All Chapters of CRAVING MY FORBIDDEN STEPBROTHER: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

LaylaCain stops me outside the door. His hand on my arm, firm, pulling me back before I can follow the nurse in.“Hey.” He dips his head until his eyes are level with mine. “Whatever she says in there, whatever she does, I’m with you. You hear me?”I nod because my throat is too tight for words. He laces his fingers through mine and squeezes once and we walk in.Sienna is on the bed, knees pulled up, hospital gown pooling around her, both hands pressed to her stomach. She’s crying. Not the careful kind she performs at the dinner table with one hand reaching for my mother’s sympathy. This is loud and ragged and ugly, her whole body shaking, her face swollen and blotched.And God help me, I feel guilty.I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. This girl has spent weeks poisoning my family against me, planting herself in my house, turning my mother into her shield. But she’s in a hospital gown with her hands on her belly and she fell down those stairs and I was there. Whatever Sienna is, whatev

The apartment is on the second floor above a bakery that closed three years ago.The stairs creak on the fourth step and the seventh and Cain climbs them without thinking, the key already out. He unlocks the door and pushes it open and the smell hits me before the light does.Old books. Hundreds of them. Lining the walls floor to ceiling, stacked on windowsills, piled on the coffee table, tucked into corners. The whole apartment smells like paper and dust and something faintly sweet that might be leftover from the bakery or might just be what a place smells like when a woman who loved books lived in it for years and nobody cleared them out after she was gone.Cain reaches for the light switch. A floor lamp in the corner comes on, warm and yellow, and the room opens up around us.It’s small. One bedroom, a kitchen barely big enough for two people, a bathroom with a door that doesn’t close all the way. The couch is old, deep green, sunken in the middle from years of someone sitting in t

A girl three lockers down laughs. Not a kind laugh. The sharp, performative kind that's meant to be heard."Called to the office for making a sex tape with your brother," the girl says to her friend, loud enough to carry. "That's a new one."Zara turns so fast the girl flinches."Say that again." Zara's voice drops into something I've heard maybe twice in the years I've known her. Low and flat and absolutely devoid of warmth. "Say one more word. See what happens."The girl's mouth closes. Her friend suddenly finds something fascinating on her phone. They both walk away faster than they arrived.Zara turns back to me. Her face softens."Go," she says. "I'll be right here when you come out."I walk. One foot in front of the other. Down the hallway, past the stares, past the whispers that start up again behind me like a faucet someone turned back on. The dean's office is at the end of the admin corridor. Glass door. Gold lettering. A waiting area with chairs that nobody ever sits in comf

"Yes," I say. "I'm sure.""You understand that with your academic record, you had several very competitive options. The program you've selected is strong, but it wasn't the highest-ranked on your list." He tilts his head. "I want to make sure this decision wasn't made under duress.""It wasn't.""May I ask what factored into your choice?"I look at him, at his glasses and his folder and his framed degrees and his twenty-two years of careful, measured questions. "There's a better reason than ranking," I say.He watches me for a moment. Then something shifts in his face, not a smile but close, the expression of a man who has heard enough answers to know when one is real. "Graduate, Miss Reed," he says. "That's the best response to all of this. Just graduate."I nod, because if I open my mouth right now something embarrassing is going to come out of it.We walk out. The assistant closes the door behind us. The admin corridor is empty and quiet, the fluorescent lights humming overhead, an

"Clearwater," she repeats. The word comes out flat and cold.Tyler looks at her. For the first time since he walked up, his eyes move from my face to hers, and something happens in the air between them that I can feel on my skin. Not hostility exactly. Something with more current in it. Something that crackles."That's my school," Zara says."I know.""You chose my school.""I chose a school. It happens to be.""Un-choose it.""That's not how applications work.""I don't care how they work." Zara's voice is climbing. Her arms tighten across her chest. "I don't want to see your face on my campus. I don't want to walk into a dining hall and see you sitting there with your stupid cap eating cereal like you didn't help a psychopath try to destroy my best friend.""Zara.""I don't want to see you at orientation. I don't want to see you at the library. I don't want to see you at a party or a game or standing in line at some coffee shop pretending we don't know each other." Her chin lifts. "