Dare: A Stepbrother Romance by Caitlin Daire

your love life from now on. Promise.”
    I nodded but didn’t say anything, still seething.
    “Are you gonna come back inside, or do you want me to drive you home?” Lana asked, her voice tentative.
    “I think I’ll just go,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get a cab.”
    I didn’t want to be fighting with my friends, but they weren’t exactly making it easy for me. They waited with me in silence until my cab arrived, and before I left they both wrapped their arms around me.
    “Don’t be mad for too long,” Lana said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
    I nodded and stepped towards the cab before turning and giving them a half-hearted wave. We’d had fights before, and I knew it would all blow over soon. I just needed some time to calm down. On the ride home, I stared out the window and thought of Drew pushing me up against the closet door, his eyes dark with a mixture of anger and lust. He’d said he didn’t really want me, but that expression had definitely said otherwise.
    Whatever. I needed to forget about it. What had happened between us that night at the hotel was in the past. I’d met someone else now, and hopefully soon the whole Drew debacle would be a distant memory. Things were finally looking up.

CHAPTER FIVE
    DREW
    “You’ve come down in the world, man.”
    My friend Caleb skipped a stone over the water in the creek behind the Ramirez house, and I laughed.
    “How’s that?”
    He grinned. “Usually we’d be sitting by your pool in Medina, getting foot massages and watching hot chicks frolic in bikinis, and now we’re hanging out beside a dirty river?”
    “I’m only here for the summer. Besides, we can always hang at yours,” I said, trying not to get defensive. Unlike Caleb, I hadn’t been born into wealth, and this creek had been one of my favorite play spots as a kid.
    We’d dragged a couple of lawn chairs from the back garden down to the water, and we were languishing on them in our shorts and aviators. We’d both taken our shirts off earlier to catch some sun, and by now we were on our fourth beer each.
    My phone buzzed next to me a second later, and I glanced at the text before immediately hitting the delete button. It was Vanessa, my ex. We need to talk , it had said. Fuck off, we didn’t need to talk. I wasn’t usually the girlfriend type, but she’d seemed really great when we first met, and I’d taken a chance on a relationship only to discover that she was absolutely insane. She’d somehow gotten into my phone and onto my Facebook account and deleted the contact details and profiles of every single girl and woman I knew, even my cousins and aunts. Fucking ridiculous. She’d seriously been that insecure and jealous. When I’d called her out on it, she’d taken a pair of scissors to half my wardrobe. See? Batshit crazy.
    “Who was that?” Caleb asked, looking across at me. “Potential action?”
    “Nah, it was no one.”
    I looked across the creek to see four giggling girls on the other side, a little further down. They were all whispering and staring at my abs, and Caleb grinned as he noticed them too,
    “Babe alert,” he said, giving them a cheeky wave. “Now there’s some potential action.”
    My mind was on Sophie, but I gave myself the pleasure of checking out the bikini-clad girls. They had the slim, toned bodies of girls who never skipped a gym session and probably subsisted on grilled chicken breast and salad, and usually I’d like that, but that was before I’d had a taste of Sophie’s voluptuous curves. Her body was absolutely smoking, even when she was just hanging around the house in a faded old dressing gown, and I quickly realized I wasn’t the only one who thought so as Caleb turned his head and let out a low whistle.
    “Yet another babe,” he said, and I turned my own head to see what he was looking at.
    Sophie had come out of the house to water the potted herbs on the back porch, and she was wearing a pair of black shorts and a loose,