All Chapters of CRAVING MY FORBIDDEN STEPBROTHER: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I ignore him. Keep walking. But my heart does a skip.Footsteps pound behind me and then a hand closes around my arm and spins me around. Cain is soaked through, hair plastered to his forehead, water running down his face and neck. Even now, crying and humiliated and wanting nothing more than to disappear, I notice the way his wet shirt clings to every line of muscle. The way his jaw is set.“Let go of me.”“You can’t walk home in this.”“Watch me.” I yank my arm free, but he grabs me again, harder this time, fingers wrapping around my bicep, and pulls me toward the side of the house.“Stop—”“You’ll get hypothermia.”“I don’t care!”But he’s stronger than me, and he drags me through a door I didn’t know existed, a small dark guest house on the side of the property. He shuts the door behind us and locks it, and the rain becomes muffled, a low drumming on the roof instead of the assault it was outside.I whirl on him. “Let me out.”“No.”I grab the door handle. “Move.”He leans against

I sit in my car for ten minutes before I can move.The rain hammers the roof and the windshield fogs from my breathing and I just sit there with my hands on the steering wheel and my coat pulled tight around the lingerie I bought with three shifts at the diner and I try to remember how to be a person.I can't go home.Can't sit in my apartment with these walls and this silence and the feeling still living in my body that I cannot think about directly. I try not to and it comes anyway ,his hands on my hips, the snake tattoo against my skin, the way he said say my name in that voice that had no right to sound like that, and then I'm pressing my thighs together in the front seat of my car like an idiot and I catch myself doing it and I actually say out loud to no one:"Are you serious right now."My own voice in the dark car sounds insane.I close my eyes and his mouth finds my breast in the dark of the guest house, his teeth scraping, and the sound that leaves me is soft and involuntary

I don’t sleep.I lie on the couch in the changing room staring at the ceiling until my alarm goes off at seven, and when I reach for my phone there are seventeen missed calls. Three from Zara. Two from Jace. Twelve from numbers I don’t recognise, probably people from the party who want to talk about what happened, who want to be the ones to tell someone else first. I delete all of them without listening to a single one.Then I sit up and immediately regret it.Everything hurts. My thighs, my core, the place between my legs that has never hurt like this before and has no business hurting like this now. I sit very still for a moment and just breathe, trying to figure out what I actually feel about last night, and coming up with nothing clean. Not numb exactly. More like there’s too much of everything and none of it has settled into a shape I can name yet. I did something I can’t undo with someone I’m supposed to hate, and my body remembers every second of it in a language my brain can’t

Three days.I've been living in this house for three days and I've barely seen him, not because he's avoiding me but because I'm avoiding him. The house is massive enough that disappearing is actually possible if you're committed to it, and I am very committed.My mother thinks I'm adjusting. Marcus thinks I'm shy. Neither of them knows that their daughter and their son spent a night together in a stranger's guest house three days before becoming step-siblings. That I danced for him at a strip club. That every time I close my eyes I see his tattoo, feel his hands, hear his voice telling me I'm his.I am losing my mind, slowly and quietly, in a beautiful house that doesn't belong to me.My mother appears in my doorway at six with that smile that means the conversation is already over. "Family dinner night. Everyone eats together. No excuses.""I have homework.""You can do it after." She's already turning away. "Marcus is grilling steaks. Come down."I follow her downstairs because I d

The circle is loud and loose when we sit. Tyler's hand settles on my knee and I let it, and when I glance across the circle Cain is already there, Sienna on his lap, his arm around her.He's already looking at me when I find him across the circle. My skin prickles before I've even fully turned his way. The bottle spins. Stops at me."Truth or dare?" Tyler asks."Dare."He grins. "Kiss the hottest person in this room."The circle goes quiet. Every set of eyes on me, and underneath all of them one pair that's heavier than everything else combined, burning and absolutely still, daring me.I turn to Tyler. Drop my voice. "You sure about that?"His throat moves. "Yeah. Absolutely."I find Cain across the circle. Hold his gaze for one long deliberate second, long enough for him to know exactly what I'm about to do and why. Then I lean in and kiss Tyler, not soft, not careful, I kiss him like I mean it, and Tyler groans against my mouth and his hand comes up to my jaw and I feel nothing, not