Stepbrother Bestie (A Stepbrother Romance Novel) by Alycia Taylor Read Free Book Online

looked at
her with an apology in my eyes.   
    “So, where did you go? What was so
important that it made you forget your own girlfriend?” She demanded, now
moving so close to my face that I felt the need to back up.
    “Nowhere…Um…Here…” Then, feeling as though
she wouldn’t stop killing me with her eyes until I told her the reason for my
distress and stupidity, I added, “I’m sorry. I had a fight with my stepsister
about my dad. It ruined the whole rest of my day and so anything after that
kind of left me.” I shrugged as she moved closer, eyeing me with a careful,
incriminating look. I stayed still and stared right back at her, unwaveringly.
    After all, I had nothing to hide.
    “I don’t believe you,” she announced suddenly,
after a few long moments of contemplation, before she turned around and
continued her stomping motion.
    “What?” I declared in pure and genuine
disbelief. “What do you mean, you don’t believe me? That’s what happened.
That’s why I didn’t wait for you. I was distracted…” I sighed and allowed my
shoulders to sag. The last thing I needed was this absurd interrogation.
    “Is there another woman? Oh God…You are,
you’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” Her glower was somehow worse than
Valerie’s but still didn’t hurt as bad, even though she was attacking my
character.
    I rolled my eyes and sighed. This wasn’t
the first time that I had been down this road with Dalilah and I was sure, if she
let it go any further, it would be another extremely long and aggravating
ordeal. “No,” I answered her solidly. “There is no other woman…” I grasped her
hands, pulling them just enough that she stopped and stared at me. When I
finally had the full attention of her eyes, I assured in a voice that was both
clear and stern, “There is no other woman, Dalilah.” I smiled, hoping that my
honesty was proving itself. “I only have eyes for you.”
    With that, her posture eased a little and
she stared at me intently, as though once again trying to figure out whether or
not I was telling the truth. Her lie detector wasn’t very good, since I had
never lied to her a day in my life, but she seemed to think it was and tried to
convince me that it was almost every time we fought.
    It was at that moment I was left to her
whim. This was the difficult part to Dalilah, but I supposed like with every
relationship, you had to take the good with the bad.
    “Okay…”
    “And I’m sorry,” I said again. “I promise
I will make it up to you.”
    “Take me to the movies,” she demanded with
just enough sweetness to sugarcoat the fact that this wasn’t a question. “There
is a new movie coming out on Friday and I want to be one of the first to see
it.”
    I shrugged, just happy that I dodged a
bullet that would have made for a very unpleasant evening. “That sounds like a
plan.”     

 
    Chapter
9
    Valerie

 
    Distraught, I didn’t come out of my room
all afternoon. I wasn’t quite sure how I was feeling about my boyfriend. I knew
that I would probably, eventually feel guilty for being so hard on him and that
would require a nice apology, but no one insulted my friend and got away with
it.
    More like an older sister, I supposed, than
a friend, I could say anything I wanted about Shawn; but no one could say
anything against him, or I would fight them tooth and nail, even if they were
right.
    I didn’t think that Zachary was right.
After all, he didn’t know the ins and outs of Shawn’s strange family dynamics.
Not like I did. I had grown up with them. I had watched his mother destroy his
spirit, again and again, while also witnessing his father crash down on him and
then turn around and say something nice to me, as though nothing had happened.
    In a way, I wished I did know why his
father   did those things, but I hadn’t
the faintest clue. Shawn’s father was a mystery to me. He was nice and he was
always good to my mother, but there were certain