Free Dirty Wicked Lust: A Stepbrother Romance by Amanda Heartley Page A

well… no way to find out lying in my bed with my hand between my legs, right?
    I rose on fragile legs, my head wobbly and throbbing as I pulled on soft cotton panties and a thick blue robe, padding toward my door on bare feet. I could smell the pot smoke the moment I opened my door, thick and acrid from across the hall.
    I smirked, never realizing my macho stepbrother was also a raging pothead. I soaked in the smell, smoke thick and dry in the hallway outside Ryan’s room. No better cure for a hangover, I thought, than second-hand ganja smoke.
    Well, that and coffee! I peeled myself away from Ryan’s smoke-filled doorway and fled down the hall, then the stairs, to find a full pot still warm from that morning and a mug laid out for my use. No note, but the mug itself was a thoughtful and much-needed gesture, another one of Ryan’s mixed signals that always seemed to keep me guessing.
    Was he feeling guilty about being a prick tease from last night? I wondered, spooning hazelnut creamer into the brimming mug. Or hoping for a second chance at my wet hungry cunt when I woke up? Was he regretting not going all the way with me? Or luring me up to his room where I could thank him for the coffee the only way a randy, denied stepsister could.
    I shook my head, marveling at my sudden capacity for bad behavior and wickedly dirty mind. Though I liked to play the part, I’d never actually teased anyone like I had Ryan the night before – to say nothing of my would-be attacker, a reality that still stung even as I inhaled my first cup of coffee to prepare a second.
    Regret hung heavy in the air, like Ryan’s pot smoke, drawing me closer as my hangover gradually dissipated. I found myself smiling and leaning in Ryan’s doorway.
    He was on his bed, propped up with half-a-dozen pillows and burning a big fatty while jamming to something inside bright red earphones. I watched him, bopping his feet on top of the comforter. He must have gone swimming, for he was wearing baggies and a soft white T-shirt, his skin dappled from the same late morning light that bathed my room across the hall. He was breathtakingly beautiful, as always, his body a combination of simple, clean lines and effortless sexiness, with hard edges everywhere they should have been and soft curves that enticed me just as much.
    The morning took on a kind of long, slow, ambient feeling, as I was stuck in time. I don’t know how long I stood there, sipping my coffee while leaning in the doorway, admiring him from afar as he lay on his bed.
    He smoked with an expertise that made it clear this wasn’t his first time toking on a joint, and from the aroma, that bud wasn’t cheap. I soaked it in, feeling less hungover with every deep inhalation, sipping my coffee carefully as I remembered the trace of Ryan’s soft, full lips as they clamped onto my tender breasts and sucked for all they were worth the night before.
    I wondered if he regretted it now, smoking away up in his room, having kissed his stepsister. He was a Marine after all. A military man taught to live by a set of rules that surely included right and wrong. Where did kissing me fall on that spectrum? And did he enjoy doing it—or regret enjoying it?
    Do I? I wondered, watching him turn the page of some graphic novel about a vampire priest. Was it wrong of me to seduce my stepbrother, drunk though I might have been? Was it wrong of me to still want him now that it was the next morning and I was stone cold sober?
    “Hey!”
    Ryan sat up in bed, covering himself with a pillow as if I hadn’t seen the outline of his cock, thick and hard, only a few hours earlier in the shallow end of the family pool.
    “What?” I asked, our eyes meeting across the thick, smoky haze of his room.
    “Ever heard of knocking?” he asked, tugging off the headphones so that I could hear the thick, pumping strains of heavy metal-slash-rap leaking from inside.
    I had to chuckle, looking from the half-open door back to Ryan’s stoned,