Page 60 of Don't Say You're Sorry

Grabbing his mom’s baby blue apron, Axel pulls it on and ties it at the back before stepping up to do his thing. He’s a chef. I heard he’d been working at one of the top restaurants in London before I dragged him back here. He loves food as much as I do, which is something we bonded over before my love for him turned to hatred. He taught me how to cook when we were in high school. He tried to teach Adam as well, but my boy wasn’t that interested. He was content to sit at the table with his iPad and draw while he watched us.

Like Axel, my dad’s not one for affection—with the exception of his wife—so Veronica doesn’t find it odd that he doesn’t greet her sons with the same enthusiasm she did. He nods at them before taking her hands and pulling her into his arms.

“Hi,” he says to her, looking at me over her head.

My nostrils flare.

“Hi,” she says back. “Did you hear…”

I don’t catch the rest of Veronica’s sentence because Adam’s hand is on my chest again, his face close to mine now that my dad is preoccupied.

“Will you relax?” he whispers.

“I’m relaxed.”

“Really? Because it looks like you’re torn between who to hit first. My brother or your dad.”

I laugh lightly at how panicked he looks. “Willyourelax?” I tease, watching the way he’s worrying his full bottom lip between his teeth. “I’m not going to hit them. But I do need to blow off a little steam. Wanna play a game?”

He eyes me skeptically.

I tip my chin at him, and he follows me upstairs. In my bedroom, I lock the door and toss a black pair of swim shortsat him. He frowns at them before looking up at me. “What’s the game?”

“Strip,” I demand, leaving a few feet of space between us. “First one to get hard gets thrown in the pool.”

He pushes out a breath, gaze locked on my fingers while I slowly unzip my jeans.

Ten minutes later, I toss his ass in the inground pool in our backyard and jump in after him.

“You still have an office upstairs, don’t you?” Adam asks his mom, exasperated as he moves her laptop and all her things from the kitchen island. “Your stuff is everywhere. How do you get any work done surrounded by all this mess?”

Amused, I watch him from across the room. He’s frustrated—sexually—and it’s making my dick hard. I love it when he gets like this. Neurotic and twitchy. Desperate for me to fuck the cum out of him.

If what he tells me is true, it’s been about two and a half weeks since he’s gotten off. I wonder if I can edge him for another two weeks or if he’ll explode by then. My money’s on the latter.

I teased him in the pool. We were just messing around at first—like good, platonic brothers do. I dunked his head under the water, and he swam after me, pulling me down with him. I was barely touching him, but then his legs somehow got tangled around my waist, and my hand was on his ass, pulling him into me. When I tapped his hole with my finger over his shorts, he snapped out of it and swam away before getting out of the pool. We changed in separate rooms after that.

“Which one of you is the designated driver?” my dad asks, and my stepbrothers point at me. My dad hands them a beer before handing me a soda, leaning against the counter next to me. He says nothing, and neither do I, both of us watching quietly as Axel cooks and Adam and his mom get into a heated debate over how many notebooks she owns but never uses. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face if I wanted to.

“Don’t even think about it,” I say for my dad’s ears only.

“What?” he asks. I don’t look away from Adam, but I can feel the way my dad’s gaze travels over from Adam to me.

He knows what. He’s been staring at the side of my boy’s head for the last five minutes, his hand white-knuckling the beer he’s holding.

“You remember why your wife kicked her ex-husband’s ass to the curb, right?” I ask calmly, not giving him a chance to respond. “Not because he wronged her, but because he wronged her children.” I pause for dramatic effect. “How do you think she’d react if she knew what you’ve done to her child?”

I feel his glare on me, but he doesn’t answer my question. Not that I thought he would.

“You leave him alone, or I’ll turn her against you. Simple as that.”

He shakes his head in my peripheral. “You wouldn’t do that. Not to her.”

My smile is cruel. “Watch me. I let you get away with it once. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Despite me threatening to take my dad’s wife away from him, the five of us manage to have a nice, normal—ish—dinner together.Veronica’s sitting between my dad and Axel on one side of the table, and Adam and I are sitting opposite them.

The food is amazing, but I don’t tell Axel that. He’s already a cocky bastard. He doesn’t need me feeding him compliments and inflating his ego more.