Free Stepbrother Wow! (Bad Boy Frat #1) by Claire Adams

never been there before. You’ll have to
send me the address.”
    “Of course, baby. I’ll email you the address. Try
and get here before eight—it’s harder to find after dark.”
    “Yes, Mom,” I said. “What’s going on? You’re so
excited.”
    “Just thinking about the surprise I have for you,”
my mom said, her voice full of whatever it was. I
shrugged it off. “It’s late—you should go to bed. I love you, sweetie.” I said
my goodbyes, and hung up as soon as my mom got finished showering me with love
and telling me to sleep well and be safe.
    I lay in bed for a few minutes after that, trying to
decide how I felt about the situation. The semester had been a long one—way
longer than any I’d been through in high school—and after everything I’d been
through, I was more than ready for a little break from school. I wanted to get
away from my classes, from the situation with Jaxon, and even the frat itself. At least it’s a mansion, I thought,
snorting. From the pictures I’d seen, it was a huge house, with a bunch of land
around it. As far away from the cramped and crammed life in the dorms, even the
packed situation at the frat house. If nothing else, it would be time away, and
I could definitely use that before I went in to tackle my finals. I’d rest up,
eat some good food, and make nice with the boyfriend. All I could hope for was
that my mom wouldn’t want us to be all buddy-buddy all the time, doing “family”
things together in the name of a happy holiday. I’d get out of whatever I
possibly could.

 
    CHAPTER
10
    A few days later I packed up enough of my stuff to
last me through the holiday weekend and loaded it into my car. I wasn’t looking
forward to the long drive; when my mom emailed me the address to her
boyfriend’s place, I’d looked it up in my app on my phone and found out that it
was hours away from the campus. It was cold, heading into the official start of
winter, with the first rounds of snow already on the ground. It wouldn’t be the
first time that I’d driven on snowy, icy roads, but after the exhaustion of the
semester, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to drive for two hours just to be with my
mom for Thanksgiving.
    She hadn’t given me any hint at all about the
surprise, just telling me to make sure to come to Bob’s house without fail,
that she’d tell me all about it then. I figured it must be something like a big
gift—a new computer maybe, or something else that she wanted me to see in
person without having any clue of it beforehand. She’d been convincing Bob for
months to help her buy me little gifts and trinkets—a jersey for my favorite
player on the Flames, tickets to a concert I wanted to go to that were
impossibly out of my budget. It would be something like that, I decided,
drinking coffee to keep myself alert on the roads. I had gotten out of my
classes early; everyone knew it was snowing, and that a lot of people had a
long way to go to get home for the holiday. Even in the classes I’d had we
hadn’t really done much—some of the students had gone home the night before,
hoping to beat all of the bad weather altogether. It wasn’t too bad, but it was
so cold that I wished I’d brought my heavier jacket into the car with me. Even
with the heater on I was shivering every now and then—though that might have
been about the caffeine as much as the cold.
    As I followed the directions my phone dictated to
me, I found myself getting farther and farther away from the places I knew,
going deep into the suburbs and then even farther, where the houses spread out
with huge yards around them, classic architecture and pretentious designs.
Gardens, big rolling lawns, huge arching trees lined the road on either side of
me, and I was starting to feel out of my depth. I focused on what I knew about
Bob’s house from my mom. He had a hot tub on the back deck—that could be a lot
of fun to visit and enjoy. I’d have my own bedroom there just as I had at