Crash: A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance Read online

  Crash

  A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance

  Sophie Sawyer

  https://www.facebook.com/SophieSawyerBooks

  http://www.SophieSawyer.com

  © Copyright 2016, Sophie Sawyer, All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Crash

  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About Sophie Sawyer

  Synopsis

  Katherine’s mother is about to remarry less than a year since her beloved father was laid to rest, and Katherine is understandably upset. But she agrees to meet the man that’s captured her mother’s heart, along with his son, Luke.

  Luke believes Katherine is just a spoiled, uptight little princess, and he has no problem telling her so. She can’t believe how arrogant he is, and she can’t wait to get away from him.

  But the two quickly began to warm up to one another once they realize neither of them was the enemy.

  Then a car crash changes everything. Katherine awakens after several months in a coma to discover Luke been by her side every moment since the crash. Is it all some warped sense of duty to his soon-to-be relative, or is it something else?

  As time passes, Luke realizes he must possess the vivacious beauty at all costs. Forget what their parents will think. Forget what society will think. There’s still two weeks until the wedding. He has two weeks to make her fall in love. Two weeks to make her his own.

  Chapter One

  Katherine

  “Katherine, please go get ready. I told you, they’ll be here in less than an hour.”

  I sighed and gave my mother the side eye. What in the world possessed her to think I was even remotely interested in dressing up to meet her stupid fiancé and his stupid son? I wasn’t happy that she was getting married at all. My beloved father hadn’t been in the ground for a full year, yet, and she’d already moved on with some Silicon Valley executive. And why? It wasn’t like she needed his money. Daddy had left us a fortune that could probably buy this new guy five times over.

  “Kat, please.”

  I bristled. She hadn’t used that name in years. She knew it was what Daddy had always called me, but I think the last time I’d heard it from her lips was at my eighth birthday party. Even then, it might have been my grandmother who’d said it. I really couldn’t remember for sure.

  “Fine,” I grumbled, rolling off the couch with a groan.

  I pushed past her without another word and lugged my lazy body up the stairs. They were getting married in a couple of months, and I still hadn’t met the guy. All I knew was that he had started some big video game company and made a fortune after dropping out of business school and was really famous in the business world. Big deal. Oh, and he had a son around my age. A couple of years older, I believe Mom had said.

  I peeled off my shorts and tank top and wiggled into my favorite white sundress. If she thought I was going to dress up for these people, she was out of her mind. Besides, it was hot as hell in Encino in May. Plus, my father had bought this dress for me. It would be my passive-aggressive method of reminding her that I wasn’t happy about the situation.

  I didn’t grow up in Encino. We’d moved there after Daddy died. We actually grew up in a really prestigious neighborhood in Beverly Hills. But with my father gone, we couldn’t stand living in that house anymore. He was all around us. Everything, absolutely everything, reminded us of him.

  My mother’s hairdresser happened to know someone selling a house in Encino. My mother balked at the idea of moving to The Valley at first. She’d said, “They’re not our kind of people in The Valley.” She hadn’t mean anything by it, but my mother… well, she’s always been a little snooty. Not in a mean-spirited kind of way, or anything. It’s hard to explain, but she’s a decent person. She just feels more comfortable around people she feels are in her social class, I guess. But she volunteers every Thanksgiving and Christmas at the soup kitchen and donates obscene amounts of money to charities. She’s not exactly stuck up. She just prefers the company of other wealthy people, I suppose. It’s her comfort zone.

  My family had been wealthy for many generations. My father, and his father, and his grandfather, had all been in show business. Before that, the family was in the oil business, and before that, they were merchants. As far back as I could trace my ancestry, they’d been wealthy.

  On my mother’s side of the family, we came from royalty. I keep forgetting which country her family came from, but I think it was a Scandinavian country or something. Mom always loved to brag about it, but it was never a big deal to me. What good is it to be descended from royalty if you’re not actually royalty anymore? I guess it made her feel important.

  When she met Steve, I couldn’t believe she’d even been interested in him. He was nouveau riche, or new money, as Mom had always called them. He was someone who was wealthy, but hadn’t come from money. He’d made his own fortune.

  I’ve always thought people who’d managed to pull themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps to become wealthy were more worthy of respect than those who simply inherited their good fortune, but I guess when you’re raised to believe you’re royalty the way my mother was, you think a little differently.

  I glanced in the mirror and smoothed my hair with my hands. I wasn’t about to put on makeup in this oppressive heat. It would just cake up in the creases of my eyelids and smear everywhere, anyway. On second thought, I snagged an elastic band and threw my hair into a ponytail. Then I slipped on a pair of sandals and headed back downstairs.

