Page 73 of Heartless Stepbrother
I flinched, jerking my knee away from him, but the movement was small, pathetic, a tremor instead of a retreat.
He saw it all.
The jet lifted, smooth and decisive. Weight dissolved from my body for a moment, then crashed back as the nose angled upward, pulling us into the sky with the cold, elegant certainty of something designed to conquer gravity and everything weaker than itself.
My stomach dropped.
My heart rose.
Riley leaned in, his breath grazing the shell of my ear, warm enough to melt bone.
“For the next few hours,” he whispered, voice a slow blade sliding under skin, “it’s just you and me. No parents. No escape. No interruptions.”
The plane climbed higher, engines roaring softly, sky swallowing us whole.
His fingers traced the brief ghost of a touch along the inside of my wrist.
“And trust me, princess…” he added, the words a dark promise curling into the pressurized air between us. “I intend to make very good use of the time.”
I angled my body subtly toward the aisle, putting an inch of space between us. One pathetic inch, but it felt like oxygen.
Riley noticed, of course.
He didn’t chase the space, didn’t lean in the way a normal boy might. No. He held still. Perfectly still. That terrible, patient calm he wore like a second skin. As if he were content to wait for the tension to snap on its own.
The engines leveled out into a steady roar. We were airborne, slicing through a sky too blue to be kind. The cabin lights softened into a warm glow, intimate and conspiring.
My pulse was still too fast. My breathing still shallow.
“Relax,” he murmured.
“I am relaxed,” I lied.
He hummed, a low, amused sound that vibrated through the seat and straight into my spine. “Your veins are working overtime. I can hear your heartbeat from here.”
“You can’t,” I snapped.
He turned his head just enough that his shoulder brushed mine, light, accidental, deliberate. His lips curved near my cheek in a smug, quiet smile.
“Princess,” he murmured, “I can hear everything.”
Heat crawled up my neck. A mix of anger, fear, and something traitorous I refused to name. I forced my gaze out the window, focusing on the endless blue instead of the warm gravity of his presence.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?” His voice was a low purr. “It fits.”
“It doesn’t.”
“It does when you look at me like that.”
My head whipped toward him. “Like what?”
His eyes dropped to my mouth, then climbed slowly, obscenely, back to my eyes. “Like you’re angry enough to bite.”
My breath caught. My stomach twisted. I tore my gaze away, but I could still feel his eyes tracing every line of my profile like a touch.
“Stop trying to get a reaction out of me.”
