CLAIMED BY MY STEPBROTHER

EVERYTHING SHE SWORE SHE WOULDN'T FEEL

Lila

I lasted four more minutes.

I counted. Damien stood in front of me with his lips wet and his eyes black and his hands deliberately still at his sides. Just watching me with the certainty of a man who had already calculated exactly how this ended and was simply waiting for me to arrive at the same conclusion.

Four minutes of holding the last thread of composure I had left with both hands.

Four minutes of telling myself that my body's choices were not my choices. That responding to him physically was not the same as surrendering anything real. That I could want this, could hate myself for wanting it and still keep the part of me that mattered entirely intact.

Then he reached out and barely… barely brushed his thumb across my c**t.

One touch. Barely contact.

"Fine," I said. The word came out steady.. Not a collapse but a decision made with my eyes open. "Please."

The distinction mattered to me. I was holding onto it with both hands.

He pressed two fingers against my lips.

The part of me that had been losing the argument for the last twenty minutes opened without being told. He slid his fingers in and my own taste hit my tongue… slick, intimate and deeply humiliating in a way that went straight to my core and my face burned with a heat that had nothing to do with anger.

I sucked his fingers and watched his jaw lock.

Good. Feel it too. Don't you dare stand there with that unshakeable composure while I'm coming apart at every seam.

He withdrew his fingers slowly. With his other hand he freed his c**k and I had told myself I wouldn't look and I looked. Thick. Long. Brutally hard with a bead already gathering at the tip. He pressed the length against my stomach and I felt the full weight and heat of it against my skin and my breath left me in one long, unsteady exhale.

"Seven years of this," he said lowly.Rough. "Seven years hard for you, Lila."

The words hit me in two completely contradictory ways at the exact same time… the shame and the want colliding so completely I couldn't find the seam between them. I was beginning to think that collision was deliberate. That he understood exactly what it did to me because he'd had seven years to think about it.

He gripped my thighs and lifted me. My legs wrapped around his waist before I'd consciously decided to let them. The broad head of his c**k pressed against my entrance… just there, present, not pushing in and the contact alone made me grip his shoulders and drag in a sharp breath.

"Tell me you want it." His mouth dropped to my neck. Teeth scraping my pulse point, then biting down hard enough to mark. The sting bloomed immediately into heat.

"I want it." The words came out even. Eyes open. "That doesn't mean you have me."

He pulled back and looked at me.

I held his gaze. "My body wanting this and me wanting you, those aren't the same thing. I need you to understand that before this goes any further."

Something moved across his face. Not the dismissal I'd been bracing for or impatience. He looked at me the way he'd been looking at me since he walked through those doors… like I was something he was constantly verifying was still real.

Then he pushed inside me.

The stretch was intense. Burning and overwhelming, a sharp ache that drove a broken cry from my throat and sent my nails into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks. He filled me completely and went absolutely still. Forehead pressed to mine. Jaw clenched and chest heaving against my chest.

Neither of us breathed.

The city blazed below us. The room held nothing but the sound of our breathing and the specific, enormous weight of what had just happened.

I waited for the claiming words. For the possession. For him to tell me I was his.

He didn't speak.

He stayed there, forehead to mine, breathing ragged and his expression held what I couldn't immediately name. Not triumph. Something rawer and more complicated. Something unsettlingly, like a man standing at the edge of his own undoing and only just realizing it.

I filed that away. Carefully.

He began to move.

Deep and measured strokes that built the pressure with a speed that was already dissolving the thoughts I was trying to maintain. My back slid against the glass with each thrust. My hips rose to meet him before I'd decided to let them. The pleasure climbed rapidly…the fullness, the friction, the devastating sensation of being completely claimed by someone who had spent seven years thinking about nothing else and I let myself feel all of it while keeping the watching part of me, the thinking part, completely intact.

My body could have this.

My mind was staying mine.

"You're mine now." His pace shifted harder, each thrust forcing the air from my lungs. "Say it."

The orgasm crashed through me before I could brace for it. My walls clenched around him in long, rolling waves that tore his name from my throat in a sound I had no control over. My vision blurred at the edges. My nails drew blood.

I did not say it.

Damien followed with a groan pressed deep into my hair, burying himself to the hilt, his arms locking around me so completely I felt the shudder of it move through both of us simultaneously.

We stayed pressed together against the glass.

Panting. The city burning below.

His hand came up slowly and smoothed my wrecked hair back from my face. Careful. His thumb brushed my cheekbone and he looked at me, really looked, like he needed to verify I was still there.

"I meant what I said," I told him. My voice was rough but it was steady.

"I know."

"You have my body in this apartment." I held his gaze. "That's not the same as having me."

He studied my face for a long moment. Reading it the way he always had, like I was the only thing in whatever room he was in that was worth paying attention to.

"I know the difference," he said quietly.

I believed him.

That was the most unsettling thing of all. Not the night. Not what my body had done without my permission. Not the mark on my neck or the way my legs were still unsteady or the inconvenient warmth still sitting in my chest.

But the fact that I believed him.