Free Dare: A Stepbrother Romance by Caitlin Daire Page A

suddenly made me fucking hungry again. What about you? Do you wanna eat, or are you just going to go to bed?” I said.
    One thing I remembered from when we were kids was that being scared made her hungry. I had no idea why, but it just did. Her Dad had been a fucking asshole, and every time I ran out to her playhouse to comfort her when he was arguing with her Mom, I’d made sure to take a bag of snacks. Munching on popcorn or something sugary seemed to calm her down, and it was the least I could do. Really, what I wanted to do was go into her house and beat the shit out of her Dad, but an eight year old boy going up against a fully-grown man wasn’t exactly the best idea.
    “Yeah, I could eat,” she said.
    I figured something warm would be best, given the cool temperature up here at night, and I hunted around in the cupboards for something quick and easy.
    “How does mac and cheese sound?”
    “Sounds good,” she said, taking a seat at one of the tables. “But you’re making it. I made most of the dinner tonight!”
    I grinned. “I was going to make it anyway, Your Highness.”
    I set about heating it up, but I ran into trouble when it was time to serve it.
    “There’s no plates left in the cupboard,” I said, hunting around.
    “I think they’re all in the dishwasher from earlier,” she said.
    I looked down at the dishwasher, and the damned thing was still going.
    “Oh well. We’ll have to make do with these,” I said, opening another cupboard and pulling out two wine glasses I’d seen earlier.
    “Why are there wine glasses here?” she asked. “I’ve never seen them before.”
    “Maybe some of the volunteers drink to cope with having to be around kids all day,” I said jokingly, scooping up a mound of mac and cheese into a glass for her.
    She wrinkled her nose. “You really expect me to eat mac and cheese out of a wine glass?”
    “It’s the classy way to do it,” I replied. “Trust me, I went to a private school.”
    “All the private schools in the world couldn’t teach you class,” she said, poking her tongue out at me before digging into her food.
    She had a point. Just because a school was expensive as fuck didn’t mean it taught any decent behavior to its students. The boarding school my father had sent me to was basically a dumping ground for bad rich kids. A lot of godawful shit went down there. For example, in the course of one year, the following happened: One girl gave five guys chlamydia, another girl had a three-way with two guys in the campus chapel (a real Devil’s threesome, huh?), four guys got high, stole a teacher’s car and crashed it, and three others beat up another kid so badly he was hospitalized for a month. Oh, and six students also got together and had an orgy in a classroom. Definitely not the best environment for a well-rounded education. My Dad could have afforded a better school for me, but he hadn’t wanted to bother doing so. Apparently I’d been acting out too much at my previous school to be worth sending to one of the very top schools in the country.
    I hadn’t done too badly since I graduated a year ago, though. I’d done heaps of work for him at his company, and I’d also toyed with modeling all through my senior year upon the suggestion of an old friend of mine whose mother was a famous photographer. After the first proper shoot, things had picked up, and this year I’d been offered a contract with an agency in the city. My agent wasn’t the best, but she’d managed to get me a couple of decent gigs, including the billboard ad. I was also meant to be flying out to Australia in a month to shoot some magazine thing, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to go. Call me crazy, but I kinda wanted to savor the time I had left with Sophie around before she headed off to California for college.
    “So what’s with all the tattoos?” she asked, peering at me over the top of her cheese-stained wine glass. “Trying to look like a bad boy?”
    “What