เข้าสู่ระบบChapter 2We weren’t finished.He flipped me onto my back and settled between my thighs carefully, guided himself to my entrance, and thrust in deep and slow. Our eyes stayed locked the entire time—his gaze burning into mine, steady and unguarded, like he was letting me see every hidden thing he’d carried for a decade. Every stroke was unhurried—long drags out, slow pushes back in—letting me feel every thick inch, every vein, every pulse of him stretching me open again. It felt like he was making up for every year we’d lost, every night we’d spent apart thinking about this exact moment without ever believing it would happen.“I never stopped thinking about you,” he whispered against my mouth, voice rough with emotion. “Every city I lived in. Every bed I slept in. It was always your face. Always you.”I wrapped my legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back, pulling him deeper until there was no spa
Chapter 1I almost didn’t come back.The invitation sat on my kitchen counter in Brooklyn for three weeks—thick cream cardstock, gold-embossed lettering, the same high-school crest we used to doodle in the margins of our notebooks when we were supposed to be paying attention. Ten-year reunion. I traced the date with my fingertip until the ink smudged into a faint golden blur. Every time I thought about clicking “Going,” my stomach twisted with the memory of him; Owen Hale, the quiet boy who sat two rows behind me in senior English, who never spoke unless called on, who once handed me a pencil without looking up when mine rolled under his desk and clattered against the leg of his chair. The boy who disappeared the summer after graduation and never came back.Not even for holidays. Not even for his mother’s funeral two years later.I told myself I was over it. I’d built a life three states away—good job in publishing, a
Chapter 2I stood on shaky legs. Hands trembling as I unbuttoned my jeans, pushed them down my thighs, stepped out of the denim pooled at my ankles. The air in the office felt colder now against my bare legs, raising fresh gooseflesh. The thin white camisole came next—slipped over my head in one slow motion, hair tumbling wild and tangled around my shoulders as the silk caught briefly on my hardened nipples before falling away. Then the black lace panties—already soaked through, clinging to my swollen folds—hooked with my thumbs and slid down my thighs, the damp fabric dragging against skin until they dropped to join the rest. I was naked in his office. Completely bare under the single desk lamp that cast a warm, intimate circle across my flushed skin. My nipples were tight and aching. My thighs were slick with arousal that had been building since the moment I confessed. Victor looked at me like I was a text he’d waited years to read—slow, tho
Chapter 1I have been sitting in Professor Victor Lang’s office for forty-seven minutes. I know because I have been counting the seconds between every slow turn of his pen against the margin of my last essay while occasionally leaning forward to point out a line I have written. The desk lamp throws a warm circle of light across the papers between us, but the rest of the space stays dim: shelves of leather-bound volumes climbing to the ceiling, a single window with the blinds half-closed. He is forty-one. I am twenty-three. He is my thesis advisor. I am the student who has spent the last six months pretending my fantasies about him are just academic curiosity—interest in power dynamics, forbidden desire, the erotics of authority in literature. That is what I tell myself when I lie awake at night replaying the way his voice drops low when he reads a particularly charged passage aloud, or how his fingers look when he turns a page.Tonight the campus outside is unnaturally quiet. Most of
I’ve known Fiona since we were twelve—two awkward girls with braces and too many opinions, sneaking into the back row of the movie theater to watch R-rated films we weren’t supposed to see. She was the one who taught me how to French-braid my own hair, who held my hand when my first boyfriend dumped me in the cafeteria, who cried harder than I did when my mom got sick. We have never gone more than a week without talking, even when life got loud and careers and cities pulled us in different directions. So when she asked me to be her maid of honor, there was never any question. I said yes before she finished the sentence.What I didn’t expect was her fiance's older brother.Gabriel Callahan is thirty-four to my thirty-one, six-three to my five-six, and carries himself like someone who’s never once doubted he belongs exactly where he stands. Dark hair that always looks a little too long, green eyes that seem to see straight through small talk, a pointed jaw, and the way he makes every ro
The private tasting room at L’Étoile Noire sat behind a heavy curtain at the back of the main dining space. Emilia Voss and Dante Reyes had been circling each other for two years. She ran the Michelin-starred kitchen at L’Étoile Noire—thirty-six, precise, ruthless in the way only someone who had clawed her way up from line cook to executive chef could be. Tall, olive-skinned, black hair pulled into a severe knot that never loosened during service, dark eyes that missed nothing. Her chef’s whites were immaculate even at the end of a fourteen-hour shift; her knife work was surgical, her sauces legendary. He was the rising star at Atelier Rouge across town—thirty-one, tattooed forearms peeking from rolled sleeves, dark curls tied back with a bandana, a mouth that smirked more often than it smiled. His food was bold, aggressive, built to provoke. Critics called him a genius; older chefs called him a showboat. Emilia called him an asshole. Publicly. Frequently. Tonight they were







