JAMIE
I wake slowly – like my body is surfacing from underwater.
For a moment, I don’t know where I am.
Everything feels warm, too soft, too good. The sheets smell like expensive detergent and something else – something clean and masculine and familiar. My limbs feel heavy, my muscles slightly sore, but in a way that sends a small, stupid smile crawling onto my lips.
Yesterday ended… good.
Not how I’ve planned it, but still…
Really good.
Pieces of the night flicker back like scenes from a movie:
The party;
My friends laughing with me;
Lex’s eyes glued to me the whole damn night;
My dumb joke that wiped the smile off his face; following him upstairs into his room —
And then–
My breath catches.
I look down.
A thick, muscular arm, warm and inked, is wrapped firmly around my waist.
The hand rests low on my stomach, fingers just barely brushing beneath the sheet. The weight of that hand is impossible to mistake. I know exactly who it belongs to.
Slowly – carefully – I turn my head.
Yeah.
Lex.
My stepbrother.
Lex, who’s usually all sharp smirks and arrogance and predator energy, is lying beside me looking soft, rumpled, and unfairly adorable. His lashes are long, stupidly long—the kind girls on TikTok would kill for. His eyebrows are thick and perfectly shaped even when sleep-soft. His lips—God—are a little swollen, a little parted, like he fell asleep mid-kiss.
And his chest.
Christ.
That chest.
Tanned, cut, muscular, shifting gently as he breathes. Tattoos stretch over his shoulder and arm, black ink against golden skin. His whole body is heat and size andstrength, and it’s wrapped around me like he has no intention of letting me go.
And I kind of don’t want him to.
My heart trips over itself.
This is everything I ever wanted.
Everything I told myself I could never have.
