The Stepbrother (Red's Tavern 5)

“I think we’re going to head in for the night,” she said, and in another moment, Greg was swinging their RV door open, ushering her inside as the two of them laughed.

I turned to Fox, my eyebrows raised. “Well, there’s no fuckin’ way I’m going in there tonight,” I said.

“Hey, at least they’re still in love,” he said with a shrug.

“I’m a very sex positive person, but even I don’t want to hear my mom and stepdad rocking away while I try to sleep across from them. I mean, I could, but I think those nightmares might be even worse than the ghost story nightmares, and—”

“Yes, Sam. You can sleep in my RV,” Fox said, his eyes trained on me.

I let out a long breath of relief. “Thank God.”

6

Fox

“I promise I won’t take any photos,” Sam said as he stepped inside the RV behind me, holding his hands up like he was guilty of a heinous crime. “Not a single one. Not even of my own face. Not even a close-up of the damn wood grain details.”

I gave him a look. “You can take a thousand pictures, for all I care,” I said. “Just don’t put them online.”

“Not like I can right now, anyway.”

“Don’t you kind of like it?” I asked. “Being away from social media?”

“What? Hell no,” he said.

“Come on. You saw beautiful deer, you wandered a forest, and I taught you how to actually make a fire.”

“The deer definitely were cool,” he said, walking over to the daybed and puffing up one of the pillows.

“Here,” I said, grabbing the tablet that controlled the RV’s lighting and shades. “This is how you activate night mode.”

“Activate night mode. Sounds like your RV is a superhero or something.”

“Might as well be,” I said. I toggled a few of the settings, making the night shades come down over the windows and changing the lighting from bright to ambient and dim. “This thing has sleep sounds, too. There are speakers all over the inside, and you can pick river sounds, ocean sounds, rain, forest, whatever you want.”

“It would be very cute to put on forest sounds while we’re in the middle of a damn forest, but I think I’m okay,” Sam said.

“Maybe we can leave the front door open and just get the real sounds,” I offered. “And as a bonus, it’s also the best way to let in all the bugs, bears, and ghosts, too.”

“I hate you,” Sam said, but he was smiling.

“You know I was actually impressed with you, right?” I said. “I wouldn’t have started walking toward the woods when Cocoa was freaking out.”

“Really?”

“Definitely not,” I said. “And you just started going off on your own. I followed you as backup, but it really could have been a bear. You were braver than I was, that’s for sure.”

“Well, I’m glad I was good for something out here,” he said.

I unbuttoned my shirt, pulling it off and reaching for a hanger on the rack behind me. As I moved the shirt, it caught on the open corner of a wooden drawer and snagged. I felt a tiny tug that I immediately knew was a bad one. I looked down to see that a small hole had ripped into the side panel of the shirt.

“Damn,” I said, looking down at the rip.

“That didn’t sound good,” Sam said, coming to my side to look at the shirt. “It goes without saying that this was an expensive shirt, right?”

He ran his fingertips over the hole.

“Technically, yes, but I got it as a gift from a designer in New York,” I said. “It’s custom, actually.”

Sam’s face fell. “Let me see if I can fix it tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t have my sewing machine but I brought my kit, at least.”

“You think you could fix this?”

“It wouldn’t be perfect, but at least it ripped near the seam,” he said. “I think I could make it look almost like new.”

He folded up the shirt and went to place it on the dashboard in the front of the RV.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed having Sam join me here tonight. I was so used to being at home alone in my penthouse back home, working late on my couch or even in my bed, never having any time to relax, not that I’d have wanted to anyway.

But so far, Sam had made this trip fun. His presence made me feel reinvigorated, like life wasn’t the same predictable routine every day. Sam had always looked at the world differently from me, but until now, I’d been closed off to any perspectives but my own.

Now I wanted to get to know Sam. I was endlessly curious about him, for reasons I couldn’t explain.

Even now, I found myself stealing glances at him as he did some light stretches before bed. He was wearing only a pair of dark grey sweatpants, and his body looked incredible as he reached up into the air.