Forbidden Reunion

The childhood house still smelled like dust and old summer nights when Jace carried the last of Lila’s boxes up the narrow stairs. Divorce had scattered their parents and shoved the two of them back under one roof for the season—Vanessa already gone again on another work trip, the place echoing with just their footsteps and the low thrum of the window unit fighting the heat. At twenty-eight, Jace had the heavy shoulders and ink-black sleeves of a man who spent his days marking skin; at twenty-two, Lila moved through the halls like she owned every forbidden memory left inside them. He watched the swing of her hips in cutoff shorts and told himself the years of wanting her had to stay buried. One slip and the fragile blended family they’d built would crack open for good.

Late that night the attic was a furnace. Lila knelt among open cartons, hair stuck to the damp nape of her neck, tank top clinging. Jace crouched beside a crate of old sketchbooks and felt the air thicken when her fingers closed around a worn page. She held it up—charcoal lines of her own teenage body, half-turned, mouth parted, the drawing he had never quite thrown away.

“You kept this,” she said, voice low and delighted. She rose and stepped into his space until her breasts brushed his chest. Heat poured off her. “All these years, big brother. Sketching your little stepsister like you wanted to ruin her.”

Jace’s throat worked. His hands stayed fisted at his sides even as his cock thickened hard against his jeans. “Lila—”