Page 83 of Jealous Stepbrother
“I’m not proud of it,” he continues, softer now but somehow even more devastating. “But I’d rather you hate me for being a man insane with love, than lose you and rot in a world without you. I don’t need freedom, or applause, or forgiveness. I need you. Just you.”
He sinks to his knees, right there on the café floor, head bowed once before lifting those shattered, striking,beautifuleyes up at me. “Scarlett, sweet girl, if you walk away now, you’ll take the last of me with you. And I don’t think I’ll survive it. Because I wasn’t built to love halfway. You came into my life when you were sixteen, and it took one second to know my world begins and ends with you.”
The silence is thunderous. My tears blur the sight of him kneeling before me, larger than life and somehow small at the same time, cracked open for everyone to see. My heart lurches, then aches andburns.
Then he rises in one swift, powerful motion, grabs me around the waist, and hauls me against his chest. “You’re mine, stepsister,” he announces hoarsely, turning toward the gawking crowd. “And I don’t give a damn who knows it.”
And to my shock, the café erupts. A scatter of applause from outside has turned into a roar inside, some whistling, a few murmuredche bello.
Not everyone approves.
But enough do to matter.
And really… isn’t that what is at the core of this wild, sexy, and forbidden journey I stepped into with my stepbrother?
My fists pound weakly at his shoulders even as I bury my face against him, trembling with confusion, heartbreak, elation, and the brutal, undeniable truth.
I love him too.
I gasp when he swings me up in his arms. “Asher, put me down!”
“Never,” he growls, clutching me tighter, striding through the tables like a man possessed. “Not in this life. Not in the next.”
The bell above the door jingles madly as he carries me out into the Florence sunlight, our storm of love and ruin spilling across cobblestones and into eternity.
Scarlett
Ten minutes later,the door clicks shut behind us, shutting out Florence, the café, the applause, the gasps.
My back hits silk wallpaper, my suitcase—which Asher had packed while I was atCasa Bellandi—drops somewhere I don’t care about.
Then my stepbrother is on me, his hands shaking as he tears at the buttons of my blouse. His mouth is rough, then reverent, then desperate on my skin.
I catch glimpses of where we are. Enough to know his hotel is nothing like mine.
It’s palatial, moody, and decadent, a penthouse that reeks of him in every gleaming surface. But all I see is him, his wild eyes, the way his hands tremble as if I’m slipping away even while he’s holding me.
“B-brother—” I choke on his name as he lifts me, carries me deeper inside, lays me on a bed big enough for a kingdom.
He undresses me with frantic care, peeling away every barrier until there’s nothing left between us but feral desire.
His clothes follow, and then he’s above me, hard and unyielding, his chest heaving like he’s run a marathon straight through hell.
“Look at me,” he rasps, cupping my jaw. “Scarlett… princess, I need you to look at me when I tell you this.”
I do. God help me, I do.
“I love you. I love you like it’s a disease eating me alive. Like there’s no cure and no end. I’ll never be free of it, and I don’t want to be. You’re my oxygen, my blood, my sanity, and my madness. Without you, I’m nothing.”
Tears blur my vision, and I spread my thighs wide.
Pull him into me.
He thrusts with a battle cry, hard and true inside me in one long, devastating stroke, stealing my breath and anchoring me to the earth. To him.
I arch, clutching at his shoulders while drowning in the most beautiful, ferocious man on earth. “God, Asher!”
He groans, forehead pressing to mine. “I don’t give a fuck if the world spits on us. I don’t care if they call me twisted, depraved, unfit to love you. They’ll never understand. But you will, won’t you, baby? Because you feel it too?”
