Stepbrother Romance: My Alpha Cowboy Stepbrother (Stepbrother Romance, Taboo, Forbidden, Stepsister, New Adult, Western Romance, Cowboy Romance) by Celia Styles Page A
Authors: Celia Styles
Ads: Link
virtual calendars when we first got married and I did add things like the occasional gallery opening to it. He never went. It did bother me at the time, but now I was glad—because it made him seem that much worse of a husband.
Disappearing alone wasn’t that hard to do—I’d managed to get a new ID with another name; because we lived so close to the state line it only took a few trips to the DMV on the other side to set up a fake address with a PO Box, where I had a whole new set of credit cards sent. I made a new life for myself online. Easton Miles was cool, sexy, confident—and it was the name I already used when I painted. She knew what she wanted, and she knew how to get it. No, the truly hard part was knowing that I would be hurting some people that I cared very much about: Marley; Simson, the owner of the gallery who’d agreed to let me present a few pieces there, where I’d made my first sale; even Janet and the rest of the Martini Morning crowd. We weren’t especially close, but as I drove away from Wild Flower Meadows at two in the morning I was pretty sure that they’d be shocked at my disappearance. But after the insurance company found the positive pregnancy test I’d planted (it’s amazing what you can get on Craigslist) they’d never look Alan in the eye again.
Let’s be clear about something—I wasn’t out to ruin his life, per se. Just make it miserable enough that he would never, ever, be able to live it down, that every time he went on a date with a woman and she decided to do a Finder search for his name, she’d come up with the article in the local papers about how his house burned down and his pregnant wife disappeared. One tragedy might be chalked up to bad luck, but two of them, linked somehow, would be sinister enough as to effectively put him off the market for good. And the noncommittal neighbors, who could only say, “Well, I thought they were fine—working through a rough patch—but who doesn’t have those? I don’t think he did anything to her, but then again, he never showed up to her gallery openings.” The last was something that I’d harped upon several times to the Martini Morning people in the past—they’d merely murmured sympathetically, but it wasn’t as if it were their responsibility to get him to go.
I drove out to the middle of nowhere, and got out the bike—something he’d bought back in the day when he was a fitness freak, rode twice, and now languished in the garage. It was a nice bike. I hoped whoever stole it would get some pretty good mileage out of it. I’d spray-painted it red and gold, so that it would be harder to recognize, but the odds of Alan even remembering he had it much less knowing what it looked like, were pretty slim.
I’d calculated that it would take me two hours to ride the bike from the middle of nowhere to the suburban train station, given that I would be carrying my overnight bag and a poster tube of my latest works. I wasn’t too far off, either. It was took me a little more than ninety minutes riding on the country roads before I saw the town, and then twenty minutes later I was at the train station. It helped that there was almost no traffic at that hour.
By then it was five in the morning. I left the bike in the bike rack, unlocked, and bought a ticket for the city with a credit card belonging to Easton Miles. It was my first purchase made under that name—and it finally, really felt like I was getting somewhere.
The fire was chalked up to an accident, a careless mistake with the soldering iron. The police suspected Alan with some mischief, but they would never be able to prove anything except that he was a total dick of a husband, and made every aspect of his dick-ness known: “Sources have confirmed that there were DNA samples of at least three people found in the bed.” I wondered what Deborah thought about that. They found the car, abandoned on the
Disappearing alone wasn’t that hard to do—I’d managed to get a new ID with another name; because we lived so close to the state line it only took a few trips to the DMV on the other side to set up a fake address with a PO Box, where I had a whole new set of credit cards sent. I made a new life for myself online. Easton Miles was cool, sexy, confident—and it was the name I already used when I painted. She knew what she wanted, and she knew how to get it. No, the truly hard part was knowing that I would be hurting some people that I cared very much about: Marley; Simson, the owner of the gallery who’d agreed to let me present a few pieces there, where I’d made my first sale; even Janet and the rest of the Martini Morning crowd. We weren’t especially close, but as I drove away from Wild Flower Meadows at two in the morning I was pretty sure that they’d be shocked at my disappearance. But after the insurance company found the positive pregnancy test I’d planted (it’s amazing what you can get on Craigslist) they’d never look Alan in the eye again.
Let’s be clear about something—I wasn’t out to ruin his life, per se. Just make it miserable enough that he would never, ever, be able to live it down, that every time he went on a date with a woman and she decided to do a Finder search for his name, she’d come up with the article in the local papers about how his house burned down and his pregnant wife disappeared. One tragedy might be chalked up to bad luck, but two of them, linked somehow, would be sinister enough as to effectively put him off the market for good. And the noncommittal neighbors, who could only say, “Well, I thought they were fine—working through a rough patch—but who doesn’t have those? I don’t think he did anything to her, but then again, he never showed up to her gallery openings.” The last was something that I’d harped upon several times to the Martini Morning people in the past—they’d merely murmured sympathetically, but it wasn’t as if it were their responsibility to get him to go.
I drove out to the middle of nowhere, and got out the bike—something he’d bought back in the day when he was a fitness freak, rode twice, and now languished in the garage. It was a nice bike. I hoped whoever stole it would get some pretty good mileage out of it. I’d spray-painted it red and gold, so that it would be harder to recognize, but the odds of Alan even remembering he had it much less knowing what it looked like, were pretty slim.
I’d calculated that it would take me two hours to ride the bike from the middle of nowhere to the suburban train station, given that I would be carrying my overnight bag and a poster tube of my latest works. I wasn’t too far off, either. It was took me a little more than ninety minutes riding on the country roads before I saw the town, and then twenty minutes later I was at the train station. It helped that there was almost no traffic at that hour.
By then it was five in the morning. I left the bike in the bike rack, unlocked, and bought a ticket for the city with a credit card belonging to Easton Miles. It was my first purchase made under that name—and it finally, really felt like I was getting somewhere.
The fire was chalked up to an accident, a careless mistake with the soldering iron. The police suspected Alan with some mischief, but they would never be able to prove anything except that he was a total dick of a husband, and made every aspect of his dick-ness known: “Sources have confirmed that there were DNA samples of at least three people found in the bed.” I wondered what Deborah thought about that. They found the car, abandoned on the
Similar Books
