Page 1 of Jealous Stepbrother
PROLOGUE
Fuck Happy Birthday
Asher
The witching hours.
I don’t need Google to tell me the history of this stupid term because I feel every fucking haunted second as I lie in my room, staring at the ceiling and wishing myself anywhere but here.
Arms tucked behind my head, bare chest cooling in the late-summer air, I can still feel the burn in my veins from earlier.
Another fight with my father, the third one this week alone, about my “wasted potential.” He wants me to join the family business, sit in the same boardrooms that bored him half to death, and pretend money and power and legacy are enough to make a man. Sure, all three are great and admirable, even.
But I’ve never been one for the one-track-or-bust mentality. I’d probably put a bullet in my head before the first quarter is out.
So fuck no, thanks.
I want something else. My own name above the door. My own empire. My own rules. You’d think he’d admire that maverick spirit he wants in his boardroom, but no.
I huff in the dark and clench my gut because sure as clockwork, I see another thought coming down the highway of fucking hell.
Because, surprise surprise, my father isn’t the only reason I’m pissed off.
He’s the surface. The part I can say out loud. The part that doesn’t chart a searing river of shame and banked fury through me.
The truth, though? The thing gnawing at my ribs like a dog with a bone?
It’s resentment. Ugly and irrational and twisted. A secret rooted in the reason I’m not even willing to entertain staring at my dad’s face across a boardroom every fucking day.
Because…I wish I’d met them…her…first.
Because then I wouldn’t be lying here in the dark, pissed off and half-hard over something society says I can’t want.
I should be happy for my father. After years of cycling through bimbos who couldn’t spell fidelity if you gave them a million dollars, he’s finally found someone worth keeping.
But his happiness came withher.
Scarlett.
Nineteen today. Born ten years to the day after me. A symmetry fate finds hilarious, I bet.
Scarlett, with the lips that should be outlawed in every corner of the world, including fucking Antarctica because no, not even the penguins could be permitted to look at those lips.
Deep red, lush, made for depraved filth, and a name that feels like a warning and yet is wreathed in temptation.
That was bad enough. Fate had also wet herself throwing in a body that could stop an ocean liner in its fucking tracks.
Last year, I stayed away for her eighteenth birthday because I was born with a little more than two brain cells to rub together. Knew well enough that I couldn’t step into temptation’s path. No matter what.
This year, the old man guilted me into showing up. A family dinner and polite toast or two. I manned the fuck up and hoped like hell that strength in numbers and being a year older and wiser would help.
It didn’t.
I’d barely made my planned escape halfway through the party with a pat on the back and sneer at the shrieking teenagers before I could say or do something I’d regret.
And yet, here I am,at the fucking witching hour, staring at the ceiling, imagining the way she’d looked tonight in that clingy red dress. The way she laughed with her friends. The way she glanced at me when she thought I wasn’t watching.
A knock on my door drags me out of the thought that’s only headed one way.
