HEAT: ACCIDENTALLY LUSTED OVER THE BAD BOY IN CAMPUS

Every night I heard moans drifting down the hall from my mother's room, and every night they kept me awake long after the house had gone quiet. My father died when I was ten. Since then, my mother had brought a long string of men through our front door. I never blamed her. Grief makes people reach for whatever fills the silence, and loneliness can eat at a person until she'll take warmth wherever she finds it. I learned to put my pillow over my ears and wait for morning. But on my eighteenth birthday, the pillow didn't help. I was walking down the passage, a slice of cake in my hand and nothing on my mind, when I heard it. The headboard knocked against the wall in a steady, punishing rhythm, and my mother's voice came out ragged and breathless. "Faster, Lucas. Faster." I should have kept walking. Instead, my feet stopped on their own. The door sat open a few inches, and I leaned toward the gap before I could talk myself out of it. My mother was on her hands and knees, her fingers twisted in the sheets, her dark hair stuck to her damp shoulders. Behind her, a man gripped her hips and drove into her hard, his back flexing with every thrust. She cried out, her head dropping between her arms, and the sound went straight through me. Something inside me stirred. It was low and hot and ravenous, and I felt my wolf pace beneath my skin, restless and threatening to break loose. My breath caught. My thighs pressed together without my permission. I tore myself away from the door and fled to my room, my heart hammering so loudly I was sure the whole house could hear it. That night, I couldn't stop thinking about it. The sound of the bed, the sound of her voice, the hunger in it. I lay in the dark with my skin burning and my hand sliding beneath the sheets, doing what I had only ever learned from the explicit videos I'd watched in secret. I bit my lip to keep quiet. When it finally crashed over me, I shuddered into my pillow and lay there panting, ashamed and unsatisfied all at once. It was only the beginning. A few weeks later, I came home from the library with my bag dragging on my shoulder and my head full of exams. "Mother?" I called, dropping my keys on the table. Nothing. The house sat silent around me. I wandered from the kitchen to the living room, calling again, and still no answer came. "Your mother isn't here." I spun around. Lucas stood at the end of the hallway, shirtless, a towel slung over one shoulder as though he owned the place. Up close, he was younger than I'd imagined. He couldn't have been past his late twenties, which made something twist uneasily in my stomach, because my mother was in her late thirties and he had been in her bed. But the unease didn't last. It couldn't, not with him walking toward me, his skin gleaming and every line of his abs shifting with each unhurried step. "What are you doing here?" I asked, and my eyes betrayed me. They dropped to his chest, to the hard ridges of his stomach, to the dark line of hair that disappeared beneath the waistband of his jeans. I dragged them back up and hoped he hadn't noticed. He had. The corner of his mouth lifted. "Your mom asked me to keep an eye on you, Claire." My frown came instantly. "I'm not a kid who needs babysitting." "No," he said, and his gaze traveled over me, slow and deliberate, from my face to my feet and back again. "You're definitely not." Heat crawled up my neck. I turned and started to walk away before my face could give me up completely. "But she doesn't trust you to keep the house from burning down," he called after me, amusement threaded through his voice. "So you're stuck with me." I glanced back over my shoulder. He was smiling, a lazy, devastating smile that made my heart skip. I would have been lying if I said I didn't want him to cross the space between us, bend me over the nearest surface, and take whatever he wanted. The thought alone left me dizzy. He's your mother's lover, I reminded myself. Stop it. My body wasn't listening. "I made dinner." His voice snapped me out of it. I blinked and found him still watching me, his head tilted as though he knew exactly where my mind had wandered. I nodded stiffly and escaped upstairs. The bathroom filled with steam as I stepped under the shower and let the water pour over my shoulders. I wanted it to wash him out of my head. It didn't. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw his chest, his hands, that slow smile. The water ran down my skin in warm streams, and when a drop slid over my breast and trickled across my n****e, it hardened at once, aching. I drew in a sharp breath and braced my palm against the cold tile. My wolf was awake now and pushing hard against my restraint, and I knew this wasn't the kind of hunger I could ignore. This was heat, real and consuming, and every nerve I owned was begging for relief. I turned off the water with unsteady hands, pulled a towel around myself, and went to my room without bothering to dry off properly. Downstairs, I could hear Lucas moving around the kitchen, plates clinking, the low hum of his voice as he sang to himself. I crossed to my dresser and slid the bottom drawer open. Beneath a stack of folded sweaters, wrapped in an old scarf, lay the toy I had bought online and hidden away for a night exactly like this one. My hand closed around it, and my pulse thundered in my ears. I lay back on the bed, the towel falling open beneath me, and let my head sink into the pillow. The air in the room felt cool against my damp skin, and it only made the heat inside me burn hotter. My hands shook as I switched the toy on. The low hum filled the silence, and I stared at the ceiling for a moment, breathing hard, almost afraid of how badly I wanted this. Just this once, I lied to myself. Just to take the edge off. The first touch drew a soft gasp out of me. My back arched off the mattress, my toes curling into the sheets. It was only a whisper of sensation, and it shot through my whole body like lightning chasing down a wire. I bit down on my lip and pressed a little closer, and a slow, trembling warmth began to spread through my belly and down my thighs. Every nerve seemed to wake at once, humming and hungry. My skin felt too tight, my breath too loud, and the ache between my legs deepened with every second, a delicious, desperate pressure that begged to be answered. I closed my eyes, and he was there. Not the Lucas who had smiled at me in the hallway. The one from that night, the one I had no business remembering so clearly. I saw the flex of his back, the grip of his hands on my mother's hips, the way he moved, so sure of himself and so unhurried, as if he knew exactly how to unravel a woman. I remembered the sound of her voice breaking apart, and I wondered what it would feel like to be the one crying out like that, to be the one he held that tightly. "Lucas..." His name left my lips in a whisper, shameful and sweet. The moment I said it, a shiver tore through me, and I said it again, softer, my voice cracking on the second syllable. "Lucas..." I imagined his hands on me instead of my own. I imagined his breath against my neck, his low voice in my ear, his weight pinning me down while I begged for more, harder, faster, just the way she had. My hips lifted to meet the rhythm I'd set, and the pleasure climbed higher, tightening in my core like a drawn bowstring. My wolf stirred beneath my skin, pleased and urgent, pushing me toward the edge. A moan slipped out of me, then another, no matter how hard I tried to swallow them. It felt so good. It felt like drowning and flying at once. My thighs trembled, my fingers twisted in the sheets, and my breath came in broken little gasps as the wave rose and rose inside me. I was so close. One more moment, one more breath, and it would crash over me and sweep everything away. "Claire? The food's getting cold." The door swung open. Everything stopped. My eyes flew wide, and the toy slipped in my frozen grip, still humming against the sheets. Lucas stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob, the other still lifted as though he'd been about to knock a second too late. His mouth hung open on the rest of his sentence. His eyes locked on mine, then moved, just for a heartbeat, to the tangled sheets, to my flushed skin, to what I held. Neither of us moved. Neither of us breathed. Gosh, I thought, my heart slamming against my ribs. I didn't lock the door. The silence stretched, thick and burning, and the worst part, the part that terrified me most, was that he still hadn't looked away.