Step Beast Read online

  “Let me see.” He gently pulled her hands away from her face, but he was still wearing a scowl.

  He pushed thick waves of red hair from her cheeks to take a good look at the injury. She let him inspect it, noting the way his brow drooped low as his fingers traced her temple, his mouth pressed into a thin line. He was still angry. She could tell by the way his jaw worked, teeth clenched. And by the guilt that flashed in his coal-black eyes.

  “Am I broken?” she asked softly as he tucked her hair behind her ear.

  “No, that would be me.” He snorted. A small, sardonic smile flashed, just for a moment, and then he looked at her. “You’re perfect. Didn’t get your eye, thank God. Your mother would kill me.”

  Tilly rolled her eyes at that. Tilly’s mother had always doted on Beast—she’d forgive him anything.

  “You might have a little bruise. You’ll be fine.”

  She knew that was the closest she was going to get to an apology.

  “No one will see it under all those freckles anyway.”

  It was an attempt at teasing her—he’d always teased her for being such a pale, freckled redhead—and Tilly wrinkled her snub little nose. That was another thing he used to like to tease her about. He liked to call her “pug.” She winced when he pressed her cheek with the tips of his fingers. That made him frown and he stroked her skin instead, lightly, with his thumb.

  “Were you having a bad dream?” She cocked her head at him, knowing she probably shouldn’t ask.

  “Yeah.” He got up off the floor, sitting on the bed beside her, the mattress sagging under his considerable weight.

  “What about?”

  “I don’t remember.” He shrugged one shoulder. Tilly noticed he was just wearing a pair of boxers. His hands turned into fists on his knees at her question. He was lying.

  “New sleep meds?” she asked, trying to make it sound casual, light.

  “Uh-huh.” His hands relaxed again. They were big hands, brown from spending so much time outside, his knuckles badly scarred. “The other ones lost their punch.”

  “You... uh...” Tilly cleared her throat, knowing how her question was going to sound, but she had to ask. Even if he got angry. “You wouldn’t take an overdose, would you?”

  “No.” Beast snorted. “Of course not.”

  She relaxed at his tone. Then he turned to her, frowning.

  “But if you come in my room like that, I just might end up killing you.” Anger flashed again in his eyes and she shrank from it. “So don’t come in here again. You hear me?”

  “But you sounded so...” She swallowed and shrugged.

  “I’ll get over it,” he told her darkly. “Nobody dies of nightmares.”

  Okay then. She knew she should have just gone back to bed. Had known, if she woke him, that it would dissolve into some sort of hazy, muddled, middle of the night argument.

  She plucked at the hem of her nightgown, which ended at her knees, not looking at him. But she felt him looking at her, felt the weight of his gaze. Having him back here, in his old room, brought back painful memories for her, and she wondered if it did for him, too.

  He was quiet and she glanced sideways at him. His gaze was softer now, watching her fingers pick at a stray thread. His weight on the mattress had slanted it, forcing her hip to rest against his. She searched for something to say, feeling an opening, however small. She remembered the first time she felt the walls around Beast coming down a little, when she thought maybe she could touch him somehow.

  “You used to like it when I came into your room,” she said softly.

  Beast didn’t say anything, but she felt his spine straighten. She shouldn’t have said it, and she knew it. But the pain of the memory was too great not to say it out loud.

  “Connie?”

  “Don’t call me that.” There was grit in his voice. “Come on.”

  He stood, holding out a hand—more paw than palm, really—to her. She took it, sighing, letting him pull her up.

  “I gotta try to get some sleep.” He gave a low groan, yawning and stretching at the same time. Tilly looked away, swallowing her body’s reaction, feeling it coiled in her belly at the way his muscles rippled across his chest and abdomen. “I have to work in the morning.”

  “Doing what?” She looked back at him, curious, as he turned her around by the shoulders, pointing her toward the door.

  “Go on.” He gave her a firm little shove, not that hard, but she got the message. “Beat it.”

  Back in her room, Tilly pulled her nightgown off—she preferred sleeping in nothing, although her mother didn’t approve—and crawled into bed. The house was quiet again. Her stepbrother was probably already asleep again, snoring away. He had bad jet lag and had gone to bed early, right after dinner. Her thoughts drifted to that afternoon, when they’d met him at the airport. Her mother had insisted on being there. At least Tilly had convinced her to use the wheelchair.

  “Conrad! Look at you!” Liv Beeston had literally lit up the moment he came off the plane, still wearing his fatigues, a carry-on duffel over his shoulder.

  Tilly watched her mother embrace him, trying to keep the emotion from her own face when he turned to give his stepsister a brief, one-armed hug, ruffling her hair like she was a ten-year-old. She’d spent an hour in the bathroom, curling and spraying it into submission. Another hour trying on and off clothing from her closet. But he’d barely glanced at Tilly’s purple paisley sundress, a stark contrast to her pale, freckled skin and sun-kissed strawberry-blonde hair—but a perfect complement to her blue, almost violet, eyes. At least, that’s what her best friend, Frankie, said over Skype.

