Chapter 6: The siblings' suppressed desires surface in the moonlit lagoon, their hands exploring familiar-yet-forbidden territory as waves crash against the rocks.
The morning sun painted the hidden cove in bands of gold and emerald, the air thick with the scent of wet stone and blooming frangipani. Hayden walked the narrow path, his mind still churning from last night’s spectacle—his father’s dark stare, Ashleigh’s defiant hips, the unspoken fracture widening at the villa. He needed the silence.
He found it here, until he saw the ripple breaking the cove’s perfect mirror surface. A flash of pale skin, a curve of red hair. Ashleigh. She was swimming, her movements lazy and private, a world away from the girl on the dance floor. Then she stood, water sluicing from her shoulders, her breasts, the thatch of crimson at her apex glistening in the light. She was entirely, devastatingly nude.
Their eyes locked. She didn’t cover herself. “Come to scold me some more?” Her voice echoed, crisp over the gentle lap of water.
“No.” His own voice was rough. The sight of her, open and unashamed, short-circuited every thought. The cove’s serenity became a charged bubble.
She waded toward shore, water clinging to her thighs, her little belly. “Good. Because I’m not in the mood.” She stepped onto the sand, dripping, completely exposed to him. A challenge. He saw the faint bruise on her hip from where he’d pulled her away last night.
“Ashleigh.” It was all he could say. He was moving before he decided to, his shoes sinking in the warm sand.
“Don’t.” But her breath hitched as he closed the distance, his hands finding her wet waist. His touch wasn’t brotherly. It was a claim. She smelled of salt and sunscreen and something uniquely her. Her eyes widened, pragmatic resolve melting into something startled and hungry.
He kissed her. It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision of teeth and shared breath, a release of all the coiled family tension. She moaned into his mouth, her hands fisting in his shirt. When he broke away, her lips were swollen. “Hayden, we can’t—”
“We are.” He walked her backward toward a soft patch of sand beneath the mangroves, their roots forming a dark, private arch. She let him guide her down, her skin pearled with water and now sand. He stripped quickly, his own need evident, enormous and urgent. Her gaze dropped, and a shaky exhale escaped her. “Jesus.”
“Don’t think,” he muttered, kneeling between her thighs. He entered her in one slow, devastating stroke, and her back arched off the sand, a cry tearing from her throat that was swallowed by the jungle hum. He felt her tightness give way, her body adjusting, welcoming. Then he moved, setting a relentless rhythm that had her digging her heels into the small of his back. Each thrust was an apology for his roughness last night, a punishment for her defiance, a desperate fuse blown in their shared, gilded cage. She chanted his name, not “bro,” but “Hayden,” each syllable a broken prayer as the world narrowed to skin, sweat, and the raw, grinding truth of their joining.