UNDYING: A Bad Boy MMA Romance (Midwest Alphas) (Book 3) Page 16

  Amy’s jaw drops. “Oh, that sounds perfect for you guys.”

  “Like I said, it’s just an idea for now, but… I want to give something back. You know?”

  “Totally,” she says. “You should call it Sanctuary.”

  I nod. “Not bad.”

  “Well, I’m great at naming things.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  She nudges my ribs. “Have you and Toby talked names yet?”

  I shake my head. “Oh, no. I don’t even want to hear about that. It’s way too early!”

  “Well, most couples hear bells before they hear rattles,” she teases.

  I smile, once again looking down at him. “Tobias and I have always done things a little backwards.”

  “Whoops—” she says, following my gaze. “I think he heard us talking about him.” We watch Tobias cross the drive and we look down from the loft as he slides the door open.

  “What are you two doing?” Tobias asks, eying the both of us with suspicion.

  “Nothing,” Amy answers. “Just chatting about girl stuff.”

  “Uh huh…”

  Amy stands up and pushes her skirt down. “Well, I think I’ll go check on Ryan.” She slowly hops down the ladder and plants a quick kiss on Tobias’ cheek as she passes by him.

  He pulls himself up into the loft to join me. “What was that about?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” I scoot to the side to give him room to sit by me.

  “You probably shouldn’t be climbing up here anymore.” He throws his arm around my shoulders and holds me against him.

  I breathe a thick sigh. “I am not that fragile, Tob—” His grin catches my eyes, forcing me to pause. “You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”

  “Kind of,” he chuckles. He leans down to rest his nose against my shoulder and inhales my scent. “But to be fair — I never stopped being your bodyguard.”

  “That’s true.” I settle against him and he brushes his mouth along my neck. “You never stopped being my Alpha either.”

  His lips curl on my skin. “And I never will.”

  I crane back to face him and he kisses me, soft and slow. My heart thumps in my chest and for a moment, I fear that this is all a dream. I kiss him back with closed eyes, pausing to experience him and remember this feeling. Should I open my eyes to find him gone, at least I’ll have this memory inside of me.

  My eyes flutter open and he stares back at me. His face shines in the late morning sun, perfect in every single way. “I love you, Tobias.”

  He lays his head against mine and wraps an arm even tighter around me, his hand falling to rest upon my growing belly. “I love you, Claire.”

  Always and forever.

  The Alpha and his Dame.

  THE END

  UNTOUCHED

  MIDWEST ALPHAS | BOOK 1

  October 2015

  **

  UNBROKEN

  MIDWEST ALPHAS | BOOK 2

  November 2015

  **

  UNDYING

  MIDWEST ALPHAS | BOOK 3

  December 2015

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  Tabatha

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  RUIN ME:

  A Stepbrother Romance

  Piper & Kai | Book 3

  PIPER

  Sex.

  Isn’t there anything else people think about?!

  It’s been three years since I’ve come back home and everything has changed. Except him.

  Kai Casablancas. My oldest acquaintance. My idiot stepbrother. My perfect boyfriend. My greatest annoyance. My favorite lover. I’ve lost track of how many labels he’s earned. He loves me. I love him, too.

  So why am I so terrified?

  I have a secret. I have to tell him, but I don’t know if I can without us falling apart.

  KAI

  Sex.

  There’s really nothing else worth thinking about.

  It’s been three years since she came back home and everything has changed. Except her.

  Piper Lynch. My beautiful princess. My wicked stepsister. My perfect girlfriend. My worst enemy. My greatest love. There’s nothing I can say about her that hasn’t already been said. She loves me. I love her, too.

  So why am I so terrified?

  I have a plan. I have to take her back to where this all began, but I don’t know if it’ll keep us from falling apart.

  Chapter 1

  Piper

  I stare across the table at him and he stares back at me.

  Kai Casablancas.

  When my mother told me we were having the Casablancas family over for dinner tonight, I didn’t expect anything like this. We’ve had them over hundreds of times before. My mother and Ava Casablancas are best friends. My father and Hawthorne Casablancas were colleagues before my father got his dream job as Headmaster of Belle Academy. Kai and I have been in every class together since we were five years old, but we’ve never been friends. He’s an acquaintance. That’s all I ever want him to be. He’s an ass, to put it mildly.

  The last thing I want is to be related to him.

  “Piper?” I hear my father’s voice from the head of the table. “You’ve been quiet.”

  “Yes, Piper,” Ava adds. I look over at her and bile tempts my throat. “I know this is a lot to take in all at once, but that’s why we’re all here — together. We want you to say what you need to say—”

  “Don’t patronize my daughter, please,” my mother interrupts. She grabs the bottle of wine in front of her and starts to pour a healthy amount into her glass. “She’s not a toddler—”

  “Penny…” my father warns.

  “Oh—” my mother laughs. “I’m sorry, everybody. My bad, Philip.” She turns to me. “Yes, Piper, please tell us your opinion on your father dumping me for my best friend after sixteen years of marriage.”

