Forbidden Desires

Off Limits

The house had never felt small until Mara had to share it with him.

Six bedrooms. Four bathrooms. A kitchen the size of a basketball court. And somehow, every time Mara turned a corner, there he was — Callum, leaning against a counter with that insufferable smirk, shirtless, drinking orange juice straight from the carton like he'd been raised in a barn.

It had been eight months since her mother married his father. Eight months since she'd been uprooted from her quiet life in Bath and dropped into this sprawling Surrey estate that smelled like new money and old cologne. Eight months of Callum Reed treating her like an intruder in a house that wasn't even his to guard.

"You're staring," he said one morning without looking up.

"Of course I'm staring. You're drinking from the carton again."

"You're the milk police now?"

"I'm the person who'd like a glass of juice that hasn't touched your mouth."

His eyes lifted then. Slow. Deliberate. The colour of river mud and just as hard to read. "You worried about my mouth, Mara?"

Heat crawled up the back of her neck. She turned for the fridge. "Don't flatter yourself."

But that was the thing with Callum. He didn't need to flatter himself. He already knew. It was written in the way he looked at her when they argued — that low, dangerous assessment, like he was cataloguing her reactions for later. And in the way he fought with her, close, always too close, close enough that she could feel the heat off his skin and tell herself it was anger, only anger, every single time.

The breaking point came on a Friday.

Their parents were in Milan for a long weekend. The house staff had the night off. Mara was curled on the library sofa with a book she wasn't reading, her bare feet tucked under a blanket, when Callum wandered in smelling of chlorine from the pool, a towel slung low on his hips, water still beading along the hard lines of his shoulders.

"Decent library you've got," he said, dragging a finger along a shelf. "Shame you never let anyone use it."

"Everyone's allowed to use it. You just only ever come in here to annoy me."

"That's not the only reason." He turned. The towel rode lower.

"I come in here because it's the only room in this house you actually relax in. I like watching you relax. It's rare."

Mara shut the book with a snap. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't do that. Don't say soft things to me and then pretend you didn't."

He went quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed against the walls. He crossed the room in five slow strides, sat on the arm of the sofa, and looked down at her — not with the smirk, not with the armour. Just looked at her, and for the first time she saw something underneath that frightened her far more than his cruelty ever had.

"You think I'm pretending?" His voice was low, rough at the edges.

"Callum—"

"You think I don't hear you, at night?" He reached out, caught a curl of her dark hair, and twined it once around his finger. "In the room next to mine. You think those walls are thick enough?"

The floor tilted. Mara felt the blood leave her face and rush somewhere far more treacherous. "You're disgusting."

"Maybe." He didn't let go of the hair. "But you said my name."

She had. God help her, she had. Not loudly, not often, but enough. On the nights when the want got so thick in her chest she couldn't breathe around it, when she pressed her face into her pillow and came with her thighs shaking around her own hand and his name trapped behind her teeth — she'd thought she was safe. She'd thought those walls were thick enough.

"You don't know what you heard," she whispered, but there was no conviction in it.

"I know exactly what I heard." He leaned down, so close she could smell the chlorine and the cedar soap and something underneath that was just him, warm and male and impossible to lie to. "I heard the girl who calls me disgusting spend her nights wanting me."

"I don't want you."

"Liar." A single word. Almost tender.

"Callum. We can't."

"I know we can't." His thumb traced the line of her jaw. "That's the whole point."

His mouth hovered a breath above hers, waiting. He didn't close the distance. He wouldn't. He was cruel like that — making her choose it. Making her walk into the fire herself.

Mara kissed him.

It was soft for half a second, a question. Then his hand fisted in her hair and his mouth opened over hers and the question became a demand and the demand became a war. She bit his lip. He groaned into her mouth — a low, broken sound that she felt in her stomach — and hauled her up onto her knees so she was level with him, kneeling on the sofa cushion, his towel dragging against the inside of her thigh.

"This is the last off-limits thing in this house," she breathed against his mouth.

"Good." He pulled back just far enough to strip the blanket off her, eyes dragging down her body — the oversized sleep shirt, the bare legs, the way her n*****s had gone hard and visible through thin cotton. "I'm tired of off-limits."

He lifted the shirt over her head. Cool air touched her skin and then his hands did — broad, rough-palmed, everywhere at once, palming her breasts, thumbing her n*****s until she arched into him with a sound she didn't recognise. His mouth followed his hands, hot and wet and open, sucking at her breast while his other hand slid down her ribs, down her stomach, between her legs.

She was already soaked. She knew he felt it the moment his fingers found her, because he exhaled a sharp breath against her chest and swore, low.

"Christ, Mara."

