Stepbrother WHOA! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #5) Read Free Page A

laughed out loud.
    “Dude, everyone knows.”
    “Everyone knows what?” My voice went squeaky with
embarrassment—I hated it. I swallowed against the tight feeling in my throat.
One of the other brothers laughed.
    “Everyone knows you guys hooked up last night.”
Jaxon and I stared at everyone around us in shock for a long moment. So much
for our idea of keeping it cool, keeping it secret from everyone.
    Then Jaxon started to laugh. “Yeah, I should’ve
known someone would have seen.” The fact that everyone was so relaxed about it
made me feel a little weirded out at first; I mean, I
was friends with most of the guys in the frat—wouldn’t they treat me
differently for seeing Jaxon? But someone put a beer in my hand and asked for
my predictions about the game that night, and it was oddly just as it had
always been.
    The guys talked about it, but not in the way that
they normally chattered about the girls they hooked up with; someone
complimented Jaxon on nabbing the one girl who “got it” and Peter collected
money from everyone else who had apparently been involved in a betting pool on
the subject of when Jaxon and I would finally get together. It was like
everyone had seen it coming but Jaxon and me; I wasn’t entirely sure how much I
liked it—but the guys knew us both so well.
    While we sat around and hung out with the rest of
the boys, I realized that it was kind of obvious to anyone who had been paying
even the least bit of attention to Jaxon and me—the way that Jaxon had started
treating me differently months before, the way we avoided each other and then
started spending time together again, thick as thieves, acting like friends. I
could almost laugh at how oblivious I had been the whole time; after all, I’d
only just commented to Jaxon that morning that it seemed like the harder we
tried to stay apart the more we ended up throwing ourselves at each other.
    The weirdest part of the situation was that everyone
seemed to be really okay with it. I wasn’t sure how much the other guys
knew—after all, I hadn’t said anything about Jaxon’s dad and my mom to anyone,
but Jaxon probably had told at least one of his friends in the frat about the
situation. I couldn’t really imagine him keeping it completely a secret, even
if I had more or less managed to. So it must have been common knowledge that we
were related by marriage; but no one treated it as weird, no one told us we
were freaks. Everyone just assumed that we would get together, and now they
were all relieved that it had finally happened.
    Jaxon waylaid me as I went to the bathroom, pressing
me against the wall in the deserted hallway and kissing me. “It’s kind of weird
how okay they are with this, right?” he asked me. I nodded.
    “Yeah, it’s pretty strange. But I guess we just go
with it? I mean—no one’s calling us sick freaks for banging each other.” Jaxon
laughed.
    “I don’t know how many of them know about Dad and
your mom. But as long as no one thinks it’s disgusting, why not ride the wave?”
I shrugged.
    “I was kind of excited about the idea of having a
secret relationship. Climbing the tree outside in the middle of the night to
sneak into your room. Ending up in the wrong room. Explaining why I’m sneaking
around to Jeremy or Johnny.” Jaxon laughed out loud.
    “We can still do that, just, you know, everyone will
know you’re lying.”
    “I guess we should just be happy that we can be
‘out’ or whatever.” Jaxon nodded.
    “Never really a good idea to try and keep a secret
like that in a frat. It always falls to pieces.” Jaxon kissed me again.
“Besides, this way I can kiss you in front of everyone and show off how hot my
girlfriend is.”
    We went back out into the living room where the
makeshift party was still going on. One of the guys asked a crude question
about my oral skills and I retorted that it wasn’t for no reason that I had
picked up French so well in high school. It was weirdly fun, and