SWEET SURRENDER: A COLLECTION OF SPICY STORIES

BOOK 2 : MIDNIGHT STRINGS

COLLISION

Riley

“I swear to God, if one more person tonight tells me to calm down, I will lose my mind.”

I slammed the front door hard enough to rattle the frame. The marble foyer swallowed the sound and threw it back at me, mocking. Two in the morning, mascara probably smeared down my face, and Marcus’s voice was still ringing in my ears telling me I was “too much.” Too emotional. Too loud. Too everything.

Story of my life..I kicked off my shoes and left them where they fell. Mom would hate that. Mom wasn’t here. Mom was somewhere in Santorini feeding grapes to her new husband while her son was having a full breakdown in the entryway.

I needed water, cold water, a shower maybe. Something to wash Marcus and that entire horrible night off my skin.

I dragged myself up the stairs, pulling at my jacket, not even bothering with the lights. I knew this house. Grew up in it. Every creak in the floor, every shadow on the wall. I pushed open the bathroom door and reached for the light switch.

The light was already on. Steam hit me first. Then the sound of water cutting off. Then the shower curtain pulled back and Jax stepped out.

I stopped breathing.

He didn’t grab a towel. He didn’t flinch. He just stood there, water running down every line of him, tattoos dark against his skin, chest broad, abs tight, and that stupid V-line disappearing below the waist like some kind of personal attack. He looked at me the way you look at something mildly interesting. A bug on the wall. A crease in a shirt.

“You’re in my bathroom,” I said. My voice came out too high.

“Your mom’s bathroom,” Jax said. He finally reached for the towel and wrapped it slow around his waist, no rush, like he had all the time in the world. “She said I could use it while mine gets re-grouted.”

“She’s in Greece.”

“She texted.”

I pulled my eyes up to his face. His jaw was sharper than I remembered. His eyes were the same though. Dark and too steady. The kind of eyes that made you feel like you were already losing an argument.

I stepped back into the hallway. He followed.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“I had a bad night.”

“Clearly.” He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, towel hanging dangerously low. “The eyeliner is a nice touch.”

“Don’t.” I pressed my fingers to my temple. “Just don’t do that thing where you talk to me like I’m still sixteen and failing chemistry.”

Something shifted in his face. Not softness. More like interest. “You still hold grudges like a teenager though.”

And there it was.

I looked at him and felt six years collapse in two seconds. Jax at seventeen, laughing in the hallway with his friends while I ate lunch alone. Jax dropping my sketchbook in a puddle. Jax calling me shadow boy because I was always in the corners, always watching, never fitting anywhere he and his crowd wanted me to fit.

He was the golden one, Captain of everything. The boy everyone loved. I was his new stepbrother who nobody asked for, including him.

Now he was a CEO with his name in the headlines for all the wrong reasons and he was sleeping under the same roof as me again, acting like none of it ever happened.

“You made my life miserable for two years,” I said.

“I was a teenager.”

“So was I.”

He pushed off the doorframe and walked toward me. I held my ground, even though every smart part of my brain was telling me to move. He stopped close. Too close. Close enough that I could still smell the steam coming off his skin.

“You’ve been staring at me,” he said, voice low, “like you want to bite. Or be bitten.”

My stomach dropped. “I’ve been staring because you’re standing half-naked in a hallway that belongs to my mother.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t uh-huh me, Jax.”

He tilted his head. “Your pulse is going.”

“My pulse is fine.”

“Right here.” He touched two fingers lightly to the side of my throat, not rough, not slow, just precise. Like he already knew exactly where to press to make a point. I stepped back and hit the wall. He didn’t follow, but he didn’t move away either.

“You think I don’t remember you too,” he said. “Following me around that first summer. Before you decided you hated me.”

“I never followed you.”

“You used to laugh at everything I said.”

“I was twelve.”

“Thirteen.”

“Get out of my face, Jax.”

He smiled then. Not the mean kind. Worse.!. The kind that meant he found something genuinely funny and wasn’t going to explain it. He stepped back and spread his hands open like he was giving me room.

“Your mom and my dad extended the honeymoon,” he said. “Another month.”

The floor felt like it tilted. “What?”

“Got the call this afternoon. Something about a private villa and no interruptions.” He picked up a glass from the bathroom counter and took a long drink of water, easy and unbothered. “So it’s just us. Big house. Plenty of space.”

“I’ll stay in my room.”

“You do that.”

I turned and walked. Fast. Heart slamming against my ribs, heat crawling up the back of my neck. I didn’t look back. I made it to my room, shut the door, and pressed my back against it in the dark.

One month.

Thirty days in this house with Jax Calloway, who was broader and quieter and more dangerous than the boy who used to make me feel invisible. Thirty days pretending my body hadn’t done something completely unforgivable the second he stepped out of that shower.

Then his voice came through the door. Low and close, like he was right on the other side.

“Run all you want, little brother. This house isn’t big enough for both of us to hide what we want.”

I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.. Then my phone lit up on the bed. I crossed the room and picked it up.

It was from Jax. A photo. Him, shirtless, leaning against the bathroom counter with that same unbothered look in his eyes.

The caption said: Your move.

I put the phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. I was so completely in trouble..