Page 103 of Heartless Stepbrother

The bathroom felt sacred. Warm, quiet, safe in ways nothing else here had been. The marble shimmered softly in the low light, the walls muffled every distant sound, and the doors behind me stood locked. My sanctuary.

I closed my eyes.

I let the heat seep deep, finding the knots buried in my muscles, undoing them with slow, purposeful tenderness. My pulse softened its frantic rhythm. My thoughts drifted without sharp edges.

For a moment, a single brief moment, I was not watched.

Not cornered.

Not waiting.

I was just a girl in a bath too beautiful to be real, breathing in steam that smelled like a life that might have been mine.

Solitude wrapped around me, gentle and absolute.

And I let myself sink into it, greedy for every second.

It shattered with a single sound.

A click.

Sharp. Metallic. Wrong.

My eyes flew open. Steam blurred the edges of the room, turning the marble into shifting ghosts. But the sound came again, undeniable. The distinct rasp of a lock being compromised, undone, overridden.

His lock.

My breath lodged in my throat. I sat up in the tub, water lapping at my ribs, bubbles sliding off my shoulders as if they too sensed danger.

The doorknob turned with slow, merciless certainty.

No. No.

The door swung inward.

And Riley stepped through the steam like he had been carved from it.

For a heartbeat, I could not breathe. He filled the doorway in nothing but black boxer briefs, the rest of him bare, unapologetic, and devastatingly real. Sweat clung to the ends of his hair, darkening it, sending droplets sliding down the columns of muscle that formed his chest. His skin glowed in the heat, golden and damp, every line of him sharpened by the contrast of shadow and light.

I had never seen him fully. Not like this.

Not unarmored.

My gaze betrayed me before I could leash it. It dragged downward over the cut lines of his abdomen, the sculpted dip at his hips, the hard, impossible breadth of his shoulders. His body looked like someone had drawn it with a ruler and then softened it with sin, all strength and temptation wrapped in careless male confidence.

He was beautiful in a way that hurt to look at.

Dangerous in a way that made my pulse misfire.

A storm in human shape.

Heat crawled up my throat, blooming beneath my skin. I tried to pull the water higher, to shield myself, but it clung to me, too transparent, too loyal to gravity.

Riley’s eyes found me instantly.

They swept over me not like a boy seeing a girl in a bath, but like a predator marking what already belonged to him. Slow. Deliberate. Unhurried. His gaze touched places he had not touched, igniting them like struck matches.

He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, completely at ease with the fact that he was nearly naked in my sanctuary.