Redeemed Book 2: A Military Stepbrother Romance (4 page)

“The police are here,” was all he said, low, and thoughtful, but seemingly unsurprised, like he’d expected this to happen all along and he’d been just killing him with me waiting for the police to arrive.

Oh.

Shit.

Chapter 15 - The Police

“What? The police?” That couldn’t have been right.

“The police are here.” Harrison’s voice was calm, resigned. Like this didn’t surprise him at all. Of course, this had happened before, but not in a long time. And certainly not when he was about to have sex with his stepsister.

“You said that part. Where’s the rest of the joke?”

Harrison didn’t have to humor me with the next part, but he did anyway. “There is no rest of the joke. That’s them downstairs now.”

Oh shit. “What do we do?”

Harrison pulled himself together, which was great, because I was getting ready to freak out. “I’m going to get dressed,” he said calmly, “and I highly suggest you do the same.”

That spurred me into motion. I nodded and forced my head down and around, looking for the clothing I’d so hastily discarded just a few minutes earlier. My bra was close by, but my shirt and pants were on the other side of the room.

We’d been pretty excited to get each other alone a few minutes ago. I quickly got dressed, trying to make as little noise as possible. By the time I looked back at Harrison, he’d gotten his shirt and pants back on.
 

He made his way to the door and opened it, then stopped and turned to me. “You wait a couple minutes before you come down.” I nodded. “And take a look the mirror, your makeup’s run a little bit.” We both smiled at that, despite the tense situation we suddenly found ourselves in.

Visions of the fun we’d just had and how good Harrison was at touching me, and the waves of pleasure I felt, the tremors of which still pulsed through me despite the dramatic change in tone in the room, made me ache for when we’d be able to resume our fooling around.

Of course, if we’d had just a few minutes more what we’d been doing would have been “finishing up sex” rather than “having sex.”

Then he was gone, and I heard his footsteps go down the hall then the stairs, all while the pounding on the door continued.I figured by now they know, or think that no one was home, before it hit me: Harrison’s car was parked outside on the curb. And there were lights on in the house.

So they must know someone was home.

I wondered if the police still new Harrison’s car by site. I stood in front of the mirror and checked myself out, running a towel I had sitting on the shelf over my face, clearing off my smudged makeup. Smudged from all the fun…

No, this was not the time to think about that. There would be plenty more time for that later.

Back in the day, the police were coming around our house often enough that, as Harrison put it, if they happen to see his car parked somewhere in town, they immediately sent a couple extra patrol cars around, just to make sure he wasn’t up to something new good. I wondered if that rule still applied.

Downstairs I heard Harrison opened the door, but I couldn’t hear the words they were exchanging afterwards. I focused again on my appearance; and looked all right, like I had just woken up from a nap. A nap. Yeah, that was the ticket. That would be my cover story.

It was weird that I felt like I needed a cover story even though I was in my own home. It didn’t feel like Harrison and I were sneaking around, and we certainly weren’t deceiving anyone, but all the same I didn’t want anyone to know what we were doing.

Hell, I didn’t even want anyone to suspect it.

I took a deep breath, letting the sigh escaped me as I once again replayed the feeling of Harrison’s hands on my body, the touch of his lips against mine, and I felt myself flush all over again with passion and lust before my breath had entirely let out.

The things that man could do to me. Not just could. I shuddered at the very idea of the things I would let that man do to me. The levels of sensual depravity we could reach together Threatened to knock me over where I stood.

Unfortunately that would have to wait. I strained my ears, trying to pick up the conversation downstairs. Back in high school these conversations with the police usually ended up in loud arguing, and shouting between my father and Harrison when the police finally left, at least temporarily mollified.

Harrison almost never said a word during these confrontations. And if he did, it was always in the sweetest and softest voice. My father would get so angry, railing against all the bad things Harrison did, and Harrison would just sit there and smile at him.

