Chapter Four
Something had broken inside of him that day. When he had come to the town house, looking to sleep off some of his excess, and found his stepsister, drunk, crawling all over one of the biggest assholes he’d ever known in school.
And when said asshole had led his stepsister up the stairs, he had lost it entirely.
He knew that it was perhaps as hypocritical as she said that he was breaking up a party which was tame by his standards, but he hadn’t been able to allow it.
Heather Gray was a thorn in his side. And the thorn had only grown more acute as she had become more beautiful.
They had been cruel to each other over the years, but after that, her behavior toward him became something like psychotic.
And the twisted thing was it seemed to ignite a spark within him.
Seemed to make him all the more interested in continuing the war that they’d been engaged in for years.
Though they saw each other less frequently, it still happened on occasion that they would find themselves at his father’s home in Italy at the same time.
Even their parents had to take notice of the rift, though they thought it was some form of sibling rivalry rather than the burning hatred that existed in them both. They traded barbs in front of both Lisa and Giuseppe, but were careful to walk the line.
In university, Heather traded her school uniform, and out-of-school bikinis, for something a bit more serious. Her red hair was often pinned up into a bun, her color palette ranging from black to darker black.
He would be lying if he said he didn’t miss the color.
But she was clearly now obsessed with being taken seriously, in that way first-year university students often were.
Which was why he had thought—the first time—that perhaps some of her anger at him might’ve cooled. Until she walked by him in the hallway, and looked up at him, her green eyes catching him so hard that he froze.
Then she put her fingertip on his chest, dragged it right across the front of his cashmere sweater. “How nice to see you, brother dearest.”
There was malice and promise in those words, and he would be damned if they didn’t send a sharp signal of arousal straight down to his cock.
The problem with Heather was that she took desire and added something more potent to it.
It was the extreme distaste he had for her that seemed to add adrenaline to the attraction.
What was forbidden to him? Nothing. Nothing but the stepsister he hated.
He was a wealthy man, and doors flew open for him.
But not her. Touching her would cause an avalanche of destruction. It was what made her compelling.
Over dinner she smiled at him sweetly. Later he cornered her. “And what is your game?”
“I don’t have a game,” she said, smiling sweetly at him.
He’d never once seen the look on her face before.
“I don’t believe you.”
She pouted. “What a terrible view you have of women.”
“Only of you, cara.”
For some reason that only made her smile more.
“You need to be nicer to Heather,” his father said to him later when they were drinking cognac by the fire.
“Why exactly?” he asked, tapping his glass.
“Because I won’t be around forever. You will have to take care of Heather and Lisa.”
“Father, your money will take care of them well enough.”
“Is that all you think I offer them?”
It was certainly why they had so happily broken up Giuseppe’s marriage.
Certainly why they had taken to all of this with such ease.
Had his father been a poor man, it would never have happened.
He knew that for certain. One of the truly difficult things was that Lisa was a kind woman.
Caring and one who seemed to enjoy spending time with her husband, doting on her daughter.
In spite of the frosty reception that Romeo had given her, Lisa had been persistently kind to him.
But he was the one who’d had to be there for his mother. He was the one who had—
“Don’t forget that I have to take care of your former wife.”
“Romeo… You know I feel sorry for the timing of everything.”
“Not so sorry that you didn’t do exactly what you wanted to anyway.”
By the time he was ready for bed he was furious.
He walked into his room and stripped his jacket off, his tie, the rest of his clothes.
He walked into the shower and stood blindly beneath the hot spray, then dried himself and walked back into the bedroom.
He stopped. There was someone in his bed.
He flicked the lights on, and there she was, the covers pulled up past her breasts, her copper hair spread out on the pillow.
His stepsister was naked in his bed.
“What are you playing at?” he asked, fury and desire creating a potent cocktail in his veins.
“‘Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’” she asked, that same smile from earlier today playing across her lips.
Whatever she was doing, it was evil. It had nothing to do with wanting him; that was certain.
“Get out of here, you little slut,” he snarled.
“I don’t think that’s what you want,” she said, completely undeterred by his insult.
“It is what I want.”
His heart was racing, his body hard, and the towel that was riding low on his hips was probably doing little to disguise the effect she had on him. But no matter how much he wanted her in that moment, he wanted her out of his room more.
She began to sit up, and in one fluid movement he went over to the bed, grabbed the edge of the blanket and pulled it around to the other side of her quickly, baring her body only for a moment without looking before he swaddled her, then grabbed the corners of the blanket and carried her, trapped inside, out into the hallway.
“Out,” he said, dumping her onto the floor.
