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

heart.
    I let my mother lead me away from the
ugliness.
    She practically tried shoving a Xanax down my throat. Oh—don’t think for one hot second I didn’t want about three of the little gems, but it wasn’t recommended during pregnancy, so I abstained. I fell onto a downy-soft canopy bed, staring up at peonies, but only seeing Garrett.
    How could I hate him, but still love him? He’d killed Chad, yet some perverse part of me needed him and only him for comfort. What was he going through? I’d seen it all, and Chad’s death had been a horrible accident—which I’d told the sheriff. But he hadn’t listened. I was viewed as the grief-stricken almost-widow far too overcome to fully comprehend the afternoon’s events. As such, my voice lacked value.
    What the man didn’t understand was that without Garrett, my life lacked value.
    But how did I reconcile that with the fact that the entirety of my allegiance should belong with my dead fiancé—the victim? How did I wrap my head around the fact that even though Chad had been caught cheating, I was now expected to mourn his loss?
    Only I couldn’t fully.
    Confusion swirled my thoughts and emotions. The rational side of me understood I needed sleep. The side of me that needed to make sense of the horror of what had happened needed Garrett. Only he was trapped behind bars and I was trapped inside the prison of my heart.

Chapter 7
Garrett
    I’d just killed a man.
    It didn’t matter that I’d only meant to temporarily punch the cheating little fucker’s lights out. It didn’t matter that he’d thrown the first punch—making this legally an open-and-shut case of classic self-defense—I still felt like shit. Never in a million years would I have purposely hurt the guy Savannah loved. Even worse, we were in Mississippi, and that changed everything. Down here, the law was of course, followed, but the interpretation of true justice could sometimes be different than the way it would have been in, say, San Francisco or New York.
    In Julep, the sheriff didn’t see two guys fighting, he saw the fact that Chad and Savannah were engaged and she was pregnant, and I’d just killed the father of her unborn child. The reason there’d even been a fight in the first place, because we’d caught the groom screwing a bridesmaid—a trusted sorority sister—no longer seemed to matter.
    Our two families that had only an hour earlier planned lifetimes of fruitful social connections had instantaneously become sworn enemies. Chad’s father and brother called me a murderer.
    Sheriff Monroe, who hadn’t seen a single murder in his twenty-six years in office, presided over the scene as if directing a stage play. With much pointing and shouting, he’d parked me in our hostess’s dining room where I was apparently under house arrest.
    Dad’s longtime attorney, Harvey Leigh Wilcox, had been in attendance at the party, and now sat at the opposite end of the table as me, nursing a dirty martini, snacking on a mountain of pulled pork and reading
Southern Living
as if we were waiting to see a fireworks show. The man easily weighed over four hundred pounds, yet had crammed himself into a navy and white seersucker suit.
    From my vantage point, I watched as deputies took hundreds of photos of the
body.
They buzzed about Chad, wielding evidence kits and bags as if they were busy bees on a goddamned episode of
CSI.
    It was self-defense!
I raged inside.
    Was I sorry I hit the cheating bastard? No. Was I sorry he was dead? Of course. I wasn’t a stone-cold killer and felt horrible about what I’d done.
    Most of all, I was sorry for what this was doing to Savannah who had been so overcome by the spectacle of it all that her mother and our hostess had whisked her upstairs, presumably to lie down. Was she okay? Was her baby okay?
    A deputy opened the room’s french doors, then cleared his throat. “Ah, Mr. Marsden, the sheriff wants me to bring you in.”
    “This is preposterous.” Harvey