  My mother eyed me with frustration wrinkling her forehead, but she said nothing. I knew she’d expected me to get all dressed up to go out for dinner, but this was all the effort she was getting. For her to be remarrying less than a year after my father, who’d supposedly been the love of her life, had passed away of a brain tumor was, in my mind, the ultimate betrayal. I was livid. But she was my mother, and I had to play the supportive daughter. Especially since college was starting in September, and there was no way I could pay for UC Berkeley on my own.

  I was just about to flop down onto the couch when the doorbell rang. My mother sprang to her feet, and with a judgmental glare, she passed by me to pull open the huge wooden front door.

  “Steve!” she gushed, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. “Come in! This must be Luke!”

  I saw her reach out to shake a hand. Then she stepped back and allowed them to enter the foyer. Steve was first. He was tall, decent looking, I suppose. He was wearing a suit, but he didn’t look particularly comfortable in it. He looked more like a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy, but I figured he’d dressed up for Mom. He might have been willing to play the part for her, but I wasn’t.

  Then HE entered. He. The one who sucked the breath from my lungs and made my knees go weak the moment he turned his eyes my way. The one who suddenly took every other guy on the planet and just wiped them completely from my brain like some kind of Man Bleach. The one with the tousled chestnut hair and the pale eyes that sucked me into them like tiny pale black holes.

  “Katherine, come meet y
our soon-to-be stepbrother, Luke!” my mother encouraged me.

  I was frozen. I meant to step forward and offer a hand in greeting, but my legs had become something close to overcooked spaghetti and my brain had turned into Bolognese. I think I may have muttered something incoherent.

  “That’s cool, she’s free to be a stuck-up bitch if she wants to,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “Luke!” Steve snapped. “Don’t you ever speak to her that way again, is that clear?”

  Luke said nothing. He just stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and turned his eyes toward the floor.

  “I’m so sorry, Lucy,” Steve said to my mother. “I told him to be on his best behavior.”

  “It’s alright, Steve,” Mom said. “I haven’t had much luck with Katherine, either.”

  She nodded in my general direction, and I sighed internally. What, I wasn’t behaving because I didn’t want to wear a pantsuit in eighty-five degree California heat?

  “Let’s get going. Reservation is at six-thirty,” Steve said.

  Luke turned to follow his father out of the house. My mother turned to me and whispered, “What is your problem?”

  “Nothing,” I muttered, brushing past her and heading through the door.

  Luke slid into the back seat of his father’s car, and Steve held the door for me. Great, I had to sit next to the asshole that just called me a stuck-up bitch. I stepped into the car, and waited until Steve closed the door before leaning against it and trying to squish myself against it to get as far away from Luke as possible.

  “Wow,” I heard Luke mutter under his breath.

  The air conditioning inside the car had made the windows a little icy, and I leaned my forehead against the coolness. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t figure out if it was due to the awkwardness of sitting next to the guy who’d been such a jerk to me, or because he was the sexiest guy I’d ever seen in my life.

  Cool it, Kat, I thought. He’s an asshole, and he’s about to be your stepbrother, anyway.

  Steve opened the door politely for my mother. She slipped into the front seat, and Steve hopped around to the driver’s side and we were on our way.

  Mom and Steve were chatting away in the front, but the backseat was eerily silent. I had nothing to say to a guy who would call me a “stuck-up bitch” without even knowing a single thing about me. I guess he had nothing to say to a “stuck-up bitch”, either.

  Whatever. Jerk.

  Chapter Two

  Luke

  I’d expected Katherine would be a little stuck up. Her family came from old money, I knew that much. And the one thing I’d heard about families that come from old money is that they think they’re better than everyone else.

  All my friends at school were from new money. The kids with old money all went to private schools. Those of us whose parents had made their own fortunes were usually relegated to the horrors of public school life. Not that public school was bad, or anything. I kind of preferred it to the thought of going to school with a bunch of people like Katherine. Katherine. Even her name was snooty. I decided I’d refer to her in my head as “The Duchess”.

  My father made his fortune in apps. Games, specifically. He was a motorcycle mechanic when I was a kid, but when my mother left him for some rich guy that whisked her off to Milan, he was determined to get rich so he could win her back. He spent his days fixing up and selling old bikes he bought at auction, and his nights learning to program games because he’d read about some stupid game about a bird that had made something like a million bucks a day.

