All Chapters of CRAVING MY FORBIDDEN STEPBROTHER: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

He sets the timer and looks at me one more time, like he’s taking something in, like he wants to remember this exact second before it becomes something else.Then he presses start and closes the distance between us and kisses me and it is nothing like the guest house.That was fury and rain and desperation. This is three years of knowing exactly what we are to each other, all of it compressed into the press of his mouth against mine, and I kiss him back and my hands find his chest and the tattoo is warm under my palms and I feel him groan against my lips before I hear it.“Couch,” he says.He walks me back to it and lays me down and looks at me for a half second in the candlelight, just looks, and I have never felt more seen and more furious about it in my life.Then his mouth is on my throat, my collarbone, my breast, and his hand slides between my thighs and finds how wet I already am and he lifts his head.“Fuck.” He says it quietly, almost to himself. “Already?”“Shut up—”“I’m no

I wake up to sunlight coming through the curtains and the shower running next door.Cain’s shower.I lie there and stare at the ceiling and listen to the water and try not to picture anything, and fail completely. I roll over. The watch is on my nightstand, sitting there in the morning light like an accusation. I pick it up and shove it in my drawer and get dressed before I can think too hard about any of it.The kitchen smells like bacon and coffee and my mother’s perfume, which means she’s been up for a while and is in one of her good moods, the kind where she hums while she cooks and the whole house feels like a different place than it actually is.“Good morning, sweetheart.” She turns from the stove with a smile that is so genuine it makes my chest hurt. “Sit. I made breakfast.”Marcus is at the table with his tablet, reaching over to squeeze her hand when she passes, and they look so easy together, so settled, and I sit down and take the coffee she puts in front of me and try to

The bathroom fills with steam fast. I have the water as hot as it goes and I stand under it with my eyes closed and my hair soaked through and for a few minutes my brain actually goes quiet.Then the door opens.I know before he says anything. The weight of the footsteps. The way the air changes.“Occupied,” I say.Silence.“Need my contact solution,” Cain says.I open my eyes.I look at myself through the fogged glass. At the water running over my skin, down my waist, over my hips. At the shape I’m making against the frosted door with the light behind me. My hair is down, all of it, the curls plastered to my back, and I know exactly what he can see from where he’s standing.I should tell him to come back. I should say nothing and wait him out.Instead I reach up and drag one finger through the condensation on the glass. Slow. A single stripe, not wide enough to see through, just wide enough to change the light, just wide enough that he knows exactly why I did it.I hear him go still.



Friday nights used to mean something specific.


The club. The lights. The two minutes on stage when I stopped being Layla Reed with her dead father’s debt and became Diamond, who owed nobody anything and moved like she knew it. I did that for months and never told anyone, and three days ago I walked out of there for the last time with Marco’s debt cleared and I thought I’d feel lighter.


I don’t feel lighter.


I feel like someone who’s been running flat out for so long that stopping feels like falling.


It’s ten PM and I’m fresh out of the shower, music playing low, hair damp against my neck, and I have nowhere to be and nothing to survive tonight and I don’t know what to do with that. The restlessness has been sitting in my chest all week and I know exactly what it is. I just won’t say it out loud.


Cain ended the bet. Called it a mistake. And I have been wound tight ever since, my body carrying something my brain refuses to name, and I’ve spent a week pretending I’m fine and

The restaurant is small and warm and smells like garlic and candle wax and fresh bread, and when we walk in the host knows Tyler by name which makes me raise an eyebrow.
“My parents come here a lot,” he says, slightly embarrassed. “I may have called ahead.”
“You called ahead.”
“I wanted to make sure we got a good table.”
We get a corner table with a candle between us and a window looking out onto the lit street and Tyler pulls out my chair and I sit and look around at the checkered tablecloths and the wine bottles on the shelves and the couples at other tables leaning toward each other.
The waiter brings bread and Tyler orders wine without making it a production and when the waiter leaves he looks at me across the candle and smiles.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
“I’ve been trying to get here for two months.”
“Here as in this restaurant or here as in across a table from me.”
“Both.” He tears off a piece of bread. “The restaurant has a six week wait unless you call ahead.”
“Yo