Stepbrother WHOA! (The Stepbrother Romance Series #5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

about him.
It was going to be a great day—and I knew I was going to rock it out.
    Like before, Jaxon went up first; his division was
scheduled for the slope course, and then he would move to the half-pipe. I was
going to be on the big air course shortly after he completed his first run. I
cheered him on from the sidelines, screaming my head off for him. Jaxon met my
gaze and grinned at me, and I knew he was going to hit it as hard as he could.
    We’d spent the whole ride up to the mountain
planning our strategies. There were a couple of tricks that I’d only really
started nailing when I’d been in practice earlier in the week; I was fully
planning to use the tweaks that Jaxon had taught me on the mountain and in the
practice space to make them worth the risk. I wasn’t going to go hard the way
that Jax was, but I was more than a little bit
optimistic about my chances. I would be taking home the gold that day, I told
myself firmly over and over again.
    Jaxon’s run on the slope made everyone gasp and
cheer—me even among the rest. Even knowing how good he was, the air he got, the
tricks he pulled off, were exciting. Unless he really messed up during the day,
I knew he was going to end up first in his division again.
    Before long, I was up; I hurried over to the big air
track, and I focused down. It was so much easier to concentrate on what I
wanted to do when I didn’t have Jaxon on my mind, when I knew that he was
there, that I could spend time with him whenever I wanted. I hit the course
hard, using the tricks that Jaxon had taught me, and I heard him screaming for
me on the sidelines; it was less distracting than I would have thought. I hit
the ramp and brought my knees up as high and fast as I possibly could. I landed
cleaner, more steadily than I ever have before in competition in my life.
    The day became kind of a blur; I got to spend a
little time with Jaxon but between the two of us and the rest of the members of
our team, we were constantly either going to watch someone on their run,
getting ready to queue up for our own events, or grabbing something to eat or
drink in between. Jaxon managed to steal a quick kiss before his first
half-pipe run, and I hugged him tightly before I went to do my second
go-through on the slope.
    I kept loose track of how
I was doing through the day, even though like before I wasn’t paying so much
attention to my specific scores. The important thing to me was that I did
better than I had the first time; I’d managed a second-place finish in my
division at the first tournament and I wanted more than anything to close out
the day in first. Not being distracted, having a better feel for the tricks and
the way I was going to land them, I could feel it in my bones that I was going
to be very close to the top, if I didn’t manage to take the gold.
    I told myself that if I didn’t land squarely in
first place, I wasn’t going to sweat it too much—second place was still
respectable, especially early in the season, and I would still have a good
chance of making it to the late regional competitions. The important thing was
to score enough points to keep the team in the top ten rankings. I watched the
other members of the team competing and had to admit to myself that even if one
of the other girls in my division managed to squeak out a lead on me, it
wouldn’t be a shame—we had all gotten better.
    By the end of the day I was exhausted, and we were
all milling around the competitor areas in the sidelines, waiting while the
judges tallied up the different events’ points. Each of the people competing
had three separate runs in each event, and the final score would be an average
of the three; other competitions scored differently, with cumulative points
instead of averages, or best single run score being the one that determined
placement. Even if most of us just got into the top ten, it would be enough
points overall for the tournament for us to have a fighting chance at later,
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