Read Online Forbidden by Abbie Williams - Free Book Online Page A

the gloaming light, a separate part of her noticing and loving the way his wide shoulders shifted under it as he walked. She could taste him on her tongue just as sharply as she could not shake the feeling that he was meant for her, and she for him. Slowly, agonizingly, she eased back to reality, the reality in which he was her mother’s younger half-brother and she had spent one incredible night fucking his brains out. Her stomach lurched and she clutched her elbows even more tightly against her ribs.
    They came through the woods to a dock that stretched west over the lake, where the last traces of peach-tinted daylight skimmed over the impossibly flat, silken surface of the water, which seemed like something from a fairy tale, so unreal did it appear in this light. Or perhaps it was just her state of mind at present. Matthew stopped, turned wordlessly, and wrapped her in his arms. Instantly she wrapped her own around him, pressing against him, not caring about their predicament for that long moment. He clutched her like a drowning man, curving his huge body down to press his cheek to the top of her head.
    â€œI’m so sorry,” he whispered into the familiar smell of her hair, and he closed his eyes, letting himself breathe her in for one last second. Then he made himself pull away. “Bryce, I am so goddamn sorry I left you that way.”
    She was suddenly cold without his arms. Although no longer directly touching, they were only a few inches apart, and the air between them seemed to hum. She wasn’t imagining it, damn it. The universe felt it, and thrummed up into their feet and swirled in the space all around them.
    â€œDon’t be sorry,” she told him, speaking through a throat that felt bruised. “You didn’t know.”
    â€œWilder called me that night,” he told her, his eyes so dark and intense on her own that her chest ached. Still she wanted him so badly…it stunned her with its force, far worse than she could ever have known that night. “He told me about Dad. Bryce…I have never left a woman like that in my life. I care that you know that.”
    â€œI knew it that night,” she told him. “I’ve never done that either. Just…let go like that with someone.” She couldn’t look away from him, even though her cheeks were blazing. “I don’t think I ever can again. You did something to me…and now…” She gulped and anger instantly swelled within her, replacing the shock in a hot and welcoming rush. She let it come into her and hissed, “What the hell were you doing in Oklahoma?”
    â€œI was on a route for my friend Marshall,” he said, taking her shoulders in his hands again. “I was staying in that motel because the truck—Marshall’s truck—blew an axle, and it was getting fixed. I was heading back here when it happened.”
    She shrugged his hands away roughly. “And what? You thought you’d hit some local tail while you were there?”
    â€œNo, Bryce, no. Not like that.” She wanted to believe him. “You did something to me, too,” he went on, his voice ragged. “I can’t stand here and pretend that you didn’t, even with what I know about us now. I have never felt that way with anyone, from the moment I saw you, I just…knew. I don’t understand any of it, Bryce.”
    And just like that, her anger dissolved away, down a depthless channel in her heart.
    â€œMatthew,” she whispered, just to speak his name aloud. She laced her fingers together over her belly, pressed hard against the pain there. “We have to pretend we’ve never met,” she said after a long moment, and then looked abrubtly away from him, out over the darkening surface of the lake. Around them the air had subtly shifted, on a level that was only sensed, not really seen. There was no exact second when evening became night, other than at a cellular level