Free Mine - A Stepbrother Romance by Caitlin Daire

hometown, and Roy had taken a few days off work just to spend time with me.
    I’d learned a lot of things about him and my biological mother from our chats. Apparently they’d actually met in Arizona, so he thought it was some strange sort of sign that my other parents had named me that. That’s what I’d taken to calling the Kellers – my other parents. I rarely brought them up around Roy, because every time I did, I could see the hurt and anger in his eyes. He didn’t deserve that.
    We’d had a short discussion on what I was actually going to do now that I was staying here for the foreseeable future, and he’d laid out a lot of options. He said if I wanted to go to college, then he’d pay for it without question, and if I just wanted to work, then he had plenty of connections to help out with that. He’d even offered for me to come in and help him at his company headquarters in Providence, starting in a couple of weeks, and I’d ended up accepting that for now. That way I could slowly ease myself into life here in Rhode Island instead of being thrown in the deep end with a bunch of strangers right away.
    Maybe I’d go to college later; who knew right now? It had never even been an option for me before, even though I’d received fairly good grades in school. It was simply unaffordable, so I’d never even applied. Having money, or at least having parents with money, really opened up a lot of doors, and I was beyond grateful that I was suddenly having all these new opportunities being given to me.
    Roy’s assistant Victoria still seemed rather standoffish around me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I assumed she didn’t trust me, seeing as I’d just miraculously appeared in Roy’s life only very recently, and I couldn’t blame her for that. She obviously cared about him as her employer, and all I could do was try to show her and everyone else that I was only here to get to know him. I didn’t really care about his money or the big house or anything else. I just wanted to get to know my real Dad.
    As for Mason…well, I thought I’d learned in high school biology that Neanderthals were extinct. Apparently not. He’d been screwing with me for the last few days by acting totally normal whenever Roy and Layla were around, and then sleazing onto me like a childish idiot when he got me alone. Slapping my ass while pretending to be reaching for something else. Making inappropriate jokes. Mimicking me touching myself the other night. You get the gist.
    I knew he was just doing it to annoy me, and it was working. I was more than annoyed. I wanted to kill him. Why couldn’t he just move out? I mean, I wasn’t trying to say that this was my house now that I was here, but he was twenty years old. Wasn’t that old enough for him to get his own bachelor pad away from the family homestead? Then again, he was only a year older than me, and he seemed to have the mental maturity of a fruit bat.
    It was Friday afternoon now, and Roy was at his office. I was feeling a bit peckish, so I decided to head downstairs to the kitchen to see if there were any leftovers from last night’s dinner in the fridge.
    As I closed my door, I looked down the hall and immediately suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. Of course Mason just so happened to be walking the opposite way up the hall at the same time. Ugh. It was like he had some sort of radar thing on me to track all of my movements.
    “Oh look, it’s Daddy’s little girl,” he said, heading straight for me. He was wearing a bright red T-shirt and faded blue jeans that probably cost more than what I’d made in a week back in Leyton, and I wrinkled my nose.
    “Oh look, it’s Clifford the Big Red Dipshit,” I replied in an acid tone.
    I was trying to annoy him, but he simply grinned. “Smart. Where are you going?”
    “None of your business,” I replied. “Shouldn’t you be under a bridge somewhere, handing out riddles to anyone who tries to cross?”
    “Oh, come on, be