Stepbrother WHOA! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #5) by Claire Adams

me, some of the people who had been
competing that day were still on the mountain, not quite ready to end their
partying and celebration. I called one of the boarders who’d given me her phone
number and begged for a ride, telling her only that I’d gotten separated from
my team, that I’d had a situation with my parents that had gone nuclear, and I
needed a ride back to the town the college was in. I remembered that it would
be on her way. “Yeah sure, get to the lodge and I’ll give you a ride.”
    I had just enough time for a beer to try and calm my
frazzled nerves before she and her friends set off to get back to where they
were going to school, a few miles north of the campus I lived on. I didn’t tell
them anything at all about the situation with Mom and Bob, but kept talking
about the tournaments to come and how exciting the day had been. They asked me
questions about Jaxon—they hadn’t missed the fact that Jaxon and I were
obviously an item—and I kept my perkiest, happiest act in place, telling them
about how we’d ended up on the team together, how he was helping me to get
better as a snowboarder.
    I was exhausted—I would have been tired down to my
bones even if Mom and Bob hadn’t shown up, even if there hadn’t been a disaster
of a dinner to come after the long day of competition. I tossed my new friend
some cash for gas as a thank-you for giving me a ride, and bought her a coffee
when we took a pit stop. The only thing I wanted in the world was to get to my
dorm and to take a long shower and curl up in my bed. I kept thinking of all
the ways that I probably made the whole situation worse.
    But in the back of my mind I couldn’t help feeling
like there was nothing more I could have done. I couldn’t have just sat there
and let Bob bad-mouth both Jaxon and me. I couldn’t just take it. After
everything that Bob had said about Jaxon, someone had to stand up for him. I
felt my anger building up inside of me again at the fact that this was the man
my mom was married to. How long would it be before he started bad-mouthing her,
too? He was an asshole of the highest caliber and if I could somehow manage to
never have to be in the same room as him ever again in my life, it would be far
too soon.

 
    Chapter
Nine
    By the time I managed to get across campus, and make
it upstairs to my room, I was completely fried. I had told myself over and over
again that I was going to take a long, hot shower when I got in, but I didn’t
even have the energy for that. I could still hear Bob’s angry words in my mind
as I walked through the door and veered left on shaky legs to my bedroom. I had
no idea where Jaxon was, or even if he had made it back to campus yet. I had no
idea what Bob and Mom were doing. I was exhausted down to my very bones; my
brain was reeling with everything that had happened.
    I climbed numbly into my bed as soon as my bedroom
door was shut behind me. I curled up to the wall and buried my face in my
pillow and started to shake all over. I was so overwhelmed by everything that
had happened that in a matter of minutes I was crying, sobbing harder than I
had even when I’d broken bones. I realized that I had cried more in the past
year than I had for most of my life and that only made me cry harder. I thought
about the terrible things Bob said to Jaxon, the way he seemed to take so much
pleasure in making his son feel worthless and useless, and the sobs kept
coming.
    I had gone from the highest high in my entire
life—making first place on a competitive field of boarders, all of my practice
paying off, getting the chance to win my victory right next to a guy I was in
love with without worrying for even a moment that someone would tell us we were
revolting—to my lowest low. When Jaxon had stormed off away from his father I
should have just followed him and gone away, I shouldn’t have even tried to
talk to Mom and Bob at all. I should have just left things the way they were.
    My tears kept