BIG: (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) Read Free

stung where she’d scraped it.
     
    But it wasn’t her Gucci luggage at fault, was it?
     
    Her bag hadn’t been the one who’d ignored Ric’s last email demanding a confirmation of her flight times for the driver, had it? No, it had been Annalesa, so annoyed by her stepbrother’s tenacity, who had immediately opened her laptop and applied for a Hertz Gold account, deciding then and there that she was going to drive herself home from the airport. She wasn’t some helpless infant who needed chauffeuring around, she told him in her head, no matter how much money their parents had.
     
    She’d forgotten that she hadn’t driven in America since... bloody hell, she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been behind the wheel of a car in the states. Driving on the right-hand side of the road had been the least of it. It had taken her half an hour to figure out how wide the Kia Sedona was compared to the road—thankfully, Kias were rather compact.
     
    But the real test had come at her first intersection, where she was attempting to make a cautious left turn. How the hell was she supposed to know she had to wait for the round green light and the little green arrow? The blare of that giant pickup truck’s horn behind her would probably haunt her dreams for the next three weeks. Driving in London wasn’t easy, but at least there, green actually meant go.
     
    She heaved her matching pair of Gucci bags into the den and flopped down on the white leather sofa, spreading her arms out along the back and sighing up the ceiling before closing her eyes to rest them. At least all the lights were on, which made her feel a little better about being home alone. Flying first class on Virgin Atlantic wasn’t exactly travel hell, but she could’ve done without the layover in Detroit. Backward airlines, taking her all the way to dirty, dingy Detroit, and then doubling back to the green forests of Maine—the place she would always think of as “home.”
     
    Which was where the heart—and her stepbrother—both were.
     
    Thinking about Ric made her jaw clench and Annalesa took a long, slow, steadying breath. How long had it been? Four years? Too long to be out of touch with someone she’d once spent practically every day with. But she was home again now, and their parents expected the two of them to play nice, like good step siblings, to hang out and celebrate their respective graduations with a combined party for all their friends and family.
     
    Of course, their parents had no idea what happened the last time Annalesa had seen her stepbrother. They hadn’t heard the yelling, hadn’t been witness to her tears. She’d always been good at hiding her feelings—she’d been born in England, after all—and this had been no exception. She’d gone to school, like the good girl she was, and never talked about it to anyone. Not even Ric.
     
    Not that he made communicating with him easy. He’d been ignoring her emails completely for the past year. And her Facebook messages. And Tweets. And Snapchats. It had been complete silence from him, right up until the last few weeks. If she hadn’t been in communication with her parents, she might have thought something bad had happened to him, but no—Ric was fine.
     
    He just wasn’t talking to her.
     
    She told herself she wasn’t going to let his lack of communication bother her, even though she found herself hoping he would thaw enough to respond, even if it was just to be a jerk. His silence was somehow worse than the terse, sarcastic comments she’d gotten from him the first three years she’d been away at school. She would have even welcomed that brusque, nearly-hostile Ric back, if he’d just talk to her.
     
    Annalesa didn’t know what to expect, after all this time. His email demanding to know her arrival information had been the first time he’d reached out, and it had sent her into a tailspin. Instead of answering, she’d decided to ignore him and give him back