The brazen, beautiful woman and I were more alike than I’d thought possible.
That didn’t make this any easier. What it did do was make this personal.
Time to confront my brother, something I should have done a hell of a long time ago.
“You motherfucking asshole.” As soon as my brother opened the door, I slammed my palm against his chest, driving him back by several feet. He stumbled, ramming his shoulder into the wall.
The shock on his face turned to anger. “What the fuck?” He rubbed his shoulder before immediately lunging toward me. He was just in his boxers and if I had to guess, coming down from various highs.
Fuck me.
As soon as he was close, I wrapped my arm around his neck, forcing his back against my chest. “I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” He struggled with my hold, trying his best to wrench my arm away.
I was much stronger. “We need to talk.”
“About what? Fucking let me go.”
For a moment, I squeezed, wanting him to feel the effects of suffocation. I resisted going any further, tossing him away by a few feet. This time, he knocked into a lamp on a table, toppling it over. The loud crash reverberated in the room.
I slapped my hands on my hips and glanced around his condo. “You live like a pig.” The place was trashed.
“What’s… What’s going on?” The woman’s voice was full of sleep and the damn drug- or drink-induced haze. She stumbled into the room while wiping her eyes.
I immediately looked away since she was devoid of clothes. “Get her the fuck out of here.”
Carson huffed and I thought for a minute he was going to ignore me. “It’s okay, Tabby. Go back to bed.”
“Oh, do we have a guest? Yummy. I like threesomes.”
“Tabitha. Go back to the fucking bed. Now!”
As I glared at my brother, she uttered a sharp cry but thankfully left the room. The silence settling between us was full of tension.
“You didn’t need to be so rough with her,” I told him.
He laughed. “You mean like you? Hell, at least I allow them to stay the night before kicking them out. Oh, that’s right. You’ve never had anyone stay at your precious mansion.”
My place was hardly a mansion, but arguing would do nothing. What irked me more than anything was that he was right.
“Except for now. You know, I wondered why out of the blue you were getting married.” He moved around me, heading for the kitchen.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You know what it means. An arranged marriage. Who would have ever thought Mr. High and Mighty would agree to something so atrocious. All the blah-blah about never allowing our father to control your life and voila, you’re suddenly marrying not just a beautiful woman, which she is, but the daughter of a man considered the competition. Or as our great father would say, an enemy to be destroyed.”
I’d trailed behind him, now standing in the doorway to his kitchen while he grabbed a carton of orange juice, gulping directly from it.
All I could think about was knocking the carton from his hand. “It’s complicated, Carson, but that didn’t give you the right to share the news before we were ready.”
“We. Suddenly you’re including some woman in your life. Wow. She must be a goddamn shark as well as amazing in bed for you to talk that way.”
That was all I could take. I knocked the carton from his hand, the force enough it smashed against the wall, splattering orange pulp everywhere.
He was shocked for a split second before bursting into laughter. “You fucking like this woman. What the hell?”
When I looked away, he continued laughing, having the nerve to double over.