  His first few games were total flops. He was close to giving up when I had an idea that would lead to a multi-million-dollar empire. I told him some of the things my friends at school had been talking about – a specific kind of game they wished existed, but didn’t. He created it, and hired some freelance designer from India to make some fancy graphics for it, and the next thing you know we were moving out of our tiny little apartment and into a house down the street from Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner.

  The saddest part, for my father, was that my mother died of a drug overdose right before he hit it big. Turns out her new husband had a big heroin problem, and he’d drug my mother right along with him. My father never even got a chance to get her back.

  I never could understand why he wanted her back in the first place. She’d never been a very good wife or mother. She spent most of her time shopping, which had driven my father into massive debt before he hit it big. She was always complaining about the fact that his credit cards were maxed and she didn’t have any money to spend. He’d just go out and apply for new cards to make her happy. Then his credit ran out, and she met Francesco and moved to Milan.

  Why would he want a woman who would run off with another man for money? And, not to disrespect my mother’s memory or anything, but she wasn’t the nicest woman in the world, anyway. She hardly ever showed either of us any affection. Unless, of course, one of us brought her an expensive gift. Then sugar wouldn’t have melted in her mouth.

  But he was in love with her. He’d fallen head-over-heels for a woman who treated him and his son with borderline contempt, spent him into the poorhouse, and valued money above the love of a family.

  And that’s exactly why I’d decided years ago to never fall in love. I wouldn’t even let a chick get close enough to chance it. Some might say that my mother leaving was the best thing that ever happened to my father, because he got incredibly wealthy in the process he of trying so hard to get her back. But they don’t understand how hollow my father became. The money meant nothing to him now that she was gone. No way was I going to risk that.

  My mother had been gone for nearly a month before we even found out. No one bothered to call and tell us. Grandma said she thought we knew and chose to not to come to the funeral because she’d left us. Grandpa said he thought Aunt Susan had called us. Aunt Susan told me Grandma told her not to call us because Grandpa was afraid we’d make a scene at the funeral. Dad was angry. I was just in disbelief. It didn’t hit me until later that my mother was gone. I guess because she’d abandoned us and hardly even called and I was angry, and it had taken longer to really sink in.

  When Dad met this new chick of his, I kind of hoped she’d be enough to help him move on. He’d been a wreck since my mother died, and he’d been getting… almost violent at times. It had gotten to the point where I was ready to get out on my own the minute I turned eighteen, but that was a couple of years earlier and I was still living with him. Where else was I going to go?

  There he was, ready to marry her, and she didn’t even understand that he was still totally hung up on my mother, and probably always would be. But who was I to say anything? Besides, I had a feeling if I’d dare opened my mouth, he would have closed it for me quickly. Not that I couldn’t take him, but it hardly seemed fair for his younger, much stronger son to kick his ass when he was already more screwed up than anything I could do to him.

  Dad wanted me to go to college, but all I wanted to do was fix bikes. It wasn’t like I wanted to follow in the old man’s footsteps. I just liked fixing bikes. I promised him I’d take some classes, soon, but I wasn’t promising anything in the way of an actual degree. That was something I’d have to think about for a while.

  We pulled up outside some upscale bistro kind of place. Dad was still fuming that I’d worn jeans instead of the khakis he’d chosen, but hey, at least I’d worn a button-up shirt instead of my usual t-shirt – solid colors, only… no hipster shit for me, thanks.

  Little Miss Snooty Britches was leaning against the window like she’d just as soon jump out of it than sit next to me. Heaven forbid Her Highness deign herself to sit with a commoner.

  When Dad told me her background – old money on her father’s side and some kind of royalty on her mother’s – I knew exactly what kind of spoiled princess I was going to meet. Turned out I was right. I stood at the ready to retrieve said princess if my presence finally overwhelmed her with disgus
t and she decided to fling herself to certain doom. Carbon copy of my mother, I’d wager.

  Yeah, I knew her type. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, so full of herself that it was laughable. And to think she had to spend an afternoon of her precious time with the likes of me. Poor little rich girl. Boo-fucking-hoo.

  The more I thought about it, the more pissed I got. Who was she to judge me? The minute I walked through the door, I could see the contempt in her eyes. That’s why she hadn’t said anything or shaken my hand. I wasn’t worthy in her eyes. I was just a commoner. New money. Well, at least my father earned his money. Her mother had inherited hers. Big deal.

  She was staring out the window and nibbling her nails. I glanced at them. Perfectly manicured, tipped with white and filed into perfect rounded corners. I bet her manicure cost more than my whole outfit.

  The valet took the keys to the car, and Dad opened the door for The Duchess and her mother. I stood by, watching with disdain as the two women brushed through the front door as my father held it for them. I reluctantly followed.