So many times, my father wanted to send him to military school, wanted to send him off somewhere where they would teach him a thing or two about discipline and respecting other people. Yet, every time, his mother, my stepmother, would step in and shield him. She would calm my father down, remind him of a hard time Harrison had gone through after losing his own father.

My father was no stranger to loss; his parents and younger sister had been killed in a car accident many years before. So despite how much he always wanted to send Harrison away, eventually he would relent. Eventually, his voice would soften, his anger would subside, and he would try to create a connection with Harrison, something beyond stepfather and stepson.

My father would try to tell Harrison, to show him that he understood what Harrison was going. Back then, Harrison would’nt listen to them. Harrison only wanted to listen to himself, and, I think, the inner demons drove Him.

It was ironic, but Harrison ended up joining the military after all. Not quite the same thing as a military school, but they sure are taught him discipline, and respect for other people. I remembered the day he came home and told my father that he had enlisted.

My father had been too stunned for words. I don’t think I could recall ever having seen him so surprised in my entire life. Harrison did it with little fanfare, he walked in, while we were eating dinner, through his enlistment papers on the dinner table, told us he was shipping out to basic in a couple weeks, and walked out the door, after grabbing a chicken leg from the bowl.

My stepmother and picked up the papers and started reading them, similarly unable to speak. My father sat back in his chair, a look of shock on his face, his mouth opening and closing without sound, as he tried to find the words to express what he was going through. Finally, tears began streaming down his face.

I was numb too, but for a different reason. I knew that my father wanted nothing more than to help Harrison through whatever he was working through. By that point, he had given up, and just wanted him to go off somewhere else and solve his own problems.

I wanted Harrison gone for a different reason. I just wanted him out of my life. We had never gotten along, and just as I would get numb to whatever torment he had thought up, he would come up with something new, some different way to bother me.

I wasn’t so much thrilled that Harrison was getting his life together, as I was thrilled that he was leaving mine. Of course, I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, but if there was a way to knock him down a peg, make him a little more humble, I would be okay with That.

By the time Harrison shipped out for basic training a couple weeks later, my father had found the words he needed to tell Harrison how proud he was of him, and how hopeful he was that the military would be a good experience. Harrison, for his part, didn’t make much of an attempt to connect with my father before leaving. He had his stuff in a duffel bag and was silent on the way to the bus station. We all piled into the car, and drove without speaking.

At the bus station, we arrived just before the bus was scheduled to leave, so there wasn’t much time for goodbyes. My stepmother had cried, and my father shook Harrison’s hand, trying to give him a hug that Harrison wormed his way out of. When he came to me, Harrison stood in front of me and just nodded, calling me some terrible nickname for me that I hated. I tried is home to be careful, but by the time I spoke I was looking to the back of his head as he stepped onto the bus. He chose a seat on the other side of the bus and held his eyes forward the entire time before the bus left.

That was the last time I’d seen Harrison before yesterday. It was like they were two different people. It was like the military had discovered, no, it was as if the military had broken into Harrison and liberated the man was there underneath all the while from the boy desperately trying to keep his real self inside.

I was still nervous as hell around the new Harrison, but at least he seemed nicer, and he seemed to enjoy kissing me. That was a definite step up from the old Harrison.

Unfortunately, now, it seemed whenever fun we were to have this evening was doomed to be interrupted by the past. The police were still talking to Harrison in the doorway when I stepped out of my room and made my way down the hall, wincing each time the creaking floor announced my presence.

I took another deep breath before I started down the stairs, trying as much as possible to clear my head of the thoughts of Harrison’s body above mine, feeling his hardness press up against me, and wanting him to go that one final step in sink himself inside me.

No. I had to focus. This wasn’t a pesky neighbor coming by to welcome us home for the holidays. This wasn’t a package delivery. This wasn’t even an old ex-girlfriend of Harrison’s; I shook my head, because he never ever called them girlfriends before. They were always girls he knew, girls he had fun with. Never anything so serious as a girlfriend.

