Free Wrecked: A Stepbrother Romance Novel by Arabella Abbing

well.”
    As intended, the absence of a returned ‘I missed you, too’ stung like a bitch. I swallowed around the lump in my throat, reaching for the glass of red wine he had poured for me and downed it. I had to stand to reach the bottle, but I topped myself off quickly and took my seat again, pointedly trying to ignore the way he frowned at me with narrowed eyes.
    “I must ask that you refrain from drinking on the days following my surgery.”
    I rolled my eyes and scoffed. “D you seriously think I would do that?”
    He shrugged. “We haven’t been close for a long time, Vanessa. You don’t know me any better than I know you.”
    Truer words were never spoken , I thought as I regarded him coolly. I knew he was a changed man the last time I saw him and now, it was even worse. We’re worlds apart now.
    As soon as the thought fluttered through my mind, I noticed he was still staring, waiting for a response.
    “I don’t know what you want me to say to that.”
    “You don’t have to say anything. Just stay sober when I need you.”
    This time, I held myself back from rolling my eyes, but I did reach for the wine again. Perhaps it was out of spite, but I apparently wasn’t old enough to care about being petty. I gave him a sugary-sweet smile before making short work of the glass, sitting it back down with an exaggerated noise of content.
    Brandon clearly wasn’t amused. “I’m serious.”
    “And I’m serious about my work. I’ve never gone to work drunk or hungover and I don’t intend to start now.”
    He nodded, accepting my answer and returning his attention to his food after a whispered, “Good.”
    The wine was making me a little bolder than when I first arrived, so I leaned back in my chair and casually watched him as I ate. The scars weren’t pleasant to look at—not in the slightest—but the rest of him was just as gorgeous as I remembered.
    Even more so, if I was being truthful. It was obvious that despite whatever health trouble he’d been having that he found a way to stay in shape and he’d bulked up quite a bit. There was nothing left of the scrawny computer nerd I knew as a teenager.
    Okay, well maybe he was still a nerd. After all, he was still a total introvert who ran a software company. Now he was just an extremely well-muscled, sexy-as-fuck nerd.
    And scarred. Damaged. Broken.
    I sighed to myself as I dropped the fork, unable to hold this back any longer. The sudden noise captured his attention and he turned to me with a frown.
    “Do you not care for the food?”
    I stared at him incredulously. “Are you kidding? No, it’s incredible. I just—I can’t sit here and take this silence. We need to talk. About everything.”
    He followed my lead, setting down his fork and pulling the napkin from his lap with a flourish. “You mean we need to talk about my scars.”
    Part of me wanted to nod, but I didn’t. Instead, I decided to take a different, hopefully less hostile approach to this.
    “We need to talk about your disappearance. Do you have any idea what it did to us? How fucking worried we were?”
    Brandon scoffed. “I wrote to my our parents. They knew I was fine.”
    I folded my arms over my chest and raised an eyebrow. “And what about me?”
    “I didn’t owe you a damn thing,” he hissed, turning to face me full-on with a fire burning in his eyes as his scowl warped the surrounding skin.
    The last time I saw that look was in my aunt’s wine cellar nearly seven years ago. The memory of the heated kiss we had shared lodged itself in my brain and the one of the argument we had afterwards promptly knocked the wind out of me.
    “Excuse me,” I muttered, standing up and storming out, praying that I’d be able to find my way back to my room.
    I wasn’t sure what I expected coming here, but I knew this wasn’t it. I wanted to make things better between us—find some way to bury the hatchet—but it was starting to feel like that was the last thing Brandon wanted. He really