Read Dare: A Stepbrother Romance for Free Online

that. He’s been legally dead for a long time now.”
    She never referred to him as ‘your Dad’ when she spoke to me about him. It was always ‘your father’ in a stiff voice. Any other person might not have picked up on such a small detail, but to me it was glaringly obvious. She hated the man, and honestly, I couldn’t blame her. I knew it was an awful thing to say I couldn’t stand my own father, but if people had seen the horrible monster he truly was behind closed doors, then they’d understand.
    One of the only people who probably really understood was Drew, as much of an asshole he was these days. Seeing as he’d grown up next door, he’d been all too aware of what went on in my house during my younger years. He’d probably heard my Mom crying, my Dad’s shouts before he smacked her in the face and dragged her by her hair to the ground so he could kick her…and he’d also heard the shaky, wailing sounds of my terror as he crouched in my playhouse with me. The backyard playhouse was the one place I could escape to when I was frightened. The entrance to it was far too small for a tall, heavy man like my father to get into, so whenever I was afraid, I’d scurry into there and turn a flashlight on and off three times. If Drew saw the flashes from his window, he’d make an excuse to his Dad to come next door, and he’d comfort me for as long as I needed.
    We never actually spoke about it outside of those moments. It was just something that happened. Most people thought my Dad was a great guy, and they had no idea of the awful things he did to my Mom when they were alone in their home. Although she was short and physically weaker than any man, my Mom was still the strongest person I knew. She’d tried so hard to make sure he never abused me, only her. I didn’t want to hurt her even more, so I’d never told her what he did to me when she wasn’t around to stop him or take the brunt of his anger for me. One time, he’d put a cigarette out on my leg because I’d taken too long to find his favorite ashtray for him. I’d hidden the burn from my mother under a band-aid and told her I scraped my leg falling off my new bike, because I knew if I told her, she’d say something to him about it and earn herself another drunken beating from him.
    The day he’d disappeared off that boat had been the happiest day of my young life, as awful as that sounds. I thought Christmas, Easter and the Tooth Fairy had all come at once when my Mom told me he wasn’t coming home. We no longer had to live our lives in terror, constantly walking on eggshells around him so as to not set him off.
    “Can I ask you something else?” I said after taking a long sip of coffee.
    “Of course.”
    “Why didn’t you leave him? All those years and everything he did to you. You could’ve just taken me and run away.”
    She sighed. “It wasn’t that easy, Sophie. Trust me, I considered it a million times. He was a nice guy when we got married, believe it or not. A couple of years in, it was like he just snapped. He made me quit my job, he controlled what I wore, what music I listened to, the way I did my hair…everything. Then the physical abuse started. By the time you were four, he was a total sociopath. A far cry from the man I thought I married.”
    She paused and then continued. “I told him I was going to leave, and he just sniffed and said we could go, but he’d find us and kill us if we did that. I was terrified he’d go through with his threats. So I stayed. I tried to make sure he never hurt you. For years, I thought about getting us both away and finding somewhere to hide so that he couldn’t get to us, but then he disappeared and I didn’t even have to worry about it anymore.”
    Her story made my stomach lurch, and I dropped my croissant, no longer hungry at all.
    She looked at me for a long moment and then continued. “That’s why I’ve always tried to stress how important education is for you. I hadn’t