"Don't talk about it. Just—" She bucked into his hand. Two fingers slid through her and curled, finding the place that made her see white, and he worked her with the same intensity he brought to everything — relentless, precise, a little bit vicious. She held onto his shoulders and dug her nails in and he liked that, she could tell, because he hissed and pressed harder, added his thumb to the swollen bud above and ground it in slow circles while his fingers f****d into her.

She came fast and bright, clenching around his fingers, mouth open against his neck, his name breaking out of her like a confession.

He didn't give her time to recover. He pulled his hand free, looked at the wet shine on his fingers, and put them in his own mouth. The sound he made was obscene. Then he was standing, pulling her up, dragging the towel off so she could see all of him — hard, flushed, thick, the tip already slick — and walking her backward until her shoulders met the bookshelf.

"Hands on the shelf," he said.

"Bossy."

"You like it."

She did. She hated that she did. She reached up and gripped the shelf above her head, the wood grain biting into her palms, and he dropped to his knees.

His mouth on her was nothing like his hands. Where his fingers had been precise, his tongue was greedy — wide, flat strokes through her folds, then pointed and circling, then sealing over her c**t and sucking until her knees buckled. He caught one of her legs over his shoulder and opened her wider and ate her like he was starving, like this was the one meal in the house he'd been denied, groaning against her until the vibration itself pushed her to the edge again.

"Callum — wait — I can't —"

"You can." He didn't stop. He sealed his mouth and sucked harder, and his fingers dug into the meat of her thigh to hold her still, and she broke apart with a cry that echoed off the spines of her books.

Before the tremors finished, he stood. He turned her around, pressed her front against the shelf, and ran his c**k through the slick mess of her once, twice, just the head pushing at her entrance, maddening.

"Tell me," he said, lips against her ear. "I need to hear it."

"Inside me. Now. Please."

He pushed in slow. Too slow. Deliberate and deep, an inch at a time, letting her feel every bit of the stretch, the fullness, the way her body had to open and yield around him. Mara's mouth fell open against a hardback spine. She heard herself whimpering and didn't care. When he was finally seated to the hilt, his hips flush against her, his c**k throbbing where it buried, he held still.

"Look at you," he said, ragged. "Taking all of it. Taking me. You're so tight I can't think."

"Then stop thinking and move."

He laughed — a dark, breathless thing — and obeyed. The first thrust knocked a book off the shelf. By the fourth, she'd lost count of the books. He f****d her hard against the shelves, one hand flat on her lower back to pin her, the other reaching around to grip her throat — not squeezing, just holding, just possessing — and his mouth found her shoulder and bit down as his hips snapped forward. The sound of their bodies was obscene: wet, rhythmic, skin on skin, the soft thud of her backside against his thighs, her broken moans, his grunts that came deeper with every stroke.

"Say my name again," he ordered. "Say it like you do at night."

"Callum—"

"Louder."

"Callum."

He shuddered. His rhythm faltered, grew ragged. His hand slid from her throat down to her c**t and worked her in tight, slick circles while he drove into her, and she felt it building a third time, deeper, heavier, like a wave pulling back from shore before it broke.

"I'm going to come inside you," he warned, and the words were raw, wrecked. "I'm going to fill you up and you're going to take it."

"Take it. Take it, Callum, please—"

He slammed home and broke. She felt it — the hot, thick pulse of him spilling into her, again and again, his whole body shaking against her back, his face buried in her hair, his hand still working her c**t until she clenched around him and came so hard her vision whited out and her nails scored the shelf.

They stayed like that, breathing, for a long time. Still joined. His forehead resting on her shoulder. Her hands trembling on the wood. Books on the floor. The house silent around them.

Finally, he pressed a kiss to the bite mark on her shoulder and pulled out slowly. She felt the warmth of him slip down her thigh. He turned her around, gently this time, and looked at her the way he never had — not smirking, not fighting, not guarded. Just present, chest heaving, mouth swollen from her teeth, eyes stripped bare.

"This doesn't fix anything," she said, but her voice was soft now, all the fight gone out of it.

"I know." He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "It makes everything worse."

"Then why does it feel like the first honest thing I've done in eight months?"

He kissed her forehead. Then her mouth. Slowly, without the desperation, without the war. Just a kiss. A real one.

"Because it is," he said.

They didn't talk about it the next morning. Not over coffee, not over the paper, not in the careful space they left between their bodies at the kitchen island.

But when their parents' car pulled into the drive that evening, and Mara moved to step away from him on the front step, Callum caught her wrist — just for a second, just long enough for his thumb to press the pulse point there — and let go.

The war was over. Something worse and better had started.

And neither of them said a word about it for the rest of the weekend, even as the bruises on her hips bloomed purple beneath her dress and she smiled at her mother across the dinner table and felt, for the first time in her life, that she was keeping a secret that was entirely, ruinously hers.