  Beast had admonished his stepmother for making the trip, and then scolded Tilly for letting her do it. As if Tilly had any control over what Liv Beeston ever decided to do? She expected her mother to say something to that effect, but then she remembered—Beast never got in trouble. It had been true back when their parents had married—Beast was just fourteen then, Tilly ten—and it was still true now. He might not be Liv’s natural child, but he was her favorite. She doted on him, always had, and likely would, until the day she died.

  Tilly didn’t like to think about that day.

  In one way, it was a relief to have him home. It took some of the unwanted focus and attention her mother placed on her only daughter—her usual nagging and criticism only intensified by the pain of her illness. But Tilly was already exasperated by the double standard. Tilly could do nothing right—Beast could do no wrong. It had been that way since they were kids, and it would likely always be that way.

  Until she’s gone.

  Tilly rolled to her side, pulling the covers up to her chin, thinking about her stepbrother sleeping down the hall in his old room. What was it like for him? Strange? Unnerving? Tilly had never known any other room but this one. It was still caught in time, the same Pepto-Bismol pink of her childhood. Her mother had never allowed her an adolescent’s retreat, where the colors would move from light pink to the darker hues of blue, purple, even black. She’d never been allowed to go through a goth phase, like her best friend, Frankie, but she’d spent plenty of time listening to The Black Keys and staring at the ceiling in her sick-medicine-pink room.

  What would it be like, she wondered, to have her own apartment? Beast had one in the city and there had never been any objection to that. Not that Beast had listened to anything Liv said since he had turned eighteen. But Tilly had suggested getting her own place, quite a few times since high school graduation. Now that she had graduated from college, she’d carefully broached the subject with her mother once again.

  “Why, Tilly? It’s not like the house isn’t big enough. The new servants get lost. I have to give them maps!” That’s what her mother had said when Tilly had asked.

  And then, her mother’s diagnosis had put the final nail in that—metaphor. Tilly wrinkled her nose in the dark. It was horrifying, how often the subject of death flitted across her mind, how many times a day she pushed i
t away. She’d always been resentful of the tight reins her mother kept on her, compared to the fancy-free life her stepbrother was allowed to live. But she wasn’t resentful now, not anymore.

  She didn’t let herself think about it a lot—but her mother’s prognosis wasn’t good. Liv put on a good face, but just the trip to the airport had exhausted her. Even in a wheelchair. She’d insisted they eat dinner together, at the dining room table, the three of them at one end of a mahogany table that could seat twenty, served by the staff, who had cooked all of Beast’s favorites.

  But Liv had gone straight to bed after dinner, leaving Beast and Tilly sitting across the dining room table looking at each other in an awkward silence that stretched to infinity. It had been a long time—years—since they’d seen each other. She looked at him in little bits, absorbing this new version of him surreptitiously, like sipping wine at a party, growing slowly drunk on the sight.

  Tilly did her best to imitate her mother and make small talk, but Beast just continued to shovel food in, answering her in monosyllables. She finally gave up, chasing peas around her plate with a fork—she hated peas—tucking them under the mashed potatoes. She wasn’t ten anymore, but the staff still reported to Liv if Tilly didn’t eat her peas. It was ridiculous.

  Finally, Beast mumbled something about jet lag and needing to get some sleep. When he turned at the door, looking back over his shoulder at her as the staff cleared his place, just for a moment, she saw something flicker in his eyes. Something that made her spine stiffen, her heart race and her hands clutch the cloth napkin in her lap.

  She wondered if he would say something—something real. She wondered if she wanted him to. Then he just said, “G’nite, Sunshine.”

  That was all. Just an old endearment. Until his nightmare brought her running down the hall and he knocked her halfway across the room. And then pulled a gun on her. Her stepbrother had come home changed. Two tours in Afghanistan might have something to do with that, but she wondered. Beast wasn’t the type who never really came home from war. Whatever was bothering him, the nightmares that haunted him—she had a feeling their source was closer to home.

  The home he’d left.

  Tilly sighed and rolled over again, hearing Scrabble rooting about restlessly in his cage. It was like the ferret could sense her unease, the change in the atmosphere. She thought about taking him out of his cage, cuddling him for comfort, but the last time she’d done that at night, she’d fallen asleep. Scrabble had slipped under her door—ferrets had an incredible ability to flatten their bodies to get into the tightest spaces—and scared her mother half to death.

  Her mother had nearly forced Tilly to get rid of him then. She’d only prevailed by threatening to go live with Frankie—Tilly’s best friend had recently moved into her own place—if her mother didn’t let her keep the ferret. And, of course, she had to promise to keep him in his cage, and never let him out when she wasn’t watching him.

  What Tilly really wanted, more than anything, was a dog, but Scrabble had been a long-fought-for and hard-won compromise. A ferret was the most she’d ever been allowed.

  Allowed.

