CHAPTER 2: I CAUGHT MY STEPDAD CHEATING AND HE MADE ME PAY FOR WATCHING

“And what are you going to do about it?” His voice is quiet. Dangerous. “Run to Mommy?”

“Maybe.” I tilt my chin up. I’m playing a game I don’t know the rules to, but I refuse to let him see me shake. “Maybe I’ll tell her exactly what I saw. Every detail.”

“You won’t.”

“Try me.”

He leans closer. His mouth is inches from my ear and I can feel his breath on my neck and between my legs I’m clenching around nothing, still wound tight from the orgasm I didn’t get to finish.

“You won’t tell her,” he murmurs, “because you were three fingers deep watching me fuck another woman. You won’t tell her because your little shorts are soaked right now and I can smell you. And you won’t tell her because you’ve been thinking about me since the wedding, haven’t you? Dreaming about me.”

My stomach free-falls.

“Fuck you,” I whisper, but it comes out breathless. Wrecked.

“That’s the plan.” He pulls back just enough to look at my face, and the arrogance in his expression makes me want to slap him and climb him at the same time. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to walk into your bedroom. And I’m going to follow you. And by the time I’m done, you’re not going to tell your mother a goddamn thing.”

“You think you can fuck me into silence?”

“I know I can.”

“You can’t.” I say it like a dare. Because it is one. Because I’m twenty-one and stupid and so turned on I can’t think straight and the only weapon I have left is defiance. “You’re not that good.”

Something shifts in his face. The arrogance sharpens into something darker. Focused. Like I just made this personal.

“Go to your room, Elena.”

“Make me.”

He doesn’t make me. He doesn’t grab me or throw me over his shoulder or any of the caveman shit I half-expect. He just straightens up, looks down at me with those cold dark eyes, and says:

“Ten seconds. If you’re not in that bed by the time I get there, I’ll fuck you in this hallway where your mother might hear. Your choice.”

He turns and walks toward the bathroom. Calm. Unhurried. Like the outcome was never in question.

I stand there for three of those seconds, my pulse roaring, my thighs slick, my brain screaming at me to go back to bed and lock the door and forget all of this.

I go to my room.

I leave the door open.

I sit on the edge of my bed in the dark, shaking, and I hear the water run and stop in the bathroom, and then I hear his footsteps in the hallway, slow, deliberate, each one a countdown, and my whole body lights up with the kind of terror that feels exactly like want.

He appears in the doorway. He’s washed his hands, splashed water on his face. His slacks are still unbuttoned. He’s still shirtless. And he’s hard again, or still, the outline of him obvious and obscene, and I realize with a vertigo-like lurch that this man was inside someone else ten minutes ago and he’s already ready to go again.

For me.

“Last chance,” he says, leaning against the doorframe. “Tell me to leave.”

I spread my knees apart on the edge of the bed. Slowly. Letting him see the dark spot on my shorts. Letting him see what he already smelled in the hallway.

“Prove it,” I whisper. “Prove you’re that good. Because right now, all I saw was a pretty average performance with a blonde who was clearly faking it.”

The lie lands exactly where I aimed it. His eyes go black.

He steps into my room and closes the door behind him, and the click of the latch sounds like the last sane decision either of us will make tonight.

“Average,” he repeats softly, walking toward me. “You’re going to regret that word.”

He drops to his knees in front of me, hooks his fingers into the waistband of my shorts, and looks up at me with a face full of dark, patient fury.

“By the time your mother wakes up,” he says, dragging my shorts down my thighs, “you’re going to be begging me not to stop.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​