1. Forbidden Fruit

The call with her mother had barely ended before Anny hurled her phone onto the dorm bed as if the device had burned her. Her mother's voice still echoed in her ears, every syllable coiling low in her belly like something sick and twisting.

"Let me guess," Morgan said from her desk, spinning lazily in her chair with a smirk already curling the corners of her mouth. "The dragon lady summons you home."

Anny dragged both hands down her face, a groan escaping into her palms. "She expects me to rot there for the entire summer. The whole thing, babe. Two whole weeks trapped in that house."

"That genuinely doesn't sound catastrophic or like a death sentence." Morgan's grin sharpened into something predatory. "But the problem would be…" 

"You know exactly why I can't walk back into that house." Anny's voice splintered as she dropped onto the edge of her bed. 

Morgan's expression shifted into something far too entertained, her eyes glittering with mischief. "Your stepfather? More precisely, your mother's gloriously inappropriate boy toy?"

"Don't." Anny snapped, her jaw tightened. "He's barely ten years older than me. The entire arrangement is obscene. Every time they go out together, people stare as if they're witnessing something indecent. He looks more like her son than her husband."

Morgan's grin widened into something positively wicked, her tongue darting out to wet her bottom lip. "So, what you're saying is he's devastatingly charming and that drives you absolutely insane?"

"I never said anything close to that." Anny turned away, wrenching her suitcase from beneath the bed with unnecessary aggression.

"You didn't have to say it aloud." Morgan leaned back, twirling a strand of honey-colored hair around her finger. "Because the way you avoid going home when he's around tells me something entirely different than disgust, roomie. He gets under your skin. All the way under, in places you're too stubborn to acknowledge."

"I despise him, Morgan. Full stop. End of discussion."

Morgan laughed, knowing. "Keep telling yourself that fairy tale, sweetheart. Maybe eventually you'll believe it." 

Anny was merely twelve when her father died. His sudden absence had upended her world entirely, leaving everything she knew shattered beyond recognition. Afterward, life became a grinding struggle for her mother, Rosie, who found herself drowning in the impossible task of managing both her grief-stricken daughter and the demands of her career, so she decided to send her daughter off to a boarding school, thinking she would be happy being with people of her age and it would help her to overcome the loss. 

For a while, it worked. Until Anny's seventeenth birthday, when she received the news that her mother had married a man named Adriano Carter. 

Supposedly, they were happily in love. Anny had to control the urge to crush the person beside her mother every time she saw them together. But she would be lying through her teeth if she claimed she felt nothing for her mother's new husband, a man at least twelve years younger to her mother. 

He was devastatingly, sinfully hot.

Anny never thought in her entire life that she would see a man sexier than him. She had never imagined a man could exist who made every boy she'd ever encountered look like a charcoal sketch beside a Renaissance masterpiece. 

Adriano Carter was irresistibly attractive and sexy. No competition existed between the boys she'd met thus far. He was irresistibly, maddeningly sexy. She was ready to literally fuck the sin, if it meant having him, even though the admission made her sound like a horrible person.

Their entire relationship consisted of hollow greetings exchanged in hallways. Nothing more, because she had nothing safe to offer him. Adriano had attempted to bridge the distance, to initiate genuine conversation, undoubtedly for Rosie's sake, but Anny never reciprocated. She built walls of silence and gradually distanced herself from her mother too, unable to bear the proximity to what she couldn't have. 

A car horn blared outside before Anny could muster a retort to Morgan's teasing. She grabbed her friend in a rushed embrace, then hauled her suitcase down the narrow dormitory staircase.

Her mother, Rosie, sat waiting in the sedan, practically glowing with anticipation when Anny slid into the passenger seat. Rosie attempted conversation, filling the silence with chirpy observations, but Anny offered only monosyllabic responses, clearly uninterested in carrying anything forward. Rosie finally let the silence settle, her sigh barely audible. 

Once they reached the mansion, Rosie opened the main door and helped her to get inside before she launched into motion. "I have to run back to the office for a few hours. Adriano is upstairs in his study. Please, try to be civil." 

She pressed a quick kiss to her daughter's cheek and vanished out the front door, the lock clicking with damning finality.

Silence descended like a held breath.

