Step Star (A Stepbrother Rockstar Romance): Promise Me

Sometimes, you have to keep people to their promises to make your own dreams come true

Step Star: Promise Me
The first of the Step Star Series

“Ben, meet your new assistant KJ Storm.”

I was no longer Katie Jean Woods. My curly blonde hair was dyed and straightened so that it fell in a raven black and shiny sheet to the middle of my back. Gone was the baby fat from high school, replaced by cheekbones and biceps, made rock hard through punishing hours at the gym. My black leather pants and sky-high stiletto booties were a world away from the second-hand blouses and pleated skirts I wore back in Sweetwater, Alabama.

I had also worked on my girlish small town twang, so that my voice sounded confident and sophisticated. It was still my desperate secret wish that the second Ben looked at me, he’d say, “Oh, Katie girl. It’s you, at last.”

Yeah, didn’t happen.

He stood with his back to me and his manager, staring out the floor to ceiling window at the city of Atlanta. We were in the headquarters of Grit, which Ben had singlehandedly made the top new label for Southern rock.

His thick dark chestnut curls flowed to his shoulders. SDFH, The Stepfather From Hell would have knocked him into next week for having long hair like that at home. He looked better in faded jeans than most men do in a two thousand dollar suit. His large hands were shoved in his pockets and he rocked back on his heels, just like he did when we were kids. It sent a flash of emotion through me and I had to look up at the ceiling to keep from crying.

Then he turned around. The air whooshed out of my lungs in one breath. All I wanted, I told myself, was to look him in the eye, have him see me and ask him why. Why did he break his promise to come back, to get my mom and me out of that god awful little town? But when I saw his face and felt his energy draw me in like a magnetic field, I knew that I was there not as a hurt step sister, but as a woman with a burning desire for him greater than reason.

“Hi, Ben. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” My voice was so high and tight, I sounded like I was on helium. And if I exhaled, it would be like letting go of a balloon. All the air escaping would sound like, “Dammnnnnn.”

Not just because the good-looking boy that I remembered had turned into the finest man I’d ever seen, with full lips and flashing dark grey eyes, the color of the ocean before a storm. It was the lush sensuality he exuded, like an intoxicating scent. He was incense smoke and thick velvet, whiskey and dark amber. He was totally masculine, but with a soft lazy smile and gracefully sleek as a black panther waiting patiently in a tree for his next meal.

He was still a head taller than me, even in my spiky boots. Sticking his hand out, he gave me that appraising look I knew all too well: checking me out, noticing that I’m attractive, calculating my availability and f**kability…but he, like other men, wasn’t really looking at me. In fact, he didn’t see me at all. To him, I was just another babe in tight leather pants.

Still. When he slid his palm against mine and pressed his strong fingertips against my wrist, the rational part of my brain dropped her panties and turned out the light."

Also included, a bonus excerpt from Step Star: Break My Heart, the second story in the Step Star Series.