This wasn’t one of those, come by to welcome Harrison back to town, to see if they could rekindle anything in the brief time he was here. No, this was the law. Harrison had enough experience with the law that they would not give him the benefit of the doubt.

Even after all his service to this country. When he wasn’t in uniform, the local police had him pegged as a malcontent, a ne’er-do-well.

A criminal.

I made my way down the stairs, step groaning as I passed by. First I saw Harrison’s feet, and as I got lower, the view moved up his legs to his amazing ass, to his wide back. From around the edges of his body, clad in his loose shirt and pants, I could see the shapes of two police officers standing side-by-side.

One was older, and looked vaguely familiar. The other was younger, maybe three or four years older than me, and his eyes shifted around nervously, flicking back and forth between watching Harrison and watching me come down stairs. The other, older, police officer gave me a quick glance then focused all his attention back on his conversation with Harrison.

The words started to make sense as I got down the steps and closer. “You’ll have to come with us, Harrison.”

“I just got into town, what’s this about?”

“You know what this is about. It’s about what happened last night at the Crown. We’ve had some reports.”

“Reports?”

“That you assaulted someone in the parking lot.”

I stood off to the side, not saying a word, but seeing Harrison’s hands balled together in fists. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell from the back of his body at he was reliving those moments from the Crown parking lot last night when he taught Steve a lesson about trying to force himself on girls.

“More than that,” the older officer continued, “we spoken to the guy you assaulted. He wants to press charges, and he named you specifically as the man who assaulted him.” The officer stopped and stared at Harrison, gauging his reaction.

Harrison looked down, away from the police, in my direction behind him. “That’s not the whole story,” he whispered just loud enough for me to hear.

I stepped forward, and cleared my throat. “Harrison was…”

Harrison whipped his head around to face me, just as the older police officer put his hand on Harrison’s arm. Harrison shook him off before focusing on me again. “Don’t say a word, Laurel. I’ll take care of this.” The anger in his face and his voice was clear. Harrison was trying to keep it together, and not being as successful as he would like to be.

I clamped my mouth shut, not wanting to complicate things anymore. I had never dealt with the police, beyond getting a traffic ticket, so I was a little out of my element. Harrison, he was another story. The way the older police officer addressed him, and interacted with him, suggested that they knew each other. I wondered if this police officer had arrested Harrison in the past.

Harrison turned again to face the officers. “You’re making a mistake.”

The older officer sighed. “You may be correct. It will be the first time we’ve ever made a mistake if that’s the case. But we have to run this down, and treated with the proper respect. You’ll have to come with us.”

The younger officer chose that moment to step forward and grasp Harrison’s left arm. That turned out to be a mistake. With a flash Harrison had gripped the younger officers wrist and begun to twist.The younger officer yelped in pain, shaking before dropping to his knees, his face a mask of hurt. With his other hand the officer began to unclip holster.

“Stow that, patrolman,” The older officer said, before looking back at Harrison, Who continued to twist the younger officer’s wrist. ”Let him go. You don’t want to make things worse for yourself.”

Harrison paused, then I saw his grip slacken and the younger officer, still on his knees, was able to get wrist free, cradling it in his other hand, His eyes filled with tears. Harrison looked down. “I’m sorry about that,” he whispered.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see if the patrolman here can see it in his heart to forgive you. You’re still didn’t have to come with us.”

“But Harrison didn’t do anything wrong!” I shouted.

The older detective stayed calm. “We’ll figure that out down the station.”

The younger officer stood up, shaky at first, still running his fingers over his twisted wrist. Focusing again on Harrison, He snarled, “put your hands behind your back.”

Harrison’s eyes widened, and mine must have also. “What?”

“You heard the man,” the older officer said, “we wanted to do this nicely, but you had other ideas. Put your hands behind your back.” The force behind his words was clear; Harrison would be leaving in handcuffs.