Step Beast Read online

  Table of Contents

  BOOK DESCRIPTION

  Step Beast

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

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  MOXIE

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  High school senior, Moxie, agrees to be moral support for her friend, Patches, who is totally enamored with a college boy, so she says yes to a double date, even though she has to lie to her parents to do it. But Moxie wasn’t counting on lying about her age to get into an x-rated movie, and she definitely wasn’t counting on her date’s Roman hands and Russian fingers, or the fact that the pants she’s borrowed from Patches are several sizes too small. By the end of the night, Moxie finds herself in far more trouble than she bargained for!

  BOOK DESCRIPTION

  They call him Beast because he fights and fucks like one. Because he’s built like the tanks he rode in Afghanistan.

  Beneath Conrad "Beast" Beeston III’s fierce, intense gaze, his brooding temperament, his knuckles scarred from fighting, lurks a wild man, his strong, broad back darkly inked with his own hard truths.

  He only has one mode, and “Beast” is it. He ripped through Tilly's life, tearing it to shreds, and then he was gone, giving a stiff middle finger to a life of entitlement. He left her like he leaves them all—with little more than a broken heart. But for Tilly, there was one more thing.

  He left her with an unbearable secret she’s been forced to keep for years.

  Tilly’s privileged life, after her recent graduation from Mt. Holyoke, has come to a screeching halt under tragic circumstances. Had she really believed she’d never see her Devil Dog stepbrother again?

  Now he’s coming home—and she’s forced to face his cocky smirk and arrogant swagger, to look once again into the eyes of the monster who left her.

  Forced to confront him, what she sees is a raw, broken, tortured man who just might be the only person she knows keeping even bigger secrets than she is.

  Worse, she still wants him. Even if it means breaking everything in her life wide open—even if it means unleashing the Beast.

  Step Beast

  By Selena Kitt

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  Chapter 1

  Something’s wrong.

  Tilly opened her eyes to darkness, breath caught in her chest.

  She couldn’t remember any dreams, didn’t have to pee, and had no idea why she was awake. She fumbled for her iPhone, knocking her purse onto the floor, and pressed the button for the display. Three-fourteen a.m. The house was quiet, her room most of all, blackout curtains drawn for total darkness. Not even an alarm clock—her mother said LEDs could interrupt the brain’s proper sleep rhythms.

  So why was she awake?

  Tilly closed her eyes, tuning her ears into the sounds of the house. There was just the ambient noise, the low hum of things plugged in but not being used. Everything was fine, she told herself, trying to get her breathing under control. It was too fast, like her heart rate.

  Something’s wrong.

  But there was nothing.

  She could almost hear her mother’s admonishment.

  Mathilda, don’t let your imagination run away with you.

  It was too late, though. She was imagining a serial killer coming silently up the stairs, a big butcher knife in hand. She was imagining her mother sprawled on the bathroom floor, collapsed, helpless, unable to call for help. She was imagining a fire started way down in the kitchen at the other end of the house, something she couldn’t quite smell yet, but that would creep up the stairs and suffocate her in her sleep long before the flames arrived.

  So maybe her imagination was running away, but she had to do something to catch it, didn’t she? If she ever wanted to sleep again that night, anyway. Because something had woken her up. Tilly didn’t just come out of a sound sleep for no reason. Her mother said Tilly slept like the dead.

  Tilly got up, slipping on a long, cotton nightshirt, determined to find the thing that had woken her.

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  From down the hall came a yell. Her heart, already racing, skipped in her chest like a stone across a pond and she stood, frozen, in her doorway. The sound came again, the speech of nightmares—unintelligible words—but she recognized his voice like it was her own, even if she hadn’t heard it in years.

  It was her stepbrother.

  Beast.

  She was wide awake now as she flew down the hallway to her stepbrother’s room. The door stood open, curtains thrown wide, typical of her stepbrother. He never did like surprises. Moonlight streamed in, transforming the large bed into a field of silver mystery, bathing his muscular, naked back in otherworldliness. Tilly frowned, hugging herself, feeling like she was peering in on a secret.

  Go back to bed. He’s fine. Just dreaming.

  The sheet tangled about Conrad’s hips as he thrashed, like a fish caught in a net. He mumbled, cried out, was still again. Tilly hesitated, worrying her lower lip between her teeth, knowing she shouldn’t wake him. That’s what her mother always said about people who were dreaming. Or was that sleepwalkers?