Anny stood in the foyer, her suitcase handle slick in her damp palm. The logical course of action would be to retreat to her bedroom, unpack her belongings, call Morgan to vent, do literally anything except remain rooted to this spot while her pulse climbed her throat like a trapped creature. 

Halfway down the upstairs hallway, her body went rigid.

The sound of rushing water carried from the bathroom at the end of the hall. Steam drifted through the partially open door, turning the air thick and humid. 

Her mouth went completely dry. Every rational thought screamed at her to keep walking. But her feet carried her forward before her brain could object. Through the gap in the doorway and the fogged glass of the walk-in shower, she saw him.

Adriano stood beneath the cascade of water, his head tipped back, rivulets streaming down the column of his throat. His abdominal muscles contracted as he adjusted his stance beneath the spray. He dragged his hands through his dark hair, pushing the wet strands back from his forehead and water droplets clung to the sharp angle of his jaw before sliding down his throat.

Anny's heart slammed against her ribs like something trying to escape a cage. Her body responded before her mind could catch up. She should turn around, walk away and pretend she'd seen nothing before her knees buckled entirely. 

But her treacherous mind had already begun painting forbidden images that made her face burn and her core clench with something she refused to name.

But gaze betrayed her completely, dropping lower, past the steam-clouded barrier of the glass, past every moral boundary she had ever constructed. The fog on the glass obscured just enough to leave something to the imagination, but not enough to hide the powerful muscles of his thighs or the darker shape that hung between them.

Her thighs pressed together involuntarily. A shiver raced up her spine despite the suffocating warmth of the steam. She hated every cell in her body for responding this way, but the ache blooming low in her belly ignored her mental protests with ruthless efficiency. A sound almost escaped her. She swallowed it down, but her body was already trembling, already aching.

Then he moved slowly as though he'd known she was standing there all along, a silent voyeur drowning in her own depravity.

Anny's heart launched into her throat. She stumbled backward, but her reaction came far too late. In the mirror mounted above the bathroom sink, his dark eyes caught hers with surgical precision.

He didn't flinch or make any attempt to cover himself at all. His hands remained at his sides while water sluiced down the expanse of his naked body and his gaze remained locked on her reflection with an intensity that made her knees threaten to buckle. Then his mouth curved into the faintest, most devastating smile she had ever witnessed on a human face.

Anny's breathing turned ragged. Her face blazed with mortification while every nerve ending in her body ignited simultaneously. Her thighs pressed together again, harder this time, the ache between them turning sharp and utterly insatiable. She should have fled down the hallway and barricaded herself in her room, but her feet remained rooted to the floor, her eyes still locked with his in the mirror.

And Adriano continued watching her in the mirror, that knowing smile still playing at the corners of his lips, his eyes dark with something that looked terrifyingly like hunger. The silence between them stretched thick and heavy with something she didn't dare name.

When she finally found the strength to break away, it felt like tearing herself from quicksand. She rushed into her bedroom and slammed the door so hard the frame rattled in protest, the sound echoing through the hallway like a gunshot. Her back pressed against the wood, her chest heaving, her hands shaking violently as she peeled off her travel clothes with desperate, fumbling fingers after a good while.

The nightgown she pulled on was thin, pale, almost sheer that did nothing to hide the peaks of her nipples or the trembling flush spreading across her chest. She told herself she chose it for comfort, for the oppressive summer heat, for any reason other than the dark, flickering possibility of being seen again.

She sat on the edge of the bed, hugging her knees to her chest, but the silence of the house only made her skin crawl with restless, humming energy. Minutes crawled by like hours. The image of him in the shower, water streaming over that impossible body, those dark eyes finding hers in the mirror, played on an endless loop behind her eyelids. 

After what felt like an eternity, she padded downstairs to the kitchen. She told herself it was late, she hadn't eaten, so she was hungry and needed food. Nothing more. 

She went directly to the refrigerator, swinging the door open to reveal shelves stocked with everything she craved. She pulled out a large bowl of ripe strawberries, their deep red flesh glistening with condensation and they smelled sweet and intoxicating.

"Thank God! They at least have the food available," she whispered, tilting her head back to look up at the ceiling, a theatrical gesture directed at whatever deity might be listening. 

"Thank you, Adriano, you mean."