As if that was enough to put some distance between us.