  That word made her close her eyes, chest tight with regret. The truth was, she’d hardly ever done anything she wasn’t allowed to do. Tilly had spent most of her life doing just what her mother told her to do. She’d once believed it was just the way things were done, the way they were supposed to be. Until Conrad-the-second had entered their lives, bringing a boy named Beast with him.

  Then, her whole world had been turned upside down, and it still hadn’t righted itself, she realized, listening closely for the sound of her stepbrother calling out from down the hall. But it was quiet. Maybe he would get the night’s rest he wanted, she thought. That would make one of them that got a good night’s sleep. Because Tilly knew already, she would spend the rest of it tossing and turning.

  Thinking about him.

  Beast had left them, but the imprint of his stay had remained.

  She just hadn’t realized how much of him she’d kept hidden away in her heart until today.

  Chapter 2

  “He had a gun?” Frankie, ever the demonstrative Italian, sat there with her mouth open, one hand on each cheek, briefly mimicking Munch’s The Scream. “You could have been killed! What was he thinking? Does your mom know he has that thing in the house?”

  “I don’t know.” Tilly shrugged and sipped her latte, looking across the table at her friend, noticing that a guy a few tables away was looking at her, too. Not that she could blame him. Frankie, with her thick, dark hair and olive skin, was both striking and magnetic. The guy looked away when Tilly stared him down, turning back to look at his laptop. “Anyway, that’s how I got the bruise.”

  Tilly rubbed her cheek self-consciously. She’d done her best to cover it with makeup and she’d thought she’d succeeded—her mother hadn’t noticed anything at breakfast, too tied up talking to Beast—until Frankie had given a dramatic gasp when they met up at Starbucks.

  But of course Frankie would notice. They’d gone to the same schools—recently getting their business degrees together at Mount Holyoke—and had been the best of friends since they shared crayons across the aisle in Mrs. Logan’s kindergarten class. Frankie always noticed when Tilly was upset or hurt. Even when there wasn’t any physical indication.

  “I guess his head’s still in Afghanistan.” Frankie dunked her scone into her coffee—black—and took a bite, chewing thoughtfully. “But really, he doesn’t need to keep a loaded gun next to him. He’s home. Your house is wired with the best security system money can buy. What’s cautious over there is crazy here—and freakin’ dangerous.”

  For the first time, it hit Tilly how easily things could have turned out tragically last night. No wonder her stepbrother had been so angry with her. She didn’t want to think about it. She figured that was probably just as obvious as the bruise on her face, from the way Frankie looked at her.

  There were a lot of things Tilly didn’t like to talk about. That was one good thing about being friends with Frankie. Her best friend might have a reputation for having a big mouth, but she was both smart and perceptive. Especially when it came to Tilly. She knew when to push Tilly to speak, and when not to.

  Tilly raised her eyebrows at laptop guy. His gaze had moved away from the screen and back to Frankie’s long, tanned legs in her short, summer skirt. He had a wedding ring on. Creeper. Frankie didn’t notice him noticing. She was probably too used to guys checking her out, she was numb to it.

  When the girls had first started dating, Tilly, the less confident one, had always wanted them to be double dates and Frankie had mostly indulged her. But Frankie was always the first to have more adventurous ideas. It was Frankie who was the first of the two of them to smoke cigarettes, though neither really acquired the habit. It was Frankie who had introduced Tilly to pot years ago, and while Tilly had never been much interested in it, Frankie still smoked it from time to time.

  If Tilly’s mother represented that part of her life that told her she never quite measured up, the part of her life that stood for order, discipline, the stiff upper lip and respectability, then Frankie was that part of Tilly’s life that represented acceptance, that told her she was fine as she was, and she should always go for what she wanted.

  And still, Frankie and Liv got along well. Maybe these twin, opposing influences on Tilly’s life had been inevitable.

  “Okay, wait a minute.” Frankie, suppressing a laugh with one hand and touching Tilly’s wrist with the other, leaned in and said in hushed tones, “You’ve gotta tell me. Your hot brother. Does he sleep in the buff, or... ?”

  “Shh!” Tilly giggled, glancing around and flushing. Laptop guy had averted his eyes. He probably thought they were laughing at him. Good.

  “Come on, Tilly...” Frankie’s eyes got that naughty spark, the one that had gotten her—them both—in trouble on more than one occasion. “You can tell me. Just how big is your big stepbr—” />
  “Frankie!” Tilly hissed her name, shaking her friend’s hand off her wrist. “Shut up. Do you think I even look there? Honestly!”

  Frankie laughed, a knowing sort of laugh, throaty but loud. Several heads turned for a moment, including creepy Mr. Married Laptop.

  “Your brother is so damned hot.” Frankie grinned when Tilly gave her a warning look. Sometimes she knew when to stop—and sometimes she really liked to push. “So is Mr. Uber-serious Super-marine still treating you like a baby?”

  “Pretty much.” Tilly stirred her latte, wrinkling her nose at the memory of her stepbrother calling her “Silly Tilly.”

  “He can be such an asshat.” Frankie rolled her pretty, dark eyes.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Sometimes...”