On the way, I pass the church. If I wasn’t already late, I would stop in, but it’ll have to wait until after class now. But I still linger for a moment, staring at the steps that lead up to the doors, imagining a young, scared girl about to walk through for the first time. She could have walked into any church that night. There were two Baptist and one Lutheran church between here and her house that she could have chosen, but she walked into my life instead.
Call it fate or divine intervention, but I believe all of this was meant to happen. Every vow we broke and sin we committed was the work of God himself. It’s so hard to argue right and wrong when my soul is finally at peace. I was a priest and she was almost a nun, and people can think being together is blasphemous and wrong, but for us, it was so very right.
Also by Sara Cate
Wicked Hearts Series
Delicate
Dangerous
Defiant
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Age-gap romance
Beautiful Monster
Beautiful Sinner
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Wilde Boys Duet
Gravity
Free Fall
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Reverse Harem
Four
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Bully Romance
Burn for Me
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Cocky Hero Club
Handsome Devil
About the Author
Sara Cate is a USA Today Bestselling author of forbidden romance with lots of angst, a little age gap, and heaps of steam. Living in Arizona with her husband and kids, Sara spends most of her time reading, writing, or baking.
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You can find more information about her at
Always Been You
BY Q.B. TYLER
Copyright © 2021 by Q.B. Tyler
All rights reserved.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination and used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Editing: Kristen Portillo—Your Editing Lounge
“Always Been You”
An adopted brother romance
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Wrong. Sinful. Taboo.
I know I shouldn’t want him.
I know I shouldn’t touch myself in the middle of the night as thoughts of him run through my mind.
Thoughts of his kiss, his touch, his love.
I’d spent years obsessing over the man I thought I couldn’t have.
But as it turns out, he wants me too.
And he wants me now.
So it seems this Christmas break, there will be many not so silent nights.
Prologue
Gabrielle
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I am in love with my older brother.
And before you get all weird, I’ll say that, yes, he’s my older brother but not biologically. The same blood running through my veins is not the same running through his. The blood in my veins is from a sixteen-year-old girl in Mississippi who messed around with a much older man she had no business with and had herself shipped off to a convent until she gave birth to me which I learned much later in life.
She overdosed not too long after that.
I wince at the harsh reality of that. But my repressed mommy issues and my potential daddy ones—given that I don’t even know a name—is not the point of this story. The point is the Calloway family adopted me when I was two years old, meaning I spent approximately two years in foster care.
Aren’t babies supposed to get adopted instantly? What was wrong with me that I wasn’t picked right away?
Well for one, I had colic and trouble eating and sleeping and doing anything cute that would make a couple think “that’s who we want to add to our family.”
Secondly, I wasn’t blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Or brown-haired. Well, okay, my hair was dark brown, I guess, but so was my skin, and in Mississippi there weren’t too many people out there looking to adopt a baby that looked like me.
But the Calloway family traveled all the way from Connecticut to meet me, and as my mom says, she fell in love with me instantly.
For the record, by then my colic was gone.
They had two children already and were struggling to conceive a third which is where I come into the picture. James was their oldest, thirteen and moody as hell. Then there was Monica; she was ten, and quite frankly, God’s gift to my parents—besides me, of course. She was outgoing and charming but well behaved with stellar grades and on the fast track to Ivy Leagues. The good kid to James’ bad one as she liked to say.
James wasn’t bad per se, he was just going through that classic teenager stage where he hated everyone and everything except getting into trouble with his friends. But I’ll rephrase that, he hated everyone but me.
In the beginning, they told me how he’d be the first to my crib when I cried. He’d pick me up and bounce me around the room and try to get me back to sleep. Sometimes it worked and he’d sit next to my bed for the rest of the night in case I woke up again.
He helped feed me and allegedly was a pretty decent babysitter. I mean I’m eighteen now and still alive, so it’s safe to say he didn’t do a terrible job.
As I got older, I followed him around like a shadow, and he never minded it. Of course, there were nights he wanted to go out with his friends and I threw a whole ass tantrum over not being able to go with him. But he always promised to make it up to me the next day.
He always delivered.
When I was six years old, he went to his prom and I was devastated that I didn’t get to put on a pretty dress like his girlfriend, Luna, who I hated because I wanted to be the only girl in his life. But the next day, he told me to put on my prettiest dress and he set up a makeshift prom in our living room. With a cake and punch and everything. I was even crowned Prom Queen.
I was seven when he left for college and I cried myself to sleep every night for three months. Even though he called and texted and emailed, it wasn’t enough. I missed him so deeply. I missed him in a way that I assume was similar to missing a parent. Looking back, I wonder if him leaving stirred up feelings of being left by my birth parents.
Remember, I am a black girl with a white family; I knew I was adopted early on.
James never moved back in after college, except for that first summer. I was eleven then and it didn’t seem like he had the same amount of time as before. He was always working and didn’t have time for me and my Barbies like he did before. I even tried to sit next to him while he did work and write in my journal to seem more grown up. He would just chuckle before getting on the phone barking about numbers.