  “Penny—”

  She lets out a cackle before downing a large sip. The table falls into an awkward silence. I lock eyes with Kai once again. He shrugs his shoulders and I want to slap him in the face. Now isn’t the time for his laid-back, give-no-fucks attitude.

  Hawthorne slides his glass closer to my mother. “I’ll take some of that, Penny,” he says.

  “Hawthorne,” Ava says his name with long, drawn-out syllables, “maybe you should slow down.”

  “This is slow, Ava dear,” he mutters.

  “Careful, Hawthorne,” my mother smirks. “You’re hitting on another man’s woman.”

  He chuckles loudly and brings the full glass to his lips.

  “I don’t think that’s funny, Penny,” my father says.

  “Well, you’ve never had much of a sense of humor, Philip.”

  I close my eyes, eager to disappear into thin air, as their voices continue tossing back and forth across the table. This is all a dream. It has to be. Some fever-fueled nightmare. Soon, I’ll wake up in my bedroom upstairs and life will return to normal. My father won’t be engaged to Ava Casablancas, my mother won’t be moving out, and Kai fucking Casablancas won’t be my goddamn stepbrother-to-be.

  I open my eyes to find that he’s still staring at me.

  Nope. This is no nightmare.

  This is my life now.

  ***

  “Harder.”

  The change hits before the word even leaves my tongue. He thrusts me with even greater intensity as his fingers wrap a little tighter around my hair. His cock charges in and out of me, knowing exactly where to touch and how deep to go to get me off fast.

  I whip my head around and moan his name.


  “Kai…”

  Kai Casablancas.

  My oldest acquaintance. My idiot stepbrother. My perfect boyfriend. My greatest annoyance. My favorite lover. I’ve lost track of how many labels he’s earned.

  He leans forward and smothers my lips with kisses as he sends his rod just a few inches deeper inside. I dig my nails into the wooden table that holds us up. Kai keeps his grip on my hair, tugging at just the right moments to mix the pleasure building inside of me with just a little bit of pain. We’ve barely been at it for two minutes and I’m already close to coming.

  To say it’s been a stressful week would be an understatement. The threat of finals week is always enough to make me feel a little jittery, but this week is special. It’s not just finals week — it’s our final finals week at USC.

  I started university a year later than my peers, but I was determined to catch up. Once again, I found myself with my face in a book — a rather familiar pose to anyone that’s ever met Piper Lynch, the princess of Belle Academy — and when I finally glanced up, I was a week away from being a college graduate. Oh, and not just any college graduate. I was Valedictorian. Again.

  The irony is not lost on me.

  I didn’t want this for myself. This was the life my father wanted for me and I hated it. I went to Europe three years ago, determined to reunite with my jilted mother and never come back. It was a good plan. It was working. Until Kai convinced me otherwise.

  After taking six months to travel Europe with my mother, we came back home and decided to settle down. It was far from an easy decision. I spent years planning how to escape from home, after all. To come back here so quickly and succumb to the life I despised was… well…

  Unexpected.

  You know the story by now. Girl meets boy. Boy is a fucking idiot, but charming in various ways. Girl hates boy. Boy makes bet with best friend to fuck girl. Girl rejects boy outright, but boy manages to pull it off. Girl and boy fuck like bunnies until girl breaks boy’s heart. Boy and girl live in gloom for half a year. Girl returns home. Boy and girl fall back in love. And they lived happily ever after.

  Sort of.

  Kai nibbles against my shoulder and I shudder beneath his passionate thrusts. My body melts for him, along with the stress of the last three years.

  It wasn’t easy to transition back into the student lifestyle, but I had a rather decent support system holding me up. My father found it in his heart to forgive me for running off and since then, we’ve actually managed to develop a rather normal father/daughter relationship. Of course, he couldn’t be prouder of me making Valedictorian again, even though I didn’t even fucking mean to.

  My mother abandoned her nomadic lifestyle in favor of coming back to Los Angeles with me. I could tell it was a rough decision for her. She’d been traveling the world for years, going nowhere and everywhere at the same time, looking to find herself after my father destroyed her life. I wasn’t sure if coming home was the right choice for her. That is, until the day Kai and I walked in on her having sex with Hawthorne Casablancas.

  Our family tree could not be more tangled. My father and his mother. My mother and his father. And us, Piper and Kai, the kids.

  Really, it’s best not to think about it.

  Moans spill off my lips as climax takes hold of me. Kai wraps his strong arms around my body and grips me still while I ride the wave back and forth on his thick cock. “Oh… fuck!” I shout.

  “Shh…” he chuckles in my ear, nervous about our location. This is a library, after all. The private study rooms aren’t meant for quickie fucks, but that never stopped us once in the last three years. He lets out one final grunt before spending himself inside of me.

  Thankfully, the library is more or less deserted. Classes are over. The only students left on campus are here for graduation and they’ve all started lining up to take that long walk across the stage to claim their degrees. I’ve been combating nervous shakes all morning and after the three-hundredth time I practiced my speech, Kai led me in here to take the edge off with a morning bang.

