My Billionaire Stepbrother (Lexi's Sexy Billionaire Romance #1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that’s how their compasses are tuned. Back then, there was only me and my world. There was school, and there were boys. If it didn’t affect me, I remember not quite thinking, then it wasn’t really worth my attention.  
    So it was with Mom and Bill.  
    I didn’t see how he was probably wrong for her until it was too late — until it began to affect me. I knew I didn’t like him but didn’t think he was bad, which he wasn’t. He was bad for her, it turned out. He dragged her down, enabled her, magnified her weaknesses while unintentionally muffling her strengths. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault, even now. But looking back, it was clearly the beginning of an end. Or the middle , seeing as we’d always been sort of trapped in our station, prisoners of our neighborhood.  
    Some people dream big. I’d always dreamed moderately. In my teens, I knew I wanted my own place and a nice handsome man to love me. It was all I could imagine, but it was enough.  
    Bill came casually into our life, and it didn’t seem all that odd that he wanted to move in. As long as it didn’t affect me, it didn’t matter … and until Bill brought over his first carload of stuff, I wasn’t affected and somehow never imagined I would be. They started talking about it; I went to school. Mom’s cessation from drink had freed up enough money to buy me a shitty enough car to grant me some precious independence.  
    I had my car.
    I had my room, like my life, the way I wanted it.  
    My mother had stopped drinking, and was better than she’d been since Dad had left her. Left us .  
    I was in the middle of my high school’s social pecking order: not really popular but not unpopular either. I had enough self-confidence to know I was pretty and was told by others that I was prettier than I realized. I rebuffed the attention because I’ve always been shy, maybe even standoffish. But it was good enough, and I had friends. I dated a little, though never seriously.  
    For a long time, I was fine with the idea of Bill moving in.  
    Until he brought his son to our house one day, to get us all acquainted.
    I should have known something was off when Bill was nervous.  
    “Now, I should tell you,” he said that day, his jaw shifting, his eyes avoiding ours, “my son — Parker. He’s … unique.”  
    Unique . That’s what you say about someone who you can’t conjure another adjective for, so you say something vaguely upbeat. Kind of like how people call developmentally delayed people “special” or say that ugly people have nice personalities.  
    I found it interesting that I was being prepped for “uniqueness.” In a normal world, that wouldn’t be something that people had to prepare for. If he were unique, I’d have met him without preamble, then thought, Wow, this boy is something special, and that would have been it. But here I was, being steeled for supposedly the same thing.  
    “Okay,” I said.  
    Mom looked at Bill, drumming her fingers on her knees. I was the only one being prepared. Whatever uniqueness this boy was infected with, she’d already had her vaccines. They were on the couch, and I was on the chair opposite the coffee table. They looked like two parents informing a child of a forthcoming divorce.  
    “You can just stay a little while,” Mom said, as if granting a favor.  
    “Just long enough to get a feel for him,” Bill echoed.  
    “Okay,” I told them.  
    Parker didn’t come on his own. Bill had to go get him. Looking back, there was probably no way he would have come otherwise. Bill and his wife were divorced like Mom and Dad, but Bill had custody. I didn’t think that meant anything at the time. It also didn’t seem strange that Bill spent a lot of his nights at our house, drunk, despite his responsibility, leaving Parker alone.  
    Bill knocked, though he already had the habit of walking right into our house. I opened the front door and saw Bill standing beside a boy I knew to be