Stepbrother Forbidden (Stepbrother, Where Art Thou? Book 2) Read Free

times in Ryan's messages to his friends, and it apparently had a reputation for hiring bartenders who didn't look too closely at ID cards. Now she'd seen it she understood why: no respectable adult would ever want to drink in such a hole.
     
    The place was... well, it was awful. The tables were sticky. The lights were dim. The jukebox had been playing the same dozen or so songs on a loop since she'd arrived, and for some reason it seemed to be stocked with music from just two artists: Bruce Springsteen and Celine Dion.
     
    It was also the kind of place that served beer in disposable plastic cups, and while Sophia's experience of bars extended only to what she'd seen in movies she guessed it wasn't a style choice. In fact, she was pretty sure it was because this was the kind of place where people got so wasted they couldn't hold onto a glass long enough to finish their drink, and the breakages had become too expensive.
     
    Sophia tried to block out the grungy, sticky atmosphere and retreated back into her own world. She stared at the Facebook feed on her iPhone screen, searching for a confidante she might be able to talk to about all this shit, but no matter how much she screwed up her eyes and frowned at the pixels they still displayed the same 30 or so friends.
     
    Not even friends, really. Sophia had read that the average college aged woman had around 650 Facebook friends. Surely they couldn't all be close - nobody can have that many real friends, surely - but it was probably safe to assume that, hidden away in those 650 faces, most young women knew at least a few people they could tell anything; a few who knew all of their embarrassing secrets, darkest desires and most hopeful aspirations. Everyone has that one friend who knows about the time they accidentally peed their pants in school, or had a weird sex dream about someone embarrassing.
     
    Not Sophia. She'd never quite managed to crack that code... never figured out the trick to winning friends that every other girl seemed to just know. She'd never been able to make that leap from ' hey, is this seat taken?' to ' hey, you wanna be best friends?' that seemed to come so naturally to everyone else.
     
    In fact, Sophia had only ever had one person in her life who made her feel completely safe; someone she knew she could trust with her secrets, safe in the knowledge that she'd never be judged: her mother. Since she was a little girl she'd known that whatever happened, whatever she felt, or thought, or had done, she could turn to her mom and tell her the truth without fear. In a complex, confusing and frightening world that woman had always been the one constant.
     
    Until now.
     
    Sophia may have been able to tell her mom about her feelings for Ryan. She could pour her heart out, and maybe she'd understand. Maybe she'd understand if she knew about what had happened in the bedroom. Maybe she'd understand if she saw the two years of messages, knew that these emotions had been simmering beneath the surface since long before Isabel had even met Ryan's dad, and that the pot had only boiled over when Sophia had been forced into the room beside his. Maybe she'd even give her blessing. Maybe she'd think it wasn't totally fucked up. Hell, maybe she'd be completely fine with Sophia dating her soon-to-be-husband's son. Maybe it was only a big deal in Sophia's head.
     
    That was the problem. The maybe .
     
    Sophia couldn't risk it. She couldn't risk destroying the relationship she'd built with her mom over the last 18 years. She wouldn't - couldn't - do anything to jeopardize that, and she wouldn't do anything that might steal the smile away from her mother's face, and the happiness from her eyes. Both had been all too rare over the course of her life, what with the abuse she'd suffered at the hands of Sophia's dad, and then having to raise her daughter without any help from anyone. Sophia refused to be the one to take her happiness away. She wouldn't.
     
    But she couldn't