  “Ohh, Kai…” I coo. I push my arms beneath me to hold myself up. “God, I needed that…”

  He laughs in my ear and leaves kisses along my neck. “I know,” he says. I feel his cock slide out of me as he takes a step back to lean against the wall.

  I stand up and turn around. “What time is it?” I ask.

  “No idea,” he says as he zips his trousers up and starts tucking his once-ironed shirt back inside. Little creases leaves wrinkles around his abdomen now, but it won’t be noticeable behind the black graduation robe he has draped over a nearby chair.

  I push my skirt down and reach for my purse to fetch my phone. “Ahh, shit,” I say. “It’s almost time.”

  Kai steps forward and cups my face. “Do you feel better?” he asks.

  I force a smile. “Yeah,” I lie.

  He raises an eyebrow. “Something else on your mind?”

  I inhale deep to let the cool air chill my throbbing insides. “No,” I answer. I lean in to give him a deep, reassuring kiss. “I’m going to swing by the ladies’ room,” I say as I reach for the doorknob.

  “Okay,” he smiles. “I’ll see you in the auditorium. Hey—”

  I feel his hand on my arm and I pause in the doorway. “Yeah?”

  Kai steps closer and rests his forehead against mine. “You’ll be fine.”

  “I just want to get it over with,” I say. I scoop my graduation robe off the table and hang it over my arm.

  “Enjoy it,” he says. “You’ve earned it.”

  I nod quickly. “Love you.”

  “Love you.”

  I pull away and step down the hallway, striding fast towards the restrooms. Kai thinks I’m freaking out about my speech, but it’s really the farthest thing from my mind at the moment. I’ve given a hundred different speeches to thousands of people. This one will be no different than the last.

  I push open the bathroom door and breathe a light sigh of relief when I see it’s empty. I stare at my pale, white skin the mirror. Usually, taking a ride on Kai’s cock is more than enough to make my cheeks pink and perfect, but not today. I felt a moment of blissful euphoria when he made me orgasm, but it quickly dissipated and the nausea came back with full force.

  I fill my palm with water and take slow sips from it. I told myself I wasn’t going to freak out about it until finals were over. Then I said I wouldn’t freak out about it until after graduation, but today, my body has other plans.

  I get myself cleaned up and pull the graduation robe over my head. Unlike the shiny, maroon-colored robes of Belle Academy, these are black and plain. I don’t mind though. Black is more my color anyway. My long, raven-colored hair blends with it as I let it fall down over my shoulders.

  My fingers grip the sink as another wave of nausea plows through me.

  Fuck…

  I coat my face with cold water and stand still a few more moments until it passes. Finally, the waves end and I quickly dry my face and rush out of the bathroom to make sure I make it to graduation on time.

  One more day. I can wait one more day before I have to freak out about this.

  Chapter 2

  Kai

  “Does Piper look different to you?”

  I look to my left. My best friend, Shawn Monty, sits next to me with squinting eyes. “No,” I answer. “Why?”

  “She looks off.”

  “Off how?”

  “I don’t know.” He tilts his head to look around the black cap in the row ahead of us. “Sick or something.”

  “She’s fine,” I tell him. “Just nervous is all.”

  Shawn shrugs and gazes around. “This is going to take forever.”

  I nod and glance around the stuffed auditorium. Shawn and I sit lost amid the sea of black caps and gowns of our graduating class. As I look around, I realize that I don’t recognize a single fucking face. Not one. It’s a little culture shocking. At Belle Academy, I knew the face and
bio of every single person that walked across that stage (mostly because I had been inside of half of them) but now… I don’t know any of them. Except for Mandy Black. She sits on my right with her arms crossed about her chest.

  “Hey, Mandy—” Shawn whispers across my lap. “Does Piper look sick to you?”

  “No.”

  It’s brief and direct. I glance over at her. Her big, brown eyes point straight ahead, focused on the speaker yammering away on the stage. Shawn slinks back into his chair when he realizes that’s all he’s going to get out of her. I’d feel worse for my good friend, but he kind of had this one coming.

  Shawn and Mandy have spent more time apart than dating over the last year. Honestly, I expected them to be back together by this point, but Mandy has stubbornly put her foot down this time. She’s ready for something more serious, she told me herself, and Shawn just isn’t the serious type. Even now that we’re college graduates — adults more or less — I still can’t see him settling down for any reason.

  Then again, I’m not so sure about myself settling down anymore either.

  I look at Piper sitting on the stage and a smile catches my lips. Piper fucking Lynch. My lover, in every sense of the word. Sure, I’ve tossed the word girlfriend around a lot, but I don’t think it quite covers what she is to me.

  Or was…

  Don’t get me wrong. I love Piper with every piece of me, but things between us have changed recently. At first, it was nothing but secret hook-ups, dirty text messages, and fiery bliss. Now, after three years… it’s more or less the same, but as time passes, expectations grow, too. I think Piper’s happy with how things are, but I know our family sure as hell isn’t.