Forbidden: A Sinful Shares Romance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  Forbidden

  A Sinful Shares Romance

  Suzanne Halliday

  Contents

  Author Note

  The Sinful Share Series

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Epilogue

  Excerpt of HIDDEN

  Excerpt of CONTROL

  About the Author

  Also by Suzanne Halliday

  Author Note

  The SINFUL SHARES Series will be short, over-the-top insta-love books that are heavy on heat! These standalone novellas are for those times when you want a quick, feel good love story but don’t have the hours to devote to a full-length book.

  Happily Ever After ~ Guaranteed

  The Sinful Share Series

  Forbidden

  Suzanne Halliday

  Copyright © 2018 Suzanne Halliday

  FORBIDDEN ~ The Sinful Shares Series

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Edit: Editing4Indies

  Cover Design: Cover Couture

  Prologue

  My name is Amanda Bailey, but you probably know me as Mandi B.

  I write smut. Good, old-fashioned, heart-thumping, panty-melting, lady boner smut. And I have a lot of fun doing it, too!

  Over the course of my writing career, many, many fans have sent me letters. Some of these letters I keep in a fancy box on the corner of my desk.

  It’s the fancy box letters I want to tell you about.

  The first Sinful Share letter I received arrived two years ago on a dreary Thursday. I remember this so precisely because we were in the midst of an awful rainy season that had turned our basement into an indoor pond. I’d been to the hardware store in a torrential downpour and was pulling down the drive, avoiding puddles and downed branches, when I noticed the mailbox tilting like the Tower of Pisa.

  Lots of rain on already oversaturated ground had a way of making things, even big things like trees, wobbly.

  Frustrated and pissed off, I mentally adjusted my big girl undies and braved the elements to save the slowly sinking mailbox. There was a lot of “I am woman, hear me roar” stuff going on in my head!

  Cramming the usual pile of junk mail and catalogs inside my classy Anorak jacket—real sexy, I know! —I somehow managed to slog through the mud. With my coat crammed with paper and a heavy bag of waterproofing supplies turning my fingers bright red, I finally make it to the house.

  Where I promptly dropped everything into a soggy pile on the floor.

  Spying the plain white handwritten envelope, a sure sign of something personal, I felt my mood instantly brighten. Wouldn’t yours? Real, actual human-to-human physical mail was a rare thing these days.

  After filling a large stoneware mug with liquid bliss that I had ordered from a Colorado coffee roaster, I settled at the kitchen table and took a closer look at the unexpected envelope.

  The handwriting was crisp and defined. Not wavering or timidly penned. I liked the sender already and wasn’t all that surprised to find the return address was a post office box in a big city. Anonymity could be vastly liberating.

  Inside the soggy-around-the-edges envelope were three handwritten pages that began like this …

  Dear Mandi B,

  I love your stories. Love the way they got me thinking outside my comfort zone. One day, I decided to act on a favorite fantasy, just like Tina Stone in Stoned by Lust. What I did was wild and crazy. Coming from a small town, I need to keep my sinful desires quiet. But I have to share my sex adventure with someone or I’ll bust! So Mandi, here’s my sinful share. Enjoy!

  And that, my lovelies, explains how The Sinful Share Series came to be.

  Each of the sinful shares in my fancy box is a tale worth telling, so I started weaving stories around the titillating confessions contributed by so many. Even though names have been changed to protect the innocent—she says snickering—these are the stories as presented to me along with some wicked embellishments.

  If you like your steamy reads to be fun, quick, and blazing hot, then Sinful Shares is for you.

  XXOO

  Mandi B.

  ~Sex with No Apologies~

  Chapter One

  Robert Peyton remembered the first time he saw Kristal Devin like it was yesterday instead of twenty years ago.

  They met at a McDonald’s—a big, sprawling one with an outdoor playground. She was five, and he was ten. Her mother, Mara, was newly engaged to his dad, Jeremy. He thought his father’s lady friend was pretty and nice—but her daughter? A total brat.

  At that first meeting, they glared at each other with mutual dislike. He’d dug in at his father’s side and tried ignoring her, but she was a fearless little thing and wouldn’t leave him alone.

  “Why do you wear big glasses?”

  Back then, at just ten years old, he hated the question because wearing glasses set him apart from the other kids. It was bad enough that he felt detached from the happy families all around him—his home life had been nothing short of a Wild West show for all of his remembered childhood. Until his mother left. Then he and his dad became objects of pity. Moms didn’t leave, but his did.

  His fugly black rimmed glasses only made things worse, so when the inquisitive five-year-old asked and wouldn’t let it go, he was forced to answer.

  They were on the stupid playground. He was ten—not five—so being banished to a fenced-in play yard was like liver and onions for dinner. Plus, his dad made a point of telling him to “watch out for Kristal.” Playing baby-minder was a ten-year-old boy’s worst nightmare. What was a self-respecting pre-teen to do but act like a dick and be all kinds of rude, right?

