Stepbrother WHOA! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #5) by Claire Adams Read Free Book Online

by the stands. Maybe it
wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe Bob would want to talk about anything else but the
situation—maybe Mom would have gotten him to think about something else
already.

 
    Chapter
Eight
    I had hoped that things would be okay, even if they
were monstrously tense. But even though I still had the situation at the lodge
during Thanksgiving break and the horrific tension of winter break still very
clear in my mind, I was not at all ready for the way that Bob was behaving when
I got to the restaurant to meet him and Mom.
    As soon as I sat down, he started in on me, and I
could see from the flush in his face and the glazed look in his eyes that he’d
had more than one cocktail. “It is completely disgusting, what you and Jaxon
are doing. It’s unnatural. You’re freaks!” He turned to my mom. “Your daughter
and my son are freaks.” I blushed bright red and looked around at the tables
close to us; people were trying hard not to listen as Bob’s voice rose over the
chatter and the clink of silverware.
    “Why don’t we talk about the competition,” I
suggested, taking a deep breath. “I’ve been working really hard—did you notice
how clean I landed that last aerial? It was awesome.” Mom jumped in, agreeing
with me, asking about my training routines, and in the interests of keeping
things as calm as possible I kept from mentioning Jaxon’s help, talking about
other members of my team. I told them about Lucy spraining her ankle in practice
or about Eric mastering a particularly tricky grab.
    Bob came back to the topic of Jaxon and me. “What
the hell are you guys even thinking with that shit?” he asked, his voice just a
little too loud. The restaurant wasn’t exactly bank-breaking, but it was still
not the kind of place that anyone would have chosen to be put on the spot like
that, and I could remember all too vividly the scene Bob had made in the lodge.
I looked at my mom and wondered just what the hell she could possibly see in a
guy like Bob, who would take the opportunity of getting to know his new
stepdaughter better, of mending fences and trying to work through the tension
of the situation and turn it into public humiliation. Does he do this to her? I wondered, thinking about Jaxon. If he
could humiliate his own son and yell at him in public, what was to stop him
from being an asshole to my mom?
    Mom and I both did everything we could to distract
him and change the subject. We talked about my classes, about the pickup games
I played, about working out and going out and doing things. I avoided
mentioning Jaxon at all, even though he’d been involved in my life at the
campus long before we’d ever even hooked up. We tried everything we could, but
Bob kept coming back around to the subject of how gross, disgusting, revolting,
unnatural it was that Jaxon and I were “hooking up like two animals.” If I had thought
that the little bit of self-awareness he’d had at the mountain was any kind of
sign that he was going to do anything to control his anger, I was totally wrong
about it. Nothing that Mom or I said or did—even when we started throwing out
comments about the food itself in desperation—seemed to make a dent in Bob’s
determination to talk shit about his son, and to drag me through the mud with
Jaxon.
    At one point it was so bad that even Mom quietly
told Bob “Darling, don’t you think this is a conversation for a different time?
I mean, this is really public—I think everyone else would like to enjoy their
meals without having all of our dirty laundry on their table.” Bob turned and
scowled at her and lit into me again.
    I managed to force down the food I’d ordered, eating
in stony silence while Bob kept talking about the situation. With any luck, I
thought, he’d get loud enough that someone would complain about him, and then
we’d be kicked out—or at least he would. I thought it would be so much easier
to eat my damn dinner if Bob was sent to the car. I was