Claim Me, Alpha StepBrothers

Your T*ts Are Out

~Olive~

Two hundred and forty people turn to watch us come down the staircase, and I am absolutely going to fall.

I know it the second I take the first step. The heels are too high, the dress is too long.

Vanessa back at me halfway down, and her eyes do the thing they did in the bedroom and they snag on my chest, and a little crease appears between her perfect brows.

“Oh..babe.” leaning back toward me like she’s doing me the world’s biggest favor. “You might want to tuck a napkin in there when we sit. So you’re not, like, spilling out in the wedding photos. Everyone’s grandma is here.” A warm little smile. “I’m just looking out for you.”

“That’s so thoughtful,” I say. “But I think I’ll let the girls breathe. It’s a wedding, not a convent.”

Her smile tightens a hair. She faces front again and then, like she can’t help it, like it’s been sitting on her tongue the whole way down.

“It’s just, Crew’s family is really traditional, you know? Richard’s super old-fashioned about that kind of thing. You don’t want to make a bad first impression your first weekend.” A pause. “And the boys notice everything. Cas especially. He’s, like, scary observant. I’d hate for you to get the wrong kind of attention before you’ve even unpacked.”

The boys notice everything.

There it is. She’s not talking about Richard. She’s not talking about grandmas. She’s talking about the boys, plural, and the careful way she says it..light, casual, a friendly little warning does not quite cover the thing underneath it, which is a girl who has already decided I’m a threat and is trying to manage me before I become one.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say sweetly.

“You’re the best.” She beams, relieved, like she’s handled it.

She has not handled it.

Because we reach the bottom of the staircase, and that’s when she finds out exactly how much she hasn’t handled it because both of them are standing there.

Crew first, because my eyes always find Crew first, the traitors. Black suit, no tie, leaning against the newel post like he owns it. And his eyes come up the staircase past his own girlfriend, past the emerald silk gliding down toward him with both arms already reaching for him and they land on me.

They drag up the front of me, exactly where Vanessa told me to put a napkin, and climb to my face. His jaw flexes. His throat moves once.

Vanessa sees it.

I watch her see it. I watch her reach the bottom step, arms open for her boyfriend, babe, and I watch her register that her boyfriend is not looking at her that he’s looking over her shoulder, up the stairs, at me.

“Babe.” She says it a little louder than she needs to. Slides her arm through Crew’s, turns her body into his, plants herself directly in his sightline. “There you are. God, you look so good in this suit, I can’t stand it.”

Crew’s eyes come down to her, lazy, half a second late. “Hey, beautiful.”

He kisses her temple.

He’s watching me while he does it.

And next to him half a step back, in black, perfectly still..Cas.

Cas isn’t dragging his eyes up me like his brother. Cas is just watching, flat and gray and unreadable, hands at his sides and somehow that’s worse, because Crew looks at me like he wants something and Cas looks at me like he already decided something. I’m so busy trying to figure out which is more dangerous that I forget where my feet are.

My heel catches the hem.

The world tips. s**t.

My hand flies off the banister and grabs nothing, and I get one bright, clear half-second of here it is, I’m going to break my neck in a pink dress in front of two hundred and forty people.

And a hand closes around mine.

His long fingers wrapping all the way around my hand and pulling, and an arm bands around my waist and hauls me up against his chest, my palm flat against his chest, his heartbeat under my hand, fast..faster than a man that calm has any right to be and I look up.

Cas.

He crossed the bottom of the staircase in two strides I never saw and now I’m in his arms, and his hand is around mine, and his other hand is splayed across the small of my back, and he’s holding me like I weigh nothing, like catching falling girls is just a thing he does, and his face is six inches from mine.

And the string in my chest doesn’t pull this time.

It ignites. f**k.

“You okay?”

“Bad shoes,” I say, which is the dumbest possible thing to say, and it comes out all breathy and wrong, like I just jogged here. “I’m fine. Thanks. For the. Catch.”

Cool. Very cool, Olive. Real complete sentences. Yale’s going to be thrilled.

