Stepping Over the Line: A Stepbrother Novel (Shamed) by Laura Marie Altom Read Free Book Online Page A

out of Constance. I hated Garrett for dragging me over here to see this. Even more, I hated myself for not having known. For never in a million years even remotely suspecting these two people I loved could be capable of betraying me in such an unspeakable manner.
    “Get out!” I raged. “How dare you?”
    “Oh, shit…” Chad yanked up his slacks while Constance pulled down the sundress that had been around her neck. “Baby, this isn’t what it looks like. I love you.”
    “You just said you love me!” Constance slapped him.
    The darkness marring Garrett’s handsome features frightened me. He grabbed Chad by the back of his starched button-down, yanking him from the car. “You dirty, sonofabitch!”
    “Calm down, man.” Out of the limo, with his pants up, but unbuttoned and with his fly still down, he held up his hands, only to then sucker punch Garrett’s left jaw.
    “Stop it!” Constance screamed from the backseat.
    “I’ll fucking kill you.” Garrett delivered a hard right and then left to Chad’s perfect chiseled chin.
    “Not if I kill you first! You think I didn’t see the way you looked at your
sister
the night of her graduation?” Chad answered back with a slam of his fist to Garrett’s stomach, another punch to his jaw, and then nose.
    A growl emitted from deep in Garrett’s chest, and then he pounded Chad hard enough on his nose that my fiancé reeled backward, hitting the back of his head with a sickening thud against a flower bed’s stone edge. I might not have been a fully-certified doctor, but in that freeze-framed instant, I knew this was bad.
    My mind no longer saw Chad, but a textbook case of an intracranial hemorrhage brought on by trauma. I’d spent years learning to shut off my emotions in an emergency and I all but threw myself on the ground, checking his pupils, only to find them fixed and fully dilated.
    There was no pulse, so despite the fact that I knew if there was even a chance of a neck injury he shouldn’t be moved, I barked at Garrett, “Help me get him flat. He needs CPR. Constance, call 9-1-1!”
    I vaguely recalled a crowd gathering and then a woman’s otherworldly cries.
    There were sirens.
    And paramedics pulling me away, telling me there was nothing more to be done.
    Police arrived and there were questions upon questions.
    I needed sleep. I needed time and space to process what my addled brain refused to compute—Chad was dead.
    Garrett had killed him.
    I stared at my stepbrother. Complex confusion welled from a frightening place so deep I feared I might never emerge. What had he done?
    Sure, my future with Chad might not have been a fairy tale scenario, but it was mine. It had been my only chance of wrenching my heart from the ridiculous fantasy I’d spun of Garrett and me sharing full lives together. Chad and his family would have given me support with this baby, and I wouldn’t have been alone while navigating being a new mom and medical resident.
    If my stepbrother truly loved me, how could he have not only stolen all my security, but ever dragged me toward that limo to bear witness to that unfathomable scene? Chad and Constance? Together? No. Just, no. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Kappa Kappa Gammas were nice girls. We wear Lilly Pulitzer and sip our cokes through straws. We didn’t fuck our sisters’ fiancés, and even if we did, we’d certainly find a classier place to do it than in the back of a rental limo that probably hadn’t had a proper cleaning in years!
    Rage consumed me.
    I wanted to lash out. To punch something—someone.
Chad, Constance, and
Garrett.
My limbs had gone numb. My tongue had as well. The only part of me still functioning were my eyes. I couldn’t stop staring at him, hating him for what he’d done. For what my sick attraction to him had made me do. On a base level, was I any better than my cheating fiancé? I might not have physically been with my stepbrother lately, but emotionally, he was constantly in my head and