Prologue
He’s just down the hall. And I know exactly what he wants.
It’s the same thing he wants every night. I keep thinking about his skin, his tongue and his lips running down along my spine, his callused fingers slipping below my panties, teasing shivers through my body.
I hated him for a while. I wanted him even more than I understood.
Now, our parents can’t know. Nobody can. Not when there is so much at stake, much more than just our reputation.
It’s our lives.
And it’s not just that he’s my stepbrother. There is so much more than that between us, so many people threatening everything we know and love. But he’s always there, his strong hands holding everything above him.
When he comes, the door to my room rattling softly, I’m always wide awake. I can’t sleep when I know he’s so close by. He slips into my room like a shadow, closing and locking the door behind him.
“You’re always breathing so deep,” he whispers into my ear as he presses his warm, muscular body against mine. I suppress a moan as my fingers roll down his defined abs.
His lips press against my neck. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
I grip his muscular arm. I can hear the house creak around us. I keep imagining the deep forest, trees and scrub brush jutting up against the windows and straining to get in, trying to swallow us up. It’s half dream and half desire. I want nature to reclaim me, to be wild and free, to let him do whatever he wants with me. His body is soil and musk as he presses me down onto the mattress.
“Did you even want to get away from me? When you heard what I do, did you think that I’m a monster?” The stubble along his cheeks rubs against the nape of my neck. His fingers roam down toward the soaked spot between my legs.
I don’t want him to stop.
All it takes is a door. One open door and everything between us goes spilling out into the open. And we both know we can’t survive in the open.
We live out near the forest. The deep forest. The trees there are bigger than anything I can imagine and ancient like the feeling that drives me to bite his bottom lip. We could disappear into the forest so easily, swallowed up by time and space.
“Some part of you wants to get caught.” His voice is low and throaty, thick with desire.
I arch my back and gasp as his skilled fingers find their mark.
My mind blanks as waves of intense pleasure roll through me.
“Reid,” I say, over and over.
“Morning is a long way away,” he whispers.
I hope it never comes.
Chapter One: Rebecca
I first saw Reid Conway in third grade. He was the new kid in town, just moved to Ridgewood with his single mom from the big city. I’d lived in town my whole life, and any change in a tiny place like Ridgewood was bound to make a splash.
He was quiet back then. He’d always been serious, but back then he wasn’t popular yet, hadn’t grown to well over six feet tall and hadn’t gotten all that lean muscle all over his fit body. He was just a little kid when we first met.
We didn’t talk until years later, not seriously, at least. I felt bad for him in those first few months and went out of my way to say hello, but that was really it. Still, I noticed him, and wouldn’t stop noticing him as we grew up. I wasn’t the only one, of course. When it became clear how extraordinary Reid was, people flocked to him. He grew out of his shyness as soon as he hit his growth spurt and girls started throwing themselves at him like crazy.
I wasn’t obsessed with Reid or anything. In fact, he was actually already a cocky asshole, even back then. But it was hard not to notice him winning local climbing competitions at only sixteen and breaking local records at seventeen. It was hard not to stare at the guy that everybody wanted to be around.#p#分页标题#e#
My life was easy back then, before Reid changed everything. I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl in the world, but I had my close friends and I had my schoolwork. I was going to college and everybody said so, even though I’d be the first person in my family to do it. That expectation kept me busy. Where a lot of girls my age were spending their weekends out by the gorge watching the boys ride their dirt bikes or shopping at the mall, I was in the library for hours, memorizing and studying my ass off.
I was a total geek. There, I admitted it. It wasn’t exactly a secret or anything, but I’m not really proud of my total lack of fashion sense back then and those thick-framed glasses (nerdy before nerdy was cool). But that was me, plain old Rebecca, smart and uptight.
All of that changed eventually, though. My mom died when I was a baby, so I never really got to know her, and it never looked like my dad wanted to remarry. Until one day out of nowhere he announced that he was engaged, and my world shifted dramatically. One conversation and the whole axis of my existence tilted wildly.