She was seething, her eyes shooting sparks from where she was lying, still trapped in the blanket. “Don’t you want to take my virginity? Since you spoiled my attempts the last time?”
“You were drunk,” he said, staring down at her in her glorious state.
“And what you do with your virginity is none of my concern. Whatever trap this is, you’re not going to catch me in it.
” And then it all became abundantly clear.
He had always known what she was, from the beginning.
It was only his attraction to her that had clouded things, for just a moment.
He began to laugh. “You are trying to trap me, aren’t you?
It is not enough that your mother married my father—do you think that you can snare me in the same sort of fashion? ”
Her face turned red.
“How dare you?”
“How dare you. But you did. Now there you are naked in the hallway, thwarted. Go to hell, Heather.”
He shut the door violently on her and locked it. And then he went straight back into the shower and stood beneath the cold spray, cursing her name the entire time.
Heather was lost in a spiral of self-loathing. He had rejected her.
She had intended him to. Sort of. She pushed her fingers through her hair and pulled hard.
Everything was tangled up. She had gotten a little bit wine drunk and told her new friends in college all about her relationship with her stepbrother, and they had suggested that half the problem was that they wanted to bang each other.
She denied it for a while, but then gave up.
Because the truth was, he was beautiful.
And she had never been immune. She also knew that he wasn’t immune to her.
“You need to screw him,” her roommate had said. “It’s that simple. The two of you are drowning in all your unresolved sexual tension.”
And the more she had thought about it, the more she had thought that perhaps she did.
God knew that her attempts at dating were entirely thwarted because every time she kissed a man she remembered Romeo storming in like an avenging angel, and it never got any further because he had destroyed the idea of sex for her.
She had gotten it into her head that at the very least she would shock him.
That she would get some kind of advantage over him.
And if they did have sex…maybe it would defuse everything between them.
But he had dumped her out into the hall, and truly, she had realized that she had miscalculated anyway.
Because the feelings had been far too intense.
They had been so much more than she had anticipated. And now she was humiliated.
At least no one had seen her scrabbling back to her room with his blankets. It really was too bad that he was a billionaire, because her stealing his blankets might have been an inconvenience to him if he were a normal man. But alas, Romeo had everything he could possibly want.
Thankfully, she was heading back to school tomorrow. Thankfully, she probably wasn’t going to have to face him again. They avoided each other well enough in the giant house.
Usually, the only time she had to see him was at family dinner, and as much as it pained her to skip one with her parents, she would just claim that she was tired and avoid tonight.
She would be heading back to school with her tail between her legs to an extent but…
She had certainly affected him.
Her attraction to him had always been so buffered by how much she hated him, and then she had been naked in his bed and he had walked in wearing only a towel, and nothing had been theoretical about that.
She had been so sure that she would have control over everything, because she was a woman and therefore more likely to keep her wits about her during sex.
She had lost her head completely. In that moment when he had walked over there and she had thought that he…
She let out a breath, and walked out of her room, needing lunch, and needing to sneak it back to her room as quickly as possible to minimize her chances of having to deal with Romeo.
And then suddenly, she found herself being maneuvered against the wall, and there he was, all six foot four inches of her outraged stepbrother, staring at her with fire emanating from his eyes.
He was so close she could feel the heat radiating from his body. So close she could smell his scent. Again.
She swallowed hard, and he lifted his hand and wrapped it around her neck, gently, but enough to let her know that he was dangerous.
That he could do whatever he wanted right then.
Whatever he wanted. Strangle her, kiss her, she wasn’t sure that she would stop him either way.
And the realization was terrifying. It all crystallized.
That first moment he had ever spoken to her, and it had been like being sliced into, the second time when it had felt that much more intimate, that much deeper.
This time, she felt it between her legs.
This time, it had formed perfectly into exactly what it had always promised to be.
It was real, deep, adult desire mixed with resentment and rage cultivated over the course of years.
She had no control. She had been wrong. She had played with this man, and she had only played herself.
If he wanted to take her right there against the wall where anyone could walk by, she would let him.
And that was the realization that finally made her move.
As soon as she did, he released his hold on her, proving that he had never held her so tightly as it felt like he had. “Don’t play with me,” he said.
She caught her breath. “Maybe we should call a truce.”
“You would like that. We are not in school anymore, and I have no investments in this game. But if you think that ignoring you means that I no longer hate you, I wish you to comfort yourself with the fact that I still do. Forever.”
“Same,” she said.
She didn’t stay for dinner. She made arrangements to change the flight plan for her father’s private plane and left an hour later. With the inescapable, lowering realization that Romeo might have actually won.