Kayla is a smart, focused, top-mark student in her last two senior years of high school in a private facility for rich kids in Florida. All she wants is to get accepted to Harvard and graduate with top marks to follow the career she has set for herself. Her entire life is about becoming an independent and successful vet. She has micro-managed it and planned it to the tiniest detail. Leaving no room for a social life or living her teen years like her peers.

This year has had its ups and downs, with her stepbrother of almost ten years coming to live under the same roof after being raised apart after their parents married. The chaos and drama his appearance has brought, since he despises not only his father but Kayla's mother too, has made home tense. He's a rude, defiant, and arrogant pain in her ass who is hellbent on causing trouble and listens to no one.  

Dane is the polar opposite in every way - Vain, oversexed, a playboy who takes nothing seriously except booze, girls, and his motorbike while he rebels in every way against his father for ripping apart his family. Looking like a teen idol, acting like someone who doesn't need to take accountability for anything in his life, Kayla honestly cannot stand him. She sees a loser who will live on daddy's money and drink away his youth while sleeping with every girl in the county.

At 17, they have known one another most of their lives and never had any kind of friendly relationship. They have always been classmates but never friends and definitely not siblings. - but all that is about to change. 

A series of events pulls them closer, a forbidden and unexpected accidental kiss, and they plummet into confusion as feelings grow that neither expected. Slowly the walls come down between them, and they have far more in common than they ever imagined.

TEEN DRAMA

　　Dane slides my hand from his clothes and avoids looking me in the eye. There’s a subtle shift in the atmosphere as a cold wall comes back up between us, his face tightens, and his eyes grow colder.


　　“I can’t help who I like….. it is what it is.” He shrugs, and my heart constricts. There’s nothing except blank and empty in his tone, and I swallow hard.


　　“So you really have feelings for her, then? This isn’t another dig at me to upset me? An attempt to make me dislike you….. because of…..” I can’t even say it.


　　We both know it, no matter how much I deny it.


　　“Let’s not do this.” Dane dodges my searching gaze and slides the box up from the counter to put it away, but I get up and follow him. I don’t want to let this moment of truce slide by so easily because I know he’ll return to hostile and blank as soon as this is done. I want to talk about this properly. Not the veiled weird, nothing conversations where we end in anger and insults.


CHAPTER 42