Page 1 of Bliss

Bliss

No one would ever be able to convince me that little brothers weren’t the bane of every older sister’s existence. I’d been cleaning up Damien’s messes since he was born, which sounded extreme considering I’d still been a toddler, but accurate, nonetheless.

The level of mess had only escalated as we’d gotten older, especially when we got to high school and girls took one look at my brother and lost their damn minds. Which went to Damien’s head really quickly. As much as I loved him, I was open-minded enough to see what an utter idiot he became when a pretty girl batted her lashes at him with a certain kind of smile.

And then they got clingy and he got bored, and I was the one who had to turn into the bad guy and send them packing. Once I got tired of dealing with the crazies who couldn’t take no for an answer, I pushed my little brother off on our cousin Mason. That sorted Damien for a while. He didn’t party often, didn’t fuck around nearly as much, and stayed out of trouble.

Which was kind of inaccurate, but only because I was comparing Damien’s ability to stay out of trouble with Hayat’s. That wasn’t fair to either of them because they were on entirely different levels. Trouble was drawn to Hayat like a moth to a flame. I blamed the dimples. With Damien, he ducked and covered to avoid trouble, yet it still hit him. Like a random casualty, almost by mistake. Keyword, almost.

Damien and I had three other sisters who could get him out of trouble. All of them older, married to men who could make a call and erase any proof of what he may or may not have done. He never called any of them. It was always me, fucking always. I should have started charging him a chaos manager fee back in high school. Maybe then he would have left me alone for five minutes.

I’d been tucked on my couch with a really good book and an entire cheesecake when I got the SOS text from him. It was a Tuesday night, so I wasn’t as braced for it as I would have been on a Friday. Seeing his name pop up on my screen had pissed me off before I’d even read the message.

Instead of changing out of my pajamas, I’d thrown on a hoodie over my T-shirt and grabbed my keys. I cursed him all the way to the house in the Hills where he was with our cousin Evan, and then I had to argue with some guy with a god complex at the gates of the swanky subdivision about why my name wasn’t on some stupid list, which took another fifteen minutes because the man wasn’t listening to what I was actually saying. Something that didn’t surprise me but did ratchet up my rage from a simmer to a full-on boil.

It was almost an entire hour after I’d gotten my brother’s first text when I finally parked in front of some random megamansion that had people spilling out the front doors. Music was playing so loudly, it could have mimicked seismic activity. I got out of my car and snapped at the valets. Because of course there were valets at a stupid party in the Hills on a random Tuesday.

“If you touch this car, I will find you, and you will wish your momma had taught you to listen better. It will be here when I come out. Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?”

The teenage boy nodded like he had a bobblehead, and for all of two seconds, I felt a moment of compassion and promised myself I’d tip him well afterward. But first, I had to find my brother.

Damien wasn’t a partier. Mason had taught him well on avoiding them like the plague. But in the last few years, Damien had been hanging out with Evan more than Mason. Much like his sister’s, Evan’s damned dimples attracted trouble. But unlike his sister, he didn’t try to stop the trouble from escalating, which had only gotten worse once he’d been drafted into the NBA after a single year of college.

As I stomped into the house, a part of my brain registered that I probably looked like an angry housewife searching for her cheating husband. I was in sleep shorts and a faded college hoodie that didn’t fully mask the fact that I wasn’t wearing a bra. My hair was in a messy knot that had fallen from the top of my head to the back of my neck, and I wore zero makeup. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had cheesecake on my face.

I was more upset over having to leave the cheesecake than I was my book, and someone was going to pay for that. Damien, if I had any say in it. Evan, too, but he wouldn’t easily accept his role in why I was raging. Evan didn’t take responsibility often enough, in my opinion. Something he’d been teaching my brother over the years and I hadn’t fully been able to correct.

It took me another ten minutes before I spotted Evan’s curls. He’d finally stopped growing when he reached seven-nine, so it should have been easy enough to find him in any crowd. Except, he wasn’t the tallest guy in this crowd, because apparently this was a basketball player’s house.

Gods, of course it was.

Having grown up around celebrities of every caliber, I knew firsthand there was no one more egotistical than a baller, especially basketball players. Evan was not my only case in point—he was simply the most consistent in my life.

Consistently an asshole I had to save, just like my baby brother.

I moved through the crowded mansion in the general direction of where I assumed I would eventually find Damien, attempting to avoid being trampled. Navigating a room full of basketball players was a lot like being a Yorkie in a room full of Great Danes. I was trying really hard not to get stepped on and still very, very angry about the cheesecake that I was not getting to eat right that minute. Because I needed to save my dumbass brother.

From what, I didn’t even know. He’d sent the SOS and his location, and I loved him enough to show up without asking questions. That should win me a Sister of the Year award for at least a decade, but I’d be surprised if I got a “Thanks, sis” from him. Ungrateful little shit.

And worst of all, he wasn’t my “little” brother. He’d surpassed me in height before he’d even made it to high school. Did I still call him “little bro,” though? Of course I fucking did. Because he was an asshole, like all brothers—and every other man with a dick, with the exception of my dad. Drake Stevenson was a godsdamn angel, and no one would ever convince me otherwise.

Finally, I squeezed myself past the giants and their exotically beautiful dates, many of whom were celebrities in some capacity. Famous was famous, regardless of how that title was earned. I did not consider myself in the category. Becoming a celebrity had never been on my bingo card. That was for my rock star dad, my Oscar-winning actress sister, and my extended family with their own careers. Like Evan, who was the youngest basketball player on his team but who currently held the highest-paying contract in basketball history.

That wasn’t just because he was a good player. He was—I’d give him that—but his agent was amazingly talented and a shark.

My gaze landed on Damien, and I made a quick assessment. All his limbs were still attached to his body. No visible blood. He was standing upright, unaided. I almost released a relieved breath when I noticed the expression on his handsome face. Normally, he could mask his emotions well in public. It came from having people with cameras stalking our family our entire lives. But now, I could read the worry on his face, the concern mixed with a little fear and trepidation.

Damien glanced at his phone, then lifted his eyes to scan the room. His shoulders visibly tensed, practically lifting to his ears before he forced them to drop and spoke to the person beside him.

That was when I paused, my eyes locking on the man who stood beside my baby brother. Around me, the noise level suddenly seemed muted. My ears began to ring as the version of the man mere yards away transformed into the version of him I knew intimately from what felt like another lifetime.

Dark hair, golden skin, and the most intensely dark lashes that surrounded the lightest blue eyes I’d ever seen, towering over me at seven-two with the kind of smile that made smart girls do the most embarrassingly stupid things girls could do. Fall in love.

He had Turkish maternal grandparents and a Irish father, and when the DNA combined, it had produced the most beautiful male specimen ever to walk the world in mortal form.

Then I blinked, the version barely shifting. His hair was shorter, his eyes a little less bright. No smile. Older, for sure. But still the most handsome man I’d ever seen.

Motherfucker.