Read Online Step Submission (Billionaire Bareback Steamy Taboo Romance) by Nikki Wild - Free Book Online

 
     
     
    STEP SUBMISSION
     
    I sat quietly in the backseat of my stepbrother’s town car, curled up against the window with my head resting against the cool glass. The leather, buttery and unbroken, smelled like brand new, a side-effect of the seat warmer enhancing its aroma, I supposed.
     
    It had been six long months since the last time I’d seen him. Beside me, he sipped a bottle of water—not his usual fare, but he was trying to be sensitive—and stared at me in the way people do when they’re trying to look like they’re not staring. His eyes kept fixing on my face, but would for a moment deviate to my body, my thin frame and the gray cardigan hanging listlessly from it. The last time he’d seen me, I’d been heavier, fuller. Now I was a shade, a shadow, a fraction of the woman I used to be.
     
    This wasn’t what he imagined I’d look like once I got better. He hadn’t been prepared.
     
    Well, tough shit. Neither had I.
     
    I closed my eyes for a moment, letting my stringy blonde hair fall in front of my face. As much as he didn’t want to see me, I didn’t want to see him. It was too much too soon. I felt like I was exposed, a live wire sparking in the street ready to burn away anything I touched. I wasn’t ready yet. No matter what anyone said, I wasn’t ready to come home.
     
    They don’t prepare you for leaving rehab. Not really. Sure, you get some technical training, some “career-oriented” skills and counseling. You’re encouraged to “make amends,” which honestly just makes everybody feel like shit and only vindicates the facility itself. Everything about it is awkward, dredging up shit that everyone involved would just rather forget. Our friends and family hate taking the calls as much as we hate making them.
     
    But the counselors insist. So we do it, hoping that it’s just one more step toward earning back our freedom. Independence becomes a romantic notion when you’re locked away from the rest of the world. At first it breeds rebellion, then determination, yearning, resolve. It’s something to hold onto, a shining star in the twilight that you wish on as you recall only the good things about what being outside those walls was like. But as you move closer to it, you understand it’s all just a burning ball of gas that consumes everything it touches. You’re heading toward a light so bright it’s a wonder it hasn’t made you blind already. And once you realize what freedom is—a crushing aloneness, even when you’re surrounded by people—you start to avoid it. You adapt to your walls, your cell, your enforced routines.
     
    And that, the facilities decide in all their learned wisdom, is when you’re ready to go home.
     
    The car stopped and I opened my eyes again, blinking against the sunbeams filtering through the canopy of trees above. They were old oak, gnarled and reaching, their boughs plagued by Spanish Moss that stretched toward the ground like giant tears. They had deep roots in the land that spread like a vast ocean on each side of the unpaved drive past the wrought iron gates and wrapped around a manse that looked more like it belonged in Antebellum Louisiana than it did anywhere else.
     
    It was the family home, a coveted piece of property fought over for generations by descendants of its owners. And now it was my stepbrother’s. I just hoped Kennith was the only one who still lived there. I wasn’t interested whatsoever in seeing our parents.
     
    The thought of Daddy sitting in his wing-backed chair reading the Wall Street Journal and avoiding my gaze made my stomach turn. Similarly, when the image of my stepmother smoking on the front porch entered my mind, her long, nimble fingers cradling a gilt cigarette holder, sanguine lips parted to release a plume of toxic smoke, my heart began to pound and my vision began to tunnel.
     
    Panic attacks had been a real problem lately. I guessed that was what happened when you gave up the addiction that had been