  “Why? So I can see your underwear.”

  He thought the answer was funny and crude—in a ten-year-old’s way. In hindsight, he saw how hilariously full of his bad self he imagined he was. Right up until the fearless little girl hauled off and kicked him in the shins so hard he went down. Straight on his ass—with an awkward thud.

  “Hey,” he yelped. “What’d you do that for?”

  The look her five-year-old self flashed at him? It was the same one she had today. The one that said, Seriously?

  Then she gave a head toss that sent her stupid braids flying over her shoulders, stuck her tongue out, and stomped away.

  He’d scrambled after her, sure that he was in for an ass chewing from his dad, but she didn’t rat him out. Mostly, she made faces at him every time their parents were distracted and made very sure he understood that from her point of view, he was as interesting as bubble gum stuck to a shoe.

  Robert wasn’t sure, but if a bet were on the line, he’d go with giving that encounter up as the moment when he fell head over heels in love with Kristal Devin.

  Six months later, she became his stepsister.

  The old-fashioned analog clock above the classroom door, that half the kids today didn’t understand, tick, tick, ticked. He glanced up and noted the time.

  “Fi
ve more minutes,” he informed his class of sixth graders.

  Groans and hisses drifted on the air.

  Involuntarily, he shifted his gaze to a small, framed photo he kept on his desk. It showed him holding Kristal’s hand as they waited at the bus stop on her first day of elementary school. She carried a My Little Pony backpack and wore brand new Keds sneakers with white socks.

  Mara took the picture.

  Robert sighed and enjoyed the wave of warmth he felt every time he thought about his stepmother. In all the ways that mattered, she had saved him. And his father. The emotional wounds inflicted by his birth mom ran deep for both of them. Deep enough that her bullshit threatened to ruin their lives. But Mara Devin was the gentle, loving soul the Peyton men needed for any hope of finding a happy ever after.

  And that, he thought, was the biggest reminder of all why his feelings for Kristal were posted with warning signs. Lusting after one’s sibling was forbidden. The only thing keeping him from total degenerate territory was the fact that they weren’t blood related.

  But still, stepsister had an edge of forbidden.

  In the back of the classroom, he saw a hand go up, and a voice murmured, “Mr. Peyton?”

  He got up and went to see what was on Emily Baker’s mind. Along the way, he checked out what his other students were doing. They were making covers for a short story project that would be displayed during parents’ night.

  “How’s it coming, Emily?” he asked.

  “Um, is it okay to draw Mickey Mouse on my cover, Mr. Peyton? You said we couldn’t copy someone else’s work, so I didn’t know.”

  Emily was a dream student. She took every assignment seriously. Maybe too much. I would even venture to say that sometimes her need to cross the T’s and dot the I’s stifled her creativity.

  “Is the mouse relevant to your story?”

  “Yeah,” she quickly answered. “My story is a trip to Disney.”

  “There’s your answer,” he said mildly. “You want the cover art to tell your audience what you are writing about.”

  She beamed at him, muttered, “Cool,” and then went back to her design.

  He wandered around the perimeter of the classroom. His students were eleven and twelve years old, the perfect age for learning because they didn’t rely on technology for every little thing. Two years from now, the design work they did would take place on computers—not a desk cluttered with crayons, markers, glue sticks, and magazine cutouts.

  He thought about his little brother, Harry. The boy was ten. Thank god he was still more interested in sports and active pursuits than holding game paddles or looking up inappropriate shit on the internet.

  Harry. Jeez. Robert loved that kid like a zombie loved a plate of brains. He was fucking awesome, and it didn’t hurt that his little bro was rather unabashedly named after a certain boy wizard of literary fame.

  As a glasses wearing nerd with a wild imagination and a gossiped-about mother, Robert found a refuge in books at an early age. It was easier to lose himself in a story than listen to his mother’s endless ravings about how much she hated her boring suburban life. He never understood what her problem was. They had a nice house in a good neighborhood. His dad owned a couple of gas stations and a Ford dealership, so it wasn’t like they were on food stamps. But she was a broken record about nearly everything, and he’d learned early on to block out her drama by immersing himself in a book. It worked every time, so a brother named as homage to a literary character? Fucking perfect!

  “Okay, guys,” he announced when the clock reached the deadline time. “Wrap it up. Check out the job chart and let’s get everything in order before the bell rings.”

  A flurry of activity exploded. Sixth graders could only sit and work quietly for so long before all hell broke loose. He wove in and out of the boisterous activity and headed to his desk.

  When the moment felt right, he rapped on his desktop to get their attention. “Quick quiz! What’s another word for thesaurus?”

  The whole room cracked up and smacked their hands on their desks—the signal of approval they decided on as a group during the first week of the fall term.

