* * *
The gorgeous model posing topless on sports cars and motorcycles isn’t just any girl. Her name is Zoe Donahue, and she also happens to be Winston’s stepsister.
* * *
While the two haven’t spoken since the day Winston reluctantly let Zoe go so she could pursue her dreams, an explosive reunion is on the horizon.
* * *
Zoe’s been holding a grudge against Winston for how things ended the day she left. Now, she’s home for a week, and her plan is to torture her brooding stepbrother by wearing as little clothes as possible while promising Winston she’ll never let him touch her again.
* * *
Winston will do anything it takes to earn Zoe’s forgiveness. And this time, he isn’t going to let her leave without putting up a fight.
Chapter One
Winston Prescott
* * *
Ten years ago…
* * *
“Tell Zoe you changed your mind. Tell her she can’t leave!” I shout at Martin Donahue when I barge into his office in a panic Saturday morning. He’s always spoiled his daughter because her mother died when she was a baby, but this is going way too far.
“I wish it were that easy.” He pushes his laptop away from him to lean back in his desk chair. “But Zoe’s eighteen now, and I can either let her go or have her resent me for the rest of her life for missing this opportunity.”
“At least she would be safe,” I mutter. “Who’s going to look out for her when she’s flying all around the world?”
“It’s sweet of you to worry so much about your stepsister. Really, it is,” he remarks.
“Someone needs to!”
“Winston, you know I love Zoe more than anyone, more than your own mother! But sometimes this is what you have to do when you love someone—you support them when they follow their dreams, even when it hurts.”
“I don’t like it,” I tell him through gritted teeth.
“Neither do I!” he says with a chuckle.
“She should be going to college, not traveling the world with some fucking modeling competition.”
For the past two years, I’ve been waiting for this day, for Zoe to graduate high school and leave the city—hopefully the state—to go to school, far enough away that I stop thinking about her and all the dirty things I obsess about doing to her. She’s constantly tempting me with her too-sexy outfits and bikinis around the pool. I had to move out of the house when she turned sixteen because it was too much. She was too much.
But every day after school, she still stops by the shop where I work to flirt with the other mechanics, flaunting what I want but can never have, right in front of my face. Her father would castrate me if I ever laid one of my dirty hands on her, and I owe him everything for saving my mother five years ago from her abusive husband.
“College would be my preference as well,” Martin says. “Zoe, however, has decided that she wants to pursue a career in modeling. And she worked hard for this chance. Maybe when she returns in six months, she’ll have had enough of the fashion industry and finally go to college.”
“You think so?”
He laughs. “No, but one can hope.”
Fuck.
“Ah! Look at the time.” Martin stands up and grabs his suit jacket from the back of his chair. “We should get going. Her party starts soon, and she’ll give us hell if we’re late.”
“I’m not going,” I tell him.
“This your way of punishing her for leaving? She’ll never forgive you.”
If I had my way, I would punish her by bending her over and spanking her perfect ass until it was bright red and she agreed not to leave. Since I’m nearing my breaking point of doing just that, I plan to stay far, far away until her plane leaves tomorrow.
“I’ve got shit to do. I’m doing a total restoration on a sixty-nine Camaro, and the shop promised the client it would be finished next week,” I lie. I am doing the restoration, but there’s no due date for a job that requires finding rare parts. “I’ve wasted enough time coming by here.”
“Right,” he agrees. “Then I guess you should get going. I’ll tell Zoe you send your regrets.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I say before I stomp out of his office, angry at him—and her—for being idiots.
Zoe Donahue
* * *
“You are so freaking lucky!” Sonya gushes as she and my other friends from school gather around me at my graduation-slash-going away party.
“I can’t believe you get to travel the world this summer!” Mabel chimes in.
“And living all on your own!” Sonya adds.
“I won’t really be on my own,” I tell them absently while keeping an eye on the front door as guests come and go. There has been a steady flow of people, with the exception of the one person I wanted to see before I leave tomorrow morning. “There will be tons of other models competing too.”
All my life, I’ve loved fashion and longed to be one of the lucky women who gets to pose in gorgeous, designer dresses on the cover of magazines. I want to travel and take pictures in different countries, experience new places and cultures. And most of all, I want to be wanted, the object of men’s desires.
Which is pretty stupid since, no matter how hard I try, how flirty I am, or how provocative I dress, I’ve never been able to hold the attention of one particular man for more than a few brief seconds. He’s the opposite of the boys in high school who proudly show me their dicks and beg me to get naked for them. But then again, Winston is a man not a boy. At twenty-one, he’s obsessed with cars and motorcycles.
He’s also my stepbrother, and I want him more than anything, even my six-month all-expenses paid trip around the world or the modeling contract I could possibly win.
“Excuse me for a second,” I say to my friends before I slip away from them to find my father and stepmother, who are talking to one of our neighbors. “Have either of you seen Winston?”
“No, not today,” his mother answers before diving right back into her conversation about seaweed spa treatments or whatever.
“Dad?”
“Sorry, honey, but I spoke to Winston earlier and he said he couldn’t make it. Something about a Camaro restoration that couldn’t wait.”
Oh my god! Some stupid car is more important than saying goodbye to me before I leave for half a year? That jackass!
The next few hours of my party I spend silently stewing, pissed at my stepbrother and unable to enjoy myself.
How hard is it for him to show up and say a simple goodbye? What car repair couldn’t wait ten minutes for him to at least pretend like he cares?
Around ten o’clock, after my last guest leaves, I grab my phone and car keys, intent on finding out.
At the auto shop across town, the lights are on and there is a line of cars sitting out front, along with Winston’s Harley. But if I have to guess, he’s the only person inside at this hour.