  You should never wake a sleepwalker, Mathilda—they could die from shock!

  But not Beast. He was made of sturdier stuff than that. She looked down at him, feeling a tightness in her chest, like someone was squeezing her heart in their hands. His hands. They were fists on the sheet. Always ready for a fight.

  Beast snorted and growled in his sleep like—well, like a beast.

  He’d been “Beast” since he was in high school. Since she could remember, really. His birth certificate said Conrad Raleigh Beeston III, and his father—the second—was always called Conrad, so Beast got stuck with Raleigh, which he’d never been happy about. When they started calling him Beast in school, he made everyone else call him that, too.

  Tilly’s mother never would, though. She insisted on calling him by his given name—Conrad—just like she refused to shorten Mathilda to Tilly. Tilly’s mother’s name, Oliv
ia, was the exception, shortened down to “Liv” by almost everyone they knew. But “Liv” was dignified, according to her mother. A far cry from “Tilly,” which she thought absurd, and “Beast,” a nickname she deemed downright distasteful.

  Tilly was the only one who got away with calling Beast “Connie” on occasion. And usually just to make him mad.

  But “Beast” really did fit him. Even back in high school, at five-foot-eleven and two-hundred-and-ten pounds, he could bench press three-eighty. His stint in the Marines had bulked him up even more—he’d just returned from his second tour of duty as a military policeman in Afghanistan—and his physique had only improved over time. His dark hair was short—almost shaved—just a shadow in the moonlight, like the stubble on his cheeks. His ink, also acquired while he was serving his country—decorated his back and shoulders, and she itched to trace the lines with her fingers.

  He cried out again, pitching, rolling from belly to back, and she held her breath, waiting for him to wake and find her standing over him. If he did, she knew he’d growl at her, tell her to leave his room. And she knew she should do just that, but she didn’t. She stayed, watching him churn in his sleep. He mumbled something, a throaty sort of grumble, and she saw his jaw working, heard the low grind of his teeth.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d seen him like this, or the first time she’d heard him have nightmares. He had them as far back as she could remember. Liv had taken him to the doctor twice, complaining of the way he woke up shouting, telling Dr. Schonner it was dangerous for a teenage boy to be wandering around such a big house in the middle of the night.

  Beast did sleepwalk back then, she remembered. It was after he’d woken them all, screaming, from the pool in the yard that Liv insisted he started taking some sort of sleep medication at night. But he’d never had nightmares like he had when he came back from Afghanistan, she remembered. It had been much, much worse then.

  Funny how everything changed, but things stayed the same, she thought, looking down at the tormented expression on his troubled face in a silver slant of moonlight. The tattoos inking his back and shoulders continued down his thick, broad chest. His upper body was heavily muscled, his chest mildly hairy. He was the kind of man who kept things simple. He had always been well groomed, but Beast wouldn’t have time or patience for any “manscaping.”

  A dark line of hair ran down from his navel, disappearing underneath the tangled sheets.

  More words that weren’t really words came from his throat. Beast flung himself about again, grinding his teeth. Maybe it was being here, in this house. He had his own apartment somewhere downtown, but he’d come back home to stay in his old room. Tilly didn’t like to think about the reason why. She hoped his nightmares didn’t have anything to do with Liv.

  Her own nightmares about it were enough.

  He yelled again, arm swinging, hitting the wall, hard. She winced, waiting for that to wake him up—it had to have hurt, bruised his already-scarred knuckles—but he just muttered and moaned. She told herself to turn around. To go back to her room and go to sleep, now that she knew what it was that had woken her.

  But the truth was, she couldn’t stand seeing him like this. In spite of everything, she hated seeing him in pain. And her own imagination ran wild. Was he dreaming about their mother? Seeing her wasting away in a hospital bed, maybe? Or had his mind skipped to the end, to a funeral that hadn’t happened? Not yet, anyway.

  Thinking about attending her own mother’s funeral made her feel a little nauseous. It was likely an inevitability, and she’d known it since Liv had been diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. But Liv wasn’t the only one who liked to live in denial. Tilly had learned from the best, after all.

  Maybe that’s why it had astonished Tilly so much when Liv contacted Beast again. That “let’s pretend everything is fine” vibe was the only one Tilly knew, when it came to her mother. So seeing her mother picking up the phone and calling Beast—begging him, with tears and everything—to come home after this tour was over, had shocked Tilly into silence. It surprised her when Liv had used a mother’s guilt—a stepmother’s guilt apparently worked just as well—asking him to come spend as much time as possible with his family in her last days.