  Timmy Jhin hollered back, “What does a thesaurus eat for breakfast?”

  The assembled group answered with a loud, “A synonym roll!”

  God, he fucking loved being an English teacher.

  Pointing at himself with both thumbs, he chanted, “I do the rock and ...?”

  “We do the roll,” his class replied amidst laughter and, yes, a few inappropriate gestures.

  “Get outta here.” Robert laughed as the bell rang, and they rushed en masse for the door.

  When the room was empty, he dropped into his chair, then twisted right and left to work out the kinks. The cricks and cracks from his body seemed deafening in the quiet classroom.

  It was his scheduled lunch break, and he should get his ass to the cafeteria before all the salads were gone, but at the moment, he wasn’t in a social mood. The idea of schmoozing with Audrey Cannon while she droned on endlessly about her latest attempt to land a husband or having to participate in another of Dr. Chilton’s tedious political flash polls gave him a headache. A fresh salad wasn’t worth it. Not today. Not when all he could concentrate on was what he should do about Kristal, and the unfortunate lust and barely disguised attraction he felt for his stepsister.

  Getting up, he went to the closet where his jacket hung and grabbed the messenger bag he dragged with him every day. After he dug through it, he pulled out an old school brown paper bag containing a sandwich and a bag of pretzels. There was no reason to leave the classroom because, upon further investigation, he found enough coffee left in the insulated tumbler from this morning to wash down the sandwich.

  Good because he was in no mood for making nice.

  Out of habit, he reached for his phone after taking a bite of the sandwich. Switching it on, he quickly reviewed his notifications, hoping to find a message or missed call from Kristal. It didn’t come as a surprise to find a text message. Knowing that she’d been thinking about him made Robert’s spirits soar.

  He tapped on the message, and it opened.

  What do you call a masturbating cow?

  The next entry was a rude picture of an aroused bull. He chuckled and shook his head.

  The next entry said—Beef stroking off!

  God, he wanted to see her ... wanted to watch her walk in the room ... wanted to hear her husky laugh. The other things he wanted were X-rated and did not belong in his classroom, so he put the phone away—reluctantly—and went back to his lunch.

  They hadn’t seen each other in weeks, owing in no small measure to where they lived. Despite both being in the suburbs of the same city, she dropped anchor in the southwest portion of the county, which was closer to the actual urban landscape than his white picket fence neighborhood on the center east edge.

  But not hanging out wasn’t the same as losing touch because that would never happen. Not if he had any say in the matter ’cause honest to god—he couldn’t envision his life without her in it. So they maintained their unusual connection through a nonstop barrage of bad jokes, naughty memes, and typed-out, heart-felt, middle of the night rambles.

  Harry’s eleventh birthday was coming up, and they had made plans to take their shared sibling to Hershey Park because, well … chocolate. Neither Kristal nor Harry had ever met a hunk of chocolate they wouldn’t drop everything to swoon over. The thing was, though, their planned outing was still weeks away, and he wanted to see her. Now.

  The sandwich, pretzels, and most of the last of the coffee were gone before he found a potential solution to his dilemma. A new god-awful slasher-stalking film that held no redeeming social value whatsoever was coming out this weekend. It was nothing more than shameless blood, guts, and gore—but his fearless half-sister found those kind of movies enormously entertaining.

  In other words, a custom-made opportunity to call her up and arrange a date.

  The wo
rd date made him squirm, but that was what it was. He was secretly dating his stepsister—even if she didn’t know it.

  “Look how brave you are,” she smoothly drawled when the lip-quivering three-year-old flinched as she gave him the shot. “All done,” she assured him with a quick rub of his tense shoulders.

  With a conspiratorial wink and a little elbow shove, she got him to laugh. “Tell the nurse at the front that I said you can have two lollipops!”

  The boy’s mother was ashen as she watched Kristal go through the motions. If she had a nickel for every parent who turned squeamish at the sight of a needle, she’d have ... what? A hundred dollars at least.

  “You’re all set, Mrs. Lopez. He’s doing great! Keep up the good work and we’ll see you in a couple of months.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when a quick knock bounced off the examining room door. “Kristal? When you have a moment, Dr. Matt could use your help.”

  “Duty calls,” she told her patients.

  Mrs. Lopez offered a broad smile. “School physicals. Yay!”

  On her way out, she wrapped her hand around the woman’s wrist, gave a little squeeze, and said, “I know, right?”

  They both laughed, and then it was time to move on. The busy family practice had a full schedule of appointments, and Dr. Matt asking for her usually meant either a nervous parent or a belligerent and uncooperative child.

  So much for pediatric medicine!

  Signaling to the girls up front that she needed a minute, Kristal dashed into the restroom and shut the door with a soft snick. Pushing the lock to ensure some privacy, she dropped the pants of her nurse’s scrubs and settled onto the cold toilet seat.