Page 1 of Claimed By The Other Brother

Prologue

Scarlett

There are things you can't explain to anyone who hasn't lived them.

Not the way it feels to stand in a gown you spent six months choosing, holding a bouquet of flowers that cost more than your first paycheck, standing at the door at the back of the aisle while the minutes stack up like debt. Not the way silence sounds when the eyes of your friends and family are on you and the man who was supposed to walk down that aisle, doesn't. Not the way your entire body understands what your mind refuses to accept before anyone says a word.

And certainly not the way it feels to end up inhisbed.

Dax Blackwell.

I tell myself, even now, that it was grief. That it was the champagne and the devastation and the fact that he was simplythereon that terrace when everything inside me was caving in. I tell myself it was a single, catastrophiclapse in judgment—the kind that belongs to the worst night of your life and nowhere else. Something you bury. Something you never speak of.

I've been telling myself that for months.

Standing in the doorway of his bedroom now, watching him pull his jacket from his shoulders and lay it over the chair with the kind of unhurried precision that tells me he is a man who has never once rushed for anything in his life, I understand that I was lying to myself the entire time.

This was always where I was going to end up.

He turns, his blue eyes finding mine across the room, and the look on his face is the same one that unravels me every single time — not hunger, not arrogance, not the cool dominance that everyone in his orbit mistakes for indifference. It'scertainty. Like I am something he has already decided on. Like the outcome of this evening was never in question.

My pulse pounds at the base of my throat.

"Stop thinking," he says quietly, and he crosses the room to me.

I open my mouth to tell him that I can't. That I've been thinking since the moment I met him, since that terrace, since New York, since every late strategy session in his office that ended the way they always ended — with his hands on me and all my carefully constructed walls reduced to rubble at my feet. I open my mouth to say all of it.

He kisses me before I get the chance, and every single thought dissolves.

His hands find my waist, pulling me flush against him as his lips move over mine with a slow, deliberate hunger that's somehow more devastating than urgency. He kisses me like he's savoring something he intends to consume entirely. His mouth is warm and certain, and I feel it in my stomach, in my thighs, in every place I've spent months pretending I don't think about.

I slide my hands up his chest and grip his collar, kissing him back with everything I've been holding in.

He walks me backward through the suite — past the living room where we'd been talking, past the city lights bleeding through the floor-to-ceiling windows — his mouth never leaving mine. When we reach the elevator bank inside the private entrance of his penthouse suite, he corners me against the wall, bracing one hand beside my head as he slows the kiss down deliberately, pulling at my bottom lip, taking his time with me.

His other hand moves down my side, tracing the curve of my waist, the flare of my hip. He kisses my jaw, then the curve of my neck, then back to my mouth — unhurried, thorough, like a man conducting a study.

I slide my hand up to his neck and dig my fingers into his hair, tilting my head back to give him better access, and he takes it, his mouth pressing harder against mine as his palm finds my lower back and pulls me against him.

The pressure of his hard cock against my stomach makes my legs go soft beneath me. I clutch his shoulder to keep myself upright, and I feel his mouth curve against mine — a quiet, knowing smile that I want to be furiousabout and can't be, because I am too busy being grateful for the wall behind me.

He pulls back just enough to look at me, his blue eyes dark, his breathing controlled in a way mine absolutely is not.

"Come here," he says, and takes my hand.

The instant we cross into the bedroom and the door closes behind us, his lips crash onto mine in an aggressive collision that consumes me completely. I throw my hands around his neck, rising onto my toes as I return every bit of his intensity. He tilts my chin, claiming my mouth, devouring it with all the hunger that has been building between us for longer than either of us wants to admit.

His tongue meets mine, and the warmth pooling between my legs deepens instantly.

He breaks the kiss only long enough to pull his shirt over his head and toss it across the room. He pulls me back against him immediately, his bare skin warm under my palms, and I press into him as he kisses me again, and something in my chest releases — this helpless, aching thing that I've been clenching shut for months.

He lifts me off the ground, pinning me against the door as he tears his lips from mine and brings his mouth to my neck. He grazes the skin there, biting softly, and I moan, my fingers threading back into his hair. He turns and carries me to the bed, dropping me onto the mattress with an ease that makes my stomach flip, and I watch him reach for his belt.

He holds my gaze while he loosens it — steady,unhurried — and the patience in his expression is almost unbearable.

He kicks off his shoes, steps out of his pants, and mounts the bed in nothing but his briefs. I watch how his hard cock is bulging—causing the fabric to stretch, and my body tightens with anticipation. He settles over me, sliding a hand to my cheek, kissing me softly as he moves against me — and I feel him press against my stomach, and every muscle in my body pulls taut.

He slips his fingers beneath the hem of my dress.