Risk: A Military Stepbrother Bad Boy Romance Read Online Free Page A

already stalking downstairs like a wild animal freed from his cage.

 
    DAMIEN
     
    “Harry, lighten up on the kid!” I roared as I stormed into the kitchen, ready, no, itching for a fight. Just let him fucking try it.
     
    Dakota sat at the kitchen table, slumped over and sulking. Her face was puffy and red—partially from crying, it looked like, but just as much from drinking.
     
    “Who the fuck are you?” she slurred when she saw me.
     
    “That’s your brother,” Harry grunted. He was nursing his left hand. The wall next to him had a dent in it; that’d be a bitch to fix. But I put the puzzles pieces together immediately: he hadn’t hit her. He’d hit the wall instead.
     
    Well, I couldn’t get too worked up over the destruction of antebellum interior design, I guess.
     
    Sarah came tumbling down the stairs after me.
     
    “Dakota, I told you not to be staying out so late…” she murmured, running over to her sister. Dakota pushed her off.
     
    The two girls looked terribly similar, even though they were otherwise totally different creatures—Sarah was dressed fairly modestly, besides those jeans that clung to her fantastic ass. But that wasn’t something she could control. Dakota, on the other hand… She wore a little girl’s spaghetti tank top that stopped at her belly, revealing a pierced naked. Below that? A skirt so tight and so short that it had to be a joke. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it on her right then and there. She looked like a pedophile’s dream: a barely pubescent version of Sarah dressed up to the nines like Lolita ready to go out on the town.
     
    “I hate all of you!” Dakota squealed, stumbling to her feet and dashing clumsily up the stairs. Presumably to her room. No one followed her.
     
    “Fucking kid…” Harry muttered. I noticed another glass of bourbon in his hand. It was already half-empty. He downed it, poured another, and downed that.
     
    And then, it was like Sarah and I were invisible. I glanced back at her, shook my head, and started back upstairs.
     
    “Where are you going?” she hissed.
     
    “I’m going to go tell Dakota to cut it out.”
     
    “She’ll just curse you out.”
     
    I shrugged.
     
    “That’s fine. What kind of idea is she getting if no one tells her not to do this shit? That tells her that no one gives a fuck about her. And she’ll just keep doing it.”
     
    Sarah followed me up the stairs and pointed to one of the doors. It had a kid’s name plate on it: Dakota, in big, loopy pink letters, with butterflies.
     
    I knocked.
     
    “Go away!” Dakota screamed from inside.
     
    “Dakota, it’s Damien. I’m coming in.”
     
    If it were the Marines, I just would have busted in. But there’s a difference between breaching a door with hostiles behind it and talking to an angry teenager, I figured.
     
    I eased the door open and Sarah followed me silently. Dakota was sitting on her window sill, smoking out the window, her phone lying in her lap.
     
    “This is my fucking room—“ she started off.
     
    “Dakota, don’t talk to our brother like that…” Sarah murmured lamely from behind me.
     
    “What the fuck is her doing here?”
     
    “He just got out of the Marines and he’s going to be staying here for a while.”
     
    “I’m going to be finishing up high school,” I told Dakota. “And if you keep acting like this, you’re going to be in my position when you’re my age too.”
     
    “Fuck if I care,” Dakota scowled, taking a drag off her cigarette. I sighed, caught her hand, and plucked the cigarette out of her fingers.
     
    “Hey, that’s mine!”
     
    “From now on, no more smoking,” I told her.
     
    “You’re not the boss of me. “
     
    “Nope,” I agreed. “But if I catch anyone buying cigarettes for you or selling cigarettes to you, I’m going to kick their teeth in.”
     
    “Fuck you.”
     
    “From now on, you’re home for dinners.”
     
    “Fuck you.”
     
    “If