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A Steamy Step-Sibling Cabin Romance
- Prologue
The garden smelled of white roses and expensive champagne the afternoon their parents married. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of ancient oaks, catching on crystal flutes and the soft sheen of silk dresses. Twenty-two-year-old Sienna Vale stood at the edge of the crowd in a pale slip of a dress that clung to the gentle swell of her breasts and the subtle flare of her hips. Her long, sun-bleached waves tumbled loose down her back, freckles scattered like secrets across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her breasts. She held her camera like armor, occasionally lifting it to capture the bride’s radiant smile or the groom’s proud stance, but mostly she used the lens as a shield.
Across the lawn, twenty-five-year-old Kai Lennox leaned against a stone pillar, dark hair falling into eyes the color of storm clouds. His broad shoulders filled out his tailored shirt, the fabric stretching slightly over the hard planes of his chest. He nursed a whiskey, jaw tight, watching the ceremony with the detached intensity of a man who preferred to observe rather than participate. His last relationship had ended in ashes, leaving him hollowed out and creatively barren. Now he wrote thrillers thick with obsession and shadowed desire, pouring every unsated hunger onto the page because it was safer than feeling it in his own body.
Their eyes met once across the sea of guests—Sienna’s wide blue gaze catching his for a heartbeat too long. Something electric flickered between them, sharp and unwelcome. She looked away first, cheeks warming, fingers tightening on her camera. He took another slow sip of whiskey, the muscle in his jaw flexing. Step-siblings now. The word felt absurd, almost laughable. They exchanged nothing more than polite nods when introduced, then drifted back into their separate worlds.
Sienna’s mother, glowing in ivory lace, had found love again with Richard Lennox, a wealthy tech CEO whose quiet power and steady presence had slowly coaxed her out of years of grief. For Sienna, the marriage still felt like a beautiful intrusion—another man stepping into the space her father had left empty. She buried the ache the only way she knew how: behind the camera, turning other women into living erotic fantasies, coaxing them to bare skin and bolder desires while she kept her own tightly leashed.
Kai had his own ghosts. The brutal…