“You’re telling me,” I mutter. “If you’re thinking of encouraging me to become an engineer as part of your Fix London Plan, you’re crazy. I’ll never get into a good school with my kind of past.”
“Your juvenile records are sealed,” he points out, his attention once again zeroing in on my butt. Darkening. “You’re young, London. People have started over a lot later in life. It doesn’t hurt to fill out an application or two.” Once again, our eyes find each other’s in the mirror. “You can make it happen.”
My heart is sprinting in my chest and it has nothing to do with climbing fake stairs.
This guy doesn’t look at me like everyone else.
Like I’m just another screw up who will end up with nothing. A nowhere life.
His expression is…optimistic. That’s not something I’ve had associated with me before.
It’s dangerously close to hope.
I’m suddenly desperate to change the subject. To prove to me and this man that he doesn’t really care about me. That he’s not willing to put in the work. No one else has. Maybe I am a lost cause. Why can’t he just accept it like everyone else?
With a lump in my throat, I hit record on my phone’s camera and hop off the stair climber. I make my smile flirtatious, adding a side-to-side bump in my walk, slowly approaching my increasingly wary stepfather. This man who is probably double my age, but…attracts me. I can’t deny that. The closer I get to him, the more my nerve endings jangle, the weight in my tummy growing heavier and heavier.
When I reach Brody, I trace a line down the center of his chest with my fingertip, my breath catching at the way his pectorals bunch in response. “You must spend a lot of time in here.” I bite my lip, letting my finger dip into his belly button, unable to ignore the stiff rod protruding from between his thighs. “If I was committing a crime—and I’ve done my fair share of that—you’d be the last cop I’d want to chase me.”
Blazing eyes trace the slopes of my breasts. “Why is that?” he rasps.
“Maybe…just a little…” I move in close and whisper in his ear, his erection pressing against my hip. “I’d like getting caught.”
He fists my hair, tugging my head back. “What are you up to, London?”
“A challenge,” I gasp, shocked to find myself enjoying his aggression. My scalp prickles with a twist of his hand and my nipples bead, the air evaporating from my lungs. “If you can squat me twenty times, I’ll apply to one engineering school.”
Did those words just come out of my mouth?
Am I really thinking of setting myself up for that kind of rejection?
But what if I don’t get rejected?
See? That little voice of optimism is already whispering in my head.
I knew he was dangerous.
“Squat you,” Brody repeats, his dark brows pulling together. “You mean, with you on my back?”
“No.” I shake my head and move in closer, winding my arms around my stepdad’s neck. I have a momentary crisis of conscience. I’m making a move on my mother’s husband! But then I remember she’s probably already moved on to someone else and will inevitability be married ten or fifteen more times before the decade is over…and I hop up, wrapping my legs around Brody’s waist, sucking in a breath over the huge bulge I encounter against my sex. “With me on your front.”
Brody closes his eyes, that enormous part of him pulsing and growing. “London…” he warns hoarsely. “It’s not polite to tease.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” I breathe against his neck. “I thought I was helping you stay in shape. And getting off…on a better foot with my new stepdad.”
His hand slides down the small of my back, hesitating, before pushing into my shorts and gripping my right butt cheek, kneading it roughly. “You’re doing the opposite. You’re trying to shove me in some category.” He tilts his hips, yanking me higher and tighter in one move, grinding me to his thick ridge of flesh—and I moan brokenly. “I won’t go.”
“It feels like you are,” I breathe, nails digging into his shoulders.
“Twenty squats and you apply to school?” he pants.
I would say anything right now to get another dose of friction. His erection is a living thing, swelling and beating against my slit, so close I can feel every ridge of his sex through the thin material of my shorts. “Yes, yes.” I climb higher, whimpering when he swats my backside with a firm palm. Twice. Three times. “Please.”
“God help me,” he mutters thickly, bending his legs and coming up with a thorough roll of his hips, riding me on the fatness of his manhood, his head falling back to let out long groan. “One.”
I watch our reflection across the room in the mirror, my eyelids drooping to half mast. I look like a horny sexpot, my thighs open around Brody’s hips, my toes dangling several inches above his knees. Clinging to him, tongue bathing his sweaty neck. His buttocks straining every time he dips low, then punches up. Yes, he’s punching now. Thrusting. Dropping down and driving up with a pump of hard male between my legs. My legs shake with the force.