My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 34

If he called my mother, everything would fall apart, years of lies, years of pretending. She believed in me. She believed I was strong, capable, brilliant. The daughter who had everything under control. The one she could look at with pride instead of worry.

If the truth came out, that image would shatter. She wouldn’t see the person she trusted anymore. She would see the girl who struggled to read simple lines without the letters twisting. The girl who might not be strong enough to carry everything the way she promised she would.

And I couldn’t let that happen, not when she looked at me like I was the one thing in her life that had gone right.

Slowly, I lowered my hands back onto the table.

The buttons stayed undone.

Raphael watched the movement carefully, with a satisfied look on his face. He picked up a pen and tapped it lightly against my résumé.

“Good,” he said.

Then, just like that, the predator vanished. His expression returned to that cold, professional one. He turned his attention back to the monitor where my fixed code was still glowing. He scrolled through the lines I had realigned, his eyes moving fast.

"This section," he said, pointing to the logic jump I had sensed through the patterns, "My head programmer spent an hour on this yesterday. He couldn't find the break. He told me the entire script was a loss."

He looked back at me, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of something that wasn't hate. It was a cold kind of respect. He gave a single, sharp nod.

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