His eyes drop to my mouth. Come back up. He still hasn’t let go of my hand and I still haven’t pulled it back and neither of us is acknowledging this and it is fine.

“Aww.”

Vanessa.

She’s at the bottom of the stairs, hand pressed to her chest, looking at the two of us like she just caught a kitten in a teacup, and my stomach drops, because I know that aww. That is not a nice aww. That is an aww with a knife taped to the bottom of it.

“Look at you two.” Sweet. So sweet. Splenda-and-strychnine sweet. “You look so cute together.”

Cas drops my hand like it’s on fire.

And me.

“What’s your problem, Vanessa?” I’m grinning at her, hands going up, the whole bit. “He’s my stepbrother. Like as of an hour from now, legally, on paper, signed and notarized. We’re going to be family. This isn’t cute, this is a man not letting the new stepsister face-plant on your future father-in-law’s marble. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. Roll credits.”

Vanessa loops her arm through Crew’s. Tilts her head. And her smile gets wider, which — no. No, that’s wrong, that’s not how this is supposed to go, she’s supposed to back down, she backed down upstairs.

“You’re not related by blood, though.”

“Are you?”

And okay. Okay.

Cas has gone statue-still beside me. Crew’s gone statue-still beside her. Two hundred and forty people somewhere behind us and it is suddenly extremely the four of us.

Say something, Olive. Say something. You always say something. This is the one thing you do.

“No,” I say.

“Not by blood. But I’m pretty sure f*****g my stepbrother is exactly as weird as it sounds.” I scoop my mother’s flowers off the side table. “Your man’s safe. Both of them are. Nobody here wants anybody.”

Great line.

Would’ve been a better line if a single word of it were true.

Vanessa studies me one more second and I watch her decide. I watch her decide she’s made her point, decide she’s too smart to push it in front of the whole family on the wedding day, decide to slide the knife back in its little sheath and smile.

“Of course not.” Warm again. Squeezing my arm like we’re girls. “God, listen to me. Wedding nerves. Ignore me, babe.”

She tugs Crew toward the garden. “Come on, baby, I want good seats.”

And Crew goes but he looks back at me once over his shoulder, at me and at the six inches of air where his brother just was, and that flat furious thing is still sitting in his eyes and it has not gotten one bit smaller.

Cas waits until they’re gone.

“That dress.”

“What about it?” I’m already bracing. “Too much? You want me in a turtleneck for the family photos too, Cassius? Should I..”

“Stop talking.”

He looks at me. Takes his time about it.

“When you came down those stairs,” he says, “every man in that foyer stopped breathing. Including the ones who shouldn’t have.” A pause. “Including me.”

“You want to know what I noticed about that dress?” He steps in. Closer. Close enough that I have to tip my head back, and his voice drops lower, even, deliberate, every word placed exactly where he wants it. “I noticed my brother forgot his own girlfriend was on the stairs. I noticed two hundred people pretend they weren’t looking. And I noticed that you knew — you knew exactly what you were doing in it, and you wore it anyway, and you walked down those stairs like a girl who wanted the whole room on its knees.” His eyes hold mine. “It worked, sweetheart. Look around. Everyone’s already down there. You just haven’t noticed yet.”

I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe and I cannot speak and I cannot do a single one of the things I am known for.

“So no don’t listen to Vanessa” His jaw ticks.

Oh that means he heard.

“Don’t tuck a napkin in it. Don’t change a thing. Wear exactly what you’re wearing.” He straightens. Steps back. “Just understand that I’m going to be watching every man who looks at you tonight. And I have a long memory. And a very short list of things I’m willing to share.”

He turns toward the garden.

Stops.

Doesn’t look back at me when he says.

“You look beautiful, Olive. It’s a problem. For both of us.”

And then he left.

For both of us.

“What does that even mean,” I say to myself.

Then I square my shoulders, fix my grip on the flowers, lift my chin, and walk out into the garden to watch my mother get married with my heart going like a kick drum and absolutely no idea which of these brothers is going to be the death of me.

My money’s on both.