Stepbrother HOT! (The Stepbrother Romance Series - Book #3) Read Online Free Page B

Everything was off. Normally I would be able to put every
thought aside—I’d gone snowboarding once during final exams week in high school
and been able to put every thought of chemistry and statistics behind me
completely. But this situation hung over my head way more heavily. I couldn’t
stop thinking about it—the way that I wanted Jaxon, how guilty I felt about how
upset I’d made my mom. Instead of getting better at the tricks I kept falling;
I seemed to miss the mark on my spins, and when I did aerials I anticipated the
landings, instead of timing them properly. I decided to stop for a while,
hoping it was just jitters or something like that.
    Jaxon wasn’t doing much better; I watched him going
down the slopes, watched him from a distance as he hit the half-pipe setup
they’d built specifically for boarders. He never got injured, but he was trying
riskier and riskier things, and barely managing to land them—sometimes not
landing them at all. I hoped my mom was having a better time than I was; I was
miserable.
    I saw Mom and Bob at different points in the
day—they at least seemed happy, and I hoped that I could just be happy for Mom
and just deal with the crap with Jaxon another time. If I kept trying, I had to
be able to forget all about him; I grabbed a snack at the lodge, and I breezed
past Jaxon as best as I could back to the mountain. If I could just find my
rhythm, I thought—everything would be right in the world once more. I went to
the top of the slope again, and tried to hit my speed. I tried it again and
again and again until I was exhausted. My legs were screaming with a deep-down
ache, and I knew I’d gotten more than a few bruises from the tumbles I took. I
knew I would be in pain the next day, but I didn’t care; the snow and the cold
made me numb down to my bones, in spite of the layers. If only my brain could
be as numb, if only my heart could be as numb as my body was. It would be a
million times easier to deal with the rest of the vacation if only I could stop
caring, stop feeling so guilty, stop feeling so ashamed. If I
could stop wanting Jaxon. If I could just be a normal
girl on a vacation with her new family.
    At one point, Mom insisted that she and I should go
down the slope together; I had to keep to her pace, standing a few feet away,
watching Bob cheer her on as she slalomed down the trail. I wished that Jaxon
and I could just be alone on the slopes like we had
been before. But it was obvious to me that while Mom might not want to talk
about the situation, she was determined as she could be that Jaxon and I
wouldn’t get an opportunity to be alone together—she didn’t want it to happen
again. I guess she thought that as long as we were all together, as long as
Jaxon and I were in front of our parents, we’d have to behave. Maybe she
thought that it would get easier. I was bored with just riding down after just
one trip with my mom, but she insisted on going again, this time with Bob.
    I wanted to just leave. But if I told Mom that it
would just cause a scene. I wanted to do something else; but she and Bob both
were set on us all hanging out together, all enjoying the great conditions on
the mountain. If I tried to tell Mom I just wanted to go back to the house and
hang out by myself, she’d pick a fight and the whole ugly mess would come
tumbling out. As much as I wanted to talk to her—alone—about the situation,
make her understand that I wasn’t some brother-humping freak, I didn’t want to
have to deal with the guilt and ugliness of Bob knowing about it.
    She left me alone again for a while, and I tried to
get my sense of speed back, tried to do the most basic tricks. I managed to get
a few in without face-planting but anytime I tried anything more advanced than
the most basic grab or aerial, I ended up landing wrong. The whole situation
was wrong, I thought. Every last bit of it. Mom being
married to Bob, Jaxon and I wanting each other but not being able to