TEASE ( A Stepbrother Romance ) By Caitlin Daire

27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Cade

Two years later

"How am I still so bad at this?"

I glanced over at Charlotte as she picked herself up from the freezing ground and dusted snow off her ski gear, and I chuckled. "I don't know. I guess you're the brainy one in this relationship, and I'm the more physical one."

She sidled up next to me and pinched my butt. "I can be physical too, if you know what I mean."

"I do know. You're a Charlotte in the streets and a harlot in the sheets."

"Cade!" she said, feigning horror before giggling. "I would've never thought that one day I'd actually be amused by hearing that stupid 'Charlotte the Harlot' thing again."

"Well, you have to admit, the nickname wasinvented by a very handsome man who you're very lucky to be skiing with right now."

She shook her head and laughed, and we began the trudge over to our cabin at the Silverton Falls ski resort. It was the same one we'd been to the first time I'd ever taken Charlotte skiing, and while she'd associated some bad memories with the place for a while after that, it was all in the past now. Nicki had proven herself to be truly sorry for her actions on that trip, and she and Charlotte were actually very close friends now. In fact, she and Blake-who was now her boyfriend-were actually here on this vacation with us. Blake's father still owned the resort, so we got a pretty sweet discount on our cabin.

We'd come up here to celebrate the end of final year exams. We all officially had Bachelor degrees now, and now was a good time for Charlotte and I to spend some quality time together before our lives got even more hectic and serious. Charlotte had passed her degree with honors, and she was starting med school next year back in our home city of Philly at the Perelman School of Medicine, which was one of the best, and I'd been drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the fifth round of the most recent NFL Draft. I was just the fourth string quarterback for now, but I knew if I worked hard enough, I'd be the starter within a few years.

While Philly and Pittsburgh were in the same state, they were still a fair distance apart-a five hour drive-which meant Charlotte and I weren't going to be seeing each other every day.

Maybe not even every week.

But we knew we'd be fine. We loved each other, and even if we were five hundred hours apart, we'd still make the effort to keep up with each other and stay true. I trusted Charlotte more than anyone, and putting my trust in people wasn't exactly easy after some of the life experiences I'd had-my asshole parents, for starters. I might've once been a bit of a sleazy douchebag who had no intentions of settling down, but that had all changed the night I met Charlotte. She'd made me realize that I didn't have to hide behind some bullshit arrogant mask of macho bravado; I could just be myself and people would still care for me. Especially her. As far as I was concerned, no other women even existed, at least not in a romantic or sexual sense. Charlotte was the one, and I knew she felt the same way about me.

I was so proud of her for getting into such a good med school after the difficult time we'd had over the last couple of years with all the media attention. Surviving one of the biggest political scandals in history wasn't exactly easy, but we'd weathered it together-along with Evan and Emilia. We might not have been a conventional family, but how many families were conventional these days anyway? We loved and supported each other, and that was all that mattered in the end.

Evan had also been right about the relationship between Charlotte and I. Emilia was totally fine with it, and no one in the media (or in our friends group) had even cared all that much about the supposed 'forbidden' or 'weird' nature of our relationship when it came out that we were together. They'd made a minor fuss about how 'cute' it was, and that was it. Aside from that, they were still focused on my father, who was currently serving out a lengthy sentence in a federal prison, along with Greg Sanders and various other people who'd been part of the shooting scandal.