LOGINHe was supposed to be a stranger. A bruised, scarred, filthy-mouthed stranger who pinned me against a bathroom wall and made me forget the boy who broke my heart 20 minutes earlier. I walked away first without his name or number, and I didn't look back. Then I found out my mom was engaged. To his dad. Rhys Maddox. Number seventeen. 6'3" of tattoos, bruised knuckles, and the kind of jaw that makes good girls do stupid things. The most dangerous player to ever step on our ice. My one-night stand. My new stepbrother. He doesn't follow rules - he breaks them. On the ice. In my bed. Against every surface in our parents' house while they eat twenty feet away. He calls me "sis" just to watch me squirm. He watches me like he already owns me. And the worst part? He does. Publicly, we're fake dating - a deal to keep my ex-bestfriend away. Privately, we're a stepbrother and stepsister who can't keep our clothes on the second we're alone. It's our biggest secret. Now the boy who I once considered my best friend suddenly wants me back. And the stepbrother who wasn't supposed to mean anything won't let me go. One wants to protect me. One wants to destroy me. And I can't tell which is which anymore. --- For readers 18+ who like their men possessive, their romances FORBIDDEN, and their chapters dripping with filthy, unapologetic spice.
View MoreNAOMI’S POVThe second call came on a Wednesday. 4 PM. Sober.I almost didn't answer. My thumb hovered over the screen for three rings – Caleb's name sitting there like a question I wasn't sure I wanted the answer to. But I'd been dodging him for weeks and dodging felt like fear and I was tired of being afraid of a phone call from a boy I'd known since I was fourteen."Naomi. Don't hang up.""Give me a reason.""Valentine's Day." He paused. Not for effect – I could hear the weight of it. The specific gravity of a man choosing his words because they mattered. "The letter. When they read it out loud. I should have stopped them. I was standing right there and I should have taken it out of their hands and told them to shut the fuck up and I didn't. I was a coward. You deserved better than what I gave you that night."I sat on my bed. The silence stretched. Because here's the thing about Caleb Park that made him the most dangerous person in my life – when he was genuine, he was devastating
RHYS’ POVThe empty dark is worse than the angry kind.Angry I can work with. Angry has edges – walls I can hit, a body I can throw into a drill until the feeling burns off. The empty dark doesn't have edges. It opens up underneath you and you fall into it and there's nothing to grab onto, nothing to fight, just a silence so complete you can't tell if you're drowning or if you drowned hours ago and haven't noticed yet.Elena's letter cracked open something I sealed shut when I was twelve years old. And now it was flooding. Nine years of concrete and she put a crack in it with two pages of cream paper and the word proud and now everything I'd buried was pouring through and I didn't have enough hands to stop it.I'd been sitting on my couch for hours. The letter was on the kitchen counter where I'd left it and I could feel it pulling at me from across the room like a second gravity. The word proud sitting in my apartment like something alive. She's proud of me.From whatever city she d
He read it standing up. Like sitting would make it too real.I watched from the kitchen table – still in his shirt, the Saturday morning we'd built dismantling itself one sentence at a time. He held the letter with both hands. Two pages. Cream paper. The heavy, textured kind you buy on purpose – the stationery of a woman who wanted this to feel permanent.His eyes moved across the words slowly. Not because he couldn't read fast – because each line was costing him something and he was paying in real time. I could see it in his face. The micro-shifts. Jaw tightening on one sentence. Loosening on the next. A swallow that took too long. A breath that came too short. Nine years of abandonment cycling across his features like weather – storm, clearing, storm again.I didn't read the letter. Didn't ask to. Sat at his kitchen table with my hands wrapped around a cold mug and gave him the only thing I had – the space to feel this without an audience that demanded performance.Seven minutes. He
I woke up to sunlight and the weight of his arm across my stomach.Saturday. His apartment. The blinds doing that thing where they filtered the light into gold bars across the bed, striping his sheets, his skin, the space between us. I could hear campus through the cracked window – the distant, muffled, weekend sounds of a world that wasn't asking anything of us yet.He was awake. I could tell by his breathing. The quiet, measured pattern of a man who'd been lying still on purpose. Watching me. Or maybe just existing beside me. Holding the moment like something he didn't want to startle.I rolled toward him. Eyes still half-closed. My body finding his the way it always did – automatic, the geography of him memorized so thoroughly that I could navigate it in the dark."Hi," I murmured. Into his chest. Into the tattoo I knew was there without looking."Hi."His voice. Morning-rough. Low. The voice that existed only in this window – before coffee, before he rebuilt the walls that kept ev
I didn’t move.Stood in the hallway with my water glass and my bare feet and the cold tile under my soles and listened to my mother talk about the boy I loved to the man who was trying to erase him from my life.“He never asks to talk to her, Richard. That’s the thing.” My mom’s voice was quiet. Ti
I sat in the driveway for eleven minutes before I could make my hands stop shaking long enough to turn off the engine.My mom's voice was still in my ears – how COULD you and I'm finally happy and fix it – playing on a loop that got louder every time I tried to think past it. I'd driven here becaus
Rhys got a B+ on the American Literature midterm.Three nights of flashcards and highlighters and him sprawled across his apartment floor complaining that Fitzgerald was "a rich drunk who wrote about other rich drunks" while I threatened to leave if he didn't focus. He'd focus for twenty minutes. T
She was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs.Coffee in front of her. Both hands wrapped around the mug. Not drinking – holding. The way people hold things when they need an anchor and the nearest one is ceramic. She was wearing the flannel pajamas again. Second day in a row. Whateve












Welcome to GoodNovel world of fiction. If you like this novel, or you are an idealist hoping to explore a perfect world, and also want to become an original novel author online to increase income, you can join our family to read or create various types of books, such as romance novel, epic reading, werewolf novel, fantasy novel, history novel and so on. If you are a reader, high quality novels can be selected here. If you are an author, you can obtain more inspiration from others to create more brilliant works, what's more, your works on our platform will catch more attention and win more admiration from readers.