Protector: A Billionaire Step-Brother Romance

She sat down on the edge of my bed and absentmindedly twirled a lock of her hair, looking for all the world like a porcelain doll. After years of obsessively watching makeup teams transform her face in a mirror, Julie Mason had perfected the art of the pink pout and smoky eye. But today there was a little smudge of eyeliner on her cheekbone. I wondered if she had been crying.

“How ‘bout you, Mom? Everything okay?” I asked, my heart pounding in my chest. Immediately I recalled countless occurrences in which she had come into my room this way, trying to dab her tears away with her sleeve. Out of habit, I prepared myself for the letdown, for her to tell me that Todd was a mistake. I braced myself for the re-packing of our stuff, the sleeping on someone’s sofa until we “picked ourselves back up,” as my mom always said.

But she merely turned to me and flashed an award-winning grin, then flung her arms around me. “Oh Kenzie, I’m just so happy.” She pulled back and cupped my face in her flawlessly-manicured hand. “This is a new start for us. I want you to be happy.”

Suddenly Cole’s face flashed into my mind: eyes the color of wet moss, lips parted ever so slightly, his shoulders broad under a close-fitting shirt. I mentally shook myself to forbid the image. Taking Mom’s hand in mine, I squeezed it and assured her, “I am happy, Mom, really. I’m just a little tired, I think.”

After a moment of scrutinizing my face, her eyes softened and she said, “Okay. Well, don’t feel like you have to unpack all this stuff tonight. If you’re worn out, take a break. There’s no rush, honey. We’re here to stay.”

I shrugged in agreement and she flounced out of the room, promising to bring me leftovers and dessert from the restaurant. A few minutes later, I heard the pair of them clacking down the marble hallway toward the front door, laughing and murmuring to each other like they’d al

ready had a drink or two. For a moment, I worried that they shouldn’t be driving, before I remembered that Todd had a chauffeur.

I was living in a mansion with a super-wealthy movie star who had a full-time driver and wait staff employed in his house. This was my home. Slowly, I slid down off the side of my bed. In a daze, I crossed the room and shut the door. Then I curled back up on my bed and closed my eyes. For a few minutes I forced my mind to focus on how I would decorate this new bedroom, but before long Cole had wandered back into the forefront of my thoughts. He had swept into my world like a gust of wind, leaving me momentarily breathless and a little disheveled. I rubbed my eyes and reminded myself that he was going to be my stepbrother.

It was strange; I’d never had a sibling. For all my life, it was only my mom and me, plus the various guys who stayed awhile and either played Daddy or didn’t, but the idea of a brother was a totally foreign concept. Certainly, I had pondered it before, how different my life might be if only I had someone a little older than me, someone stronger and more experienced in life to keep an eye on me. When I was little, I felt lucky to have a mom who was silly and playful, who let me wander and be independent. All my elementary school friends complained of their bedtimes and strict chore schedules. For a long time, I reveled in my own relative autonomy. My mom didn’t have a lot of rules beyond “say please” and “don’t talk to strangers.” She was always willing to play with me and make believe whatever I wanted, with an astounding level of conviction. After all, she was a very good actress.

But in later years, I began to realize the downsides of having that kind of parent. I discovered that the reason she gave me so few responsibilities was because she didn’t have a particularly firm grasp on her own obligations. In high school, I remember lamenting to Jessica that sometimes I felt like I was the parent and she was the child. Julie Mason was always game for a good time, but she wasn’t always around to clean up afterward. I learned to take care of myself, to stay within the lines. If Mom wasn’t going to do it, I had to do it myself. In some ways, I was grateful. My mother’s faults had developed me into a self-sustaining individual. But sometimes, I felt a little lonely, staying in night after night to take care of business at home. Jess told me over and over again, “You never get to just be a kid, Kenzie.” I knew she was right, but what could I do?

But now that I was going to have a stepbrother, maybe things would change. Maybe I would at least have someone to share the burden with. I imagined Cole’s lips moving to form the words replaying in my memory: “I’ll look out for you.” There had been so much heat, so much insistence in his voice, those green eyes blazing. My own eyes squeezed tightly shut, I licked my lips and recreated his entire image in my brain: tall, so tall he almost had to duck under the doorframe—surely he towered at least a foot above than me; muscles hard and sharp under those half-rolled sleeves. I kept returning to his lips, rounded and full on the bottom, shaped into a Cupid’s bow on the top. They looked so soft.

A tiny, dark, shameful part of me wondered what they tasted like.

My phone split the silence with a loud, high-pitched ring, and I nearly fell off the bed in surprise. Sitting up and pressing my hand to my chest as though to slow my heart rate, I fumbled to pull my phone out from under the comforter. It was Jessica. Still trying to restore my breathing to normal, I accepted the call.

“Hey gorgeous!” she exclaimed, and instantly I could tell that she’d already started drinking for the night. “What the fuck are you up to tonight?”

“Nothing, at the moment,” I admitted, preparing for her inevitable disbelief.

Jessica heaved a long, drawn-out sigh into the phone and I held it away from my ear for a moment until she was finished. Then she said, “You’ve been busy all week, Kenz. Are you breaking up with me?”

I laughed and got up to pace around the room. It was a weird habit I’d developed, probably an anxious tic of some kind. “Jess, you know our love is real,” I told her emphatically. “But what are you doing tonight?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. I’m downtown in that park, that one with all the roses? I’m waiting for the guys to come meet me but they’re super late, of course. We’re going to some pub they played at last weekend. Vince is, like, pissed as hell that they haven’t paid up yet.” She paused for a moment, presumably to take a sip of something, and then added, “Wanna come with? I promise we’ll leave if the scene gets weird or anything.”

For a few seconds I considered the invitation, but my sensibility wouldn’t allow me to accept. “Mmm, not tonight, Jess. Maybe next time.”

She groaned overdramatically. “One of these days, I am seriously gonna go to your house and kidnap you. Just so you can experience the outside world for once.”

Desperate to change the subject, I jumped in with the first new topic which came to mind: “Oh, you’ll never guess who I met for the first time today.”

“Mr. Van der Hausen? I thought you met him like a week ago.”

“No,” I said, peering at myself in the mirror on my dresser. “Mr. Van der Hausen, Junior, his son.”

“Really?” she gasped, clearly warming to the subject. “Oh my god! I forgot he has a son! Holy shit. I can’t believe I forgot, dude, he’s so fucking hot.”

I was silent for a moment, trying to decide whether it was okay for me to agree with her or not. Luckily, Jessica picked right back up with, “How did it go? What happened? Tell me everything.”

“He just kind of showed up here, at Todd’s house. I was in my room and he just appeared in the doorway. I didn’t even know he was in the house until he was suddenly there talking to me,” I explained lightly, hoping she wouldn’t ask for the gritty details of our conversation.

“Shit. I would have literally died of shock immediately.”

“Yeah, he scared the hell out of me at first.”

“So?” she pressed eagerly. “What did he say? What was he wearing?”

I rolled my eyes and glanced at the clock on my bedside table. It was now 9:56. I set the phone on speaker and laid it gently on my dresser. “Um, he didn’t say a whole lot. Just welcomed me to the family, you know, that kind of thing,” I lied. I kicked my knee-high socks into a little pile of dirty clothes forming in the corner and began to peel off my striped shirt.