CLAIMED BY MY STEPBROTHER

Damien

She was finally here.

Real, warm and fucking mine.

Lila sat rigid against the far door, breathing fast, her chestnut hair wrecked from where I'd thrown her over my shoulder. Her hazel eyes burned with a hotter fury that she kept flinching away from every time it surfaced. That black dress clung to every soft curve I'd spent seven years starving for… the flare of her hips, the swell of her chest rising and falling too quickly, the bare stretch of thigh she kept pressing together like the pressure would solve something.

It wouldn't.

I knew exactly what she was feeling. The flush climbing her throat. The way her lips had parted slightly. The small tells her body was broadcasting that her expression was working hard to contradict. Lila had always been transparent to me. Even at sixteen, trying desperately to pretend she wasn't feeling what she was feeling, she'd been the most readable person I'd ever known.

Seven years hadn't changed that.

I reached over, gripped her waist, and hauled her across the seat until she straddled my lap. She gasped sharply, small hands flying to my chest and shoving hard.

"Damien, stop this…"

I gripped her hips and pulled her down against the thick, aching length of my cock straining beneath my pants. Her breath caught and broke into a soft whimper she immediately tried to swallow.

"Feel that?" I growled against her ear, grinding up slowly so she felt every inch. "Seven years, Lila. Seven years of watching you, protecting you from threats you never even knew existed. Seven years of going out of my mind every time some man got within reach of you."

"You don't get to say that." Her voice was unsteady. Working for steadiness it wasn't finding.

"You left. You chose to leave."

"I left to come back." I slid one hand under the hem of her dress, palming the curve of her ass. "There's a difference."

"There isn't." But the conviction was already thinning at the edges.

My fingers found the lace edge of her panties and slipped beneath.

She was soaked.

The groan that came out of me was involuntary, pressed against her temple before I could decide to contain it. Seven years. Seven years of surveillance photos and secondhand reports and the torture of watching her build a quiet, careful life that had no idea I was circling it and this was where it had always been pointing. Her warmth on my lap and her body already betraying everything she was trying to hold back.

"Don't," she said. Sharp and directed. "Don't talk like this was inevitable."

"Wasn't it?"

She turned her face away and looked out the window at the city sliding past. Her jaw was set. Her shoulders were rigid. And her hips had made one small, involuntary roll forward against my hand that she was pretending hadn't happened.

I let her pretend.

I dragged my fingers through her heat slowly, circling her swollen clit with patience, and felt the moment her breath changed… the shallow pull of air, the subtle loosening of the tension in her thighs, the way her grip on my shirt shifted from pushing to holding.

Her body was having a completely different conversation than her silence.

I worked her without rushing. Building the pressure in careful increments and easing back before she could tip over, finding the rhythm that made her breathing dissolve and her hips start moving in small, helpless pulses. Learning every response. Every shift. Every sound she tried to suppress.

"You're fighting very hard," I said quietly, "for someone whose body already decided."

"Shut up." The words came out ragged.

"I'm not saying it to embarrass you."

"Then stop talking."

I pressed harder against her clit and she bit down on her lip hard, catching the moan before it fully formed. Her forehead dropped to my shoulder. Her grip on my shirt tightened until I could feel her knuckles through the fabric.

I kept her right at the edge. Building and pulling back. Again. Again. Until she was trembling continuously, hips rolling forward in desperate pulses against my hand, her breath coming in shallow, broken pulls against my neck.

I pulled back completely.

The sound she made… frustrated and furious went straight to my cock.

"Damien…"

"Not yet."

She lifted her head from my shoulder and looked at me. Her face was flushed, her eyes glassy with want and sharp with anger, and she was fighting so hard to hold onto herself that I could see the exact effort of it in the set of her jaw.

"I hate you," she said.

"I know."

"I genuinely hate you right now."

"You can hate me and still want this." I held her gaze. "Both things are true. Neither one cancels the other out."

Her jaw tightened. She looked away again…out at anywhere that wasn't my face. Her chest was rising and falling too quickly for someone pretending to be composed.

I watched her.

The building appeared through the glass ahead of us, forty-three floors of dark steel rising against the city sky. I watched the recognition move through her body. The slight tension. The SUV stopped.

She climbed off my lap without being told, smoothing her dress down and creating distance with the efficiency of someone who had decided that composure was the only weapon left available to her. I let her have it. Watched her wrap her arms around herself in the elevator, eyes fixed on the rising floor numbers, the armor reassembling itself piece by careful piece.

The doors opened into the penthouse.

She stepped out and turned immediately to face me. Chin up. Shoulders back.

"I want answers," she said. "That's why I came up here. Not because of anything else."

"Okay."

She studied my face. "You're agreeing too easily."

"You deserve answers." I shrugged off my jacket, laid it over the back of the couch, rolled my sleeves up. Unhurried. Like this was simply a night. "You'll have everything you want to know."

"Tonight."

"After."

Her eyes narrowed. "After what."

I crossed the room toward her. Four steady steps. She watched me come and held her ground… committed to not retreating, chin lifting slightly as the distance closed. I stopped close enough that the space between us had its own specific weight.

"You know after what," I said quietly.

Her throat moved as she swallowed.

"That's not your decision to make," she said.

"You're right." I reached out and touched her jaw… two fingers, the lightest possible contact and felt her breath change immediately. Felt the shiver she contained before it fully formed. "But your body already made it."

I walked her backward until her shoulders met the floor-to-ceiling glass. The city sprawled below us, forty-three floors of indifferent light and noise that existed in a completely separate world from this one.

She looked up at me. Fury and want occupying the same space in her eyes, neither one willing to yield to the other.

I dropped to my knees.

Shoved her dress to her waist and ripped her soaked panties down her legs in one motion. Her thighs pressed together instinctively.

I spread them. Hooked one leg over my shoulder, pressed the other firmly open, and looked up at her from the floor.

Flushed. Chest heaving and eyes blazing.

"Damien…"

"Hold onto something," I said.

Then I buried my face between her legs and stopped pretending I had any interest in patience.

The first long, slow lick drew a cry out of her that rang off every hard surface in the room. She tasted like everything I'd spent seven years trying not to remember too precisely… sweet and wet and completely addictive. I groaned against her and devoured her the way a man devours after starvation for long enough that restraint feels like an insult to hunger.

Her hands flew to my hair and gripped hard.

"Oh God, Damien…"

Her hips rocked against my mouth. The carefully reconstructed composure from the elevator was gone entirely. What was left was entirely honest. Her body moving without apology, chasing the pressure, her moans filling the room with a rawness she'd stopped trying to contain.

I worked her to the edge. Found the rhythm that made her thighs shake around my head. Held her right there… teetering and kept her there long enough that the desperation became its own kind of pleasure.

Then I pulled back.

She made a sound of pure, furious desperation that she would never have made if she'd remembered she had any dignity left to protect.

I rose to my feet. Looked at her…undone against the glass, legs unsteady, eyes blazing with want and the anger that the want kept complicating.

She was still fighting it. Even now. Even like this.

I reached out and tucked a strand of wrecked hair behind her ear. Felt her breath catch at the gentleness of it, like that was somehow the thing that got through when everything else hadn't.

"We have time," I said quietly.