  It surprised Tilly even more when he’d agreed to come.

  She would be lying if she said she didn’t know how long it had been. Tilly knew exactly how long, down to the day. Part of her knew it down to the minute, the second, the last time they’d seen him, her last glimpse of his fatigues as he headed out the door without even looking back.

  Mathilda, go back to your room.

  It was her mother’s voice, in her head. And Tilly actually moved to go, taking a step toward the door. But a moan, low and pained, stopped her. Beast’s hands were fists again, gripping the sheet. Even in his sleep, he was fighting someone, something. Maybe just his own demons. And as much as she told herself it wasn’t her fight, it wasn’t really any of her business at all, the sound of his voice reached something deep inside of her. It was a part she thought she’d cut out of herself long ago, excised and disposed of like a tumor.

  And it ached.

  “Beast.” Tilly kept her voice down, but she put her hands on his shoulders, shaking gently. My God, the man was like a rock. Her hands were lost in the hills and valleys of his shoulders. “Wake up!”

  He moaned, shifted, but still didn’t wake.

  “Beast!” She leaned to put her mouth near his ear. “It’s okay. Just wake up.”

  She shook him harder—it was like trying to move a boulder—her fingernails digging into his skin.

  “Connie!” she snarled, feeling a rage rising in her throat. She didn’t just shake him now—she hit him with closed fists, pummeling his chest, which was just like hitting a brick wall. “Wake the fuck up!”

  There was a sudden surge of skin and muscle, and before she knew it, Tilly found herself on the floor in the corner. Her face bloomed with pain and she held it in her hands, hiding from him. Beast had backhanded her right across the cheek.

  He was up in a flash, reaching for his gun on the night table. Despite the moonlight, she knew it was too dark for Beast to see who was in his room, but his cop reflexes had kicked in with a vengeance.

  “Don’t!” she croaked, her throat raw, burning, her face throbbing under her fingers. Her cheeks were wet, although she didn’t register when she’d started crying.

  Gun in hand, Beast stopped. “Fuck.”

  She heard him uncock the weapon and put it down.

  Tilly looked at him through her fingers, a hulking figure in the silver light, heard his ragged intake of breath, his deep, shuddering sigh. For just a moment, she thought he might give in. She wanted to hear him murmur words of apology and comfort. More than anything she wanted his big arms around her, enfolding her.

  Instead, he yelled at her.

  “For fuck's sake! What the hell are you doing in my room?”

  “You were yelling!” she yelled back, hitching sobs shaking her chest. She fought them, not wanting him to know how much he’d scared her. “In your sleep. I was just trying to wake you up, dummy!”

  “Fuck.” He rubbed his forehead with his fingers. “These new sleep meds I’ve been taking are too damned strong...”

  So he was still taking them. She’d wondered.

  His voice lowered then, as she stared at him, concerned, he muttered something to himself, almost too low for her to hear, “... or maybe not strong enough...”

  Like father, like son?

  A jolt of alarm went through her at that. Conrad Raleigh Beeston II—Tilly’s stepfather and Beast’s father—had eaten the business end of a gun in the garage seven years ago. That loss had shaken all of them, from Tilly’s mother on down, but she thought it might have been hardest on Beast.

  She wanted to reach out, to touch him, but she didn’t. She swallowed the urge, looking up at him in the darkness, thinking about the man who had brought this hulking figure into her life.


  Conrad-the-second had been devastated when his software company went bankrupt during the 2008 stock market crash. His wife had plenty of money, so they weren’t broke, but Tilly knew, father and son were a lot alike. Independent and driven, neither of them could handle being “taken care of” for too long. They were both men who liked to be in charge, on top, always.

  Tilly wanted to say something, but she knew it would only make things worse. That’s the way it was, with Beast. Saying things always made it worse. She stayed where she was, still cowering in the corner, wondering at the meaning of his words. He wouldn’t, would he? The thought of losing her stepbrother, too, so soon after he’d come home again, made her whole body go cold and she actually shivered.

  Beast reached behind him and turned on the lamp. The bulb was dim, lighting him from behind, making him appear even more menacing as he bent to help Tilly to her feet. She let him, though, sitting on the edge of the bed where he put her while he kneeled on the floor in front of her.