Unlawful Temptations (The Star-Crossed Series Book 1)

There are moments in life when you know you’ve fucked up.

They all start the same. Your heart catches on fire, nervous sweat sprouts from everywhere and anywhere, and your mind goes completely and fantastically blank.

Like right now.

I froze, still clutching Dominic’s shirt and stealing his air. He’d broken our kiss, snapping his head towards the shed door to whoever had caught us. Every muscle of his against me drew tight, his hard body lining with panic, and still, I couldn’t move.

Literally I was stuck, staring at Dominic’s profile and taking in every tiny tick of his reaction towards the person who caught us. The twitch in his cheek. The way his bottom lip curved to form words and then stopped. Even how the strain he had over himself loosened just a hair beneath my palms.

“Mom.”

Mom?

Did he just fucking say Mom?

I knew, just knew, my eyes were the size of fucking saucers when he spoke that word.

Humiliation started at my toes and ate its way up until it had consumed me whole. Dominic’s robust voice breaking into the silence shattered the full body tension cast holding me still, and I balled my hands into fists, snatching them back to myself.

His touch disappeared from my back, and then altogether, but he didn’t step away to a more appropriate distance because why bother? We’d already been caught. The evidence of it was smeared all over his criminal red, puffy lips.

“Is this the new nanny you’ve mentioned?”

Oh god. My chest caved into itself, and I wanted it to follow through until it became a black hole and swallowed me up. She didn’t sound mean with her subtle southern twang, but her words cut like knives, spilling fresh horror in my stomach. It churned and twisted in on itself, and the thought that I might throw up all over this floor became hard to ignore.

Dominic stood his ground next to me, locking into his usual bravado.

“Her name is Kat, and I pulled her in here.”

Of course he had to be gallant right now and take the blame. Of course. My eyes rolled shut, and I tried to breathe, tried to find some semblance of grounding to hold on to. This was bad. This was so, so bad.

Then it got worse.

“I know. I saw,” his mom said.

And the ground and breath were both snatched away from me.

My head whipped towards her, locking in on his mother for the first time. She saw us. She saw us with those stone gray eyes just like her son’s, save for the fine wrinkles around the edges. They were fixed on me now, taking in the girl she caught her son having an affair with.

Affair. Affair. Affair.

Fuck, that word wouldn’t leave me alone, nor would the feeling like I was dying. It was happening, right now in this shed at a kid’s birthday party. My heart was ripping itself out of my chest cavity, tearing valves and shattering bones on its way out. It was going so fast, so fast it must have grown legs to sprint with, and right now those legs were running divots into my chest with all the effort.

Dominic’s mom was staring at me like she was sizing me up, figuring me out. Almost like she was dissecting me like her son did, except all the information she had about me was that I was a whore. A homewrecking whore.

And if she saw us, then who else did? Anyone could have. Maya. Heather.

I didn’t know I was hyperventilating until a warm hand cupped my bent elbow, directing my focus back to him and the worry scribbled into his expression. Dominic feathered a stroke of his thumb over my skin—

And my heart screamed bloody fucking murder.

I jerked back, retreating in so many paces, my back hit the wall behind me, jostling a few clatters of metal to the ground. Dominic looked both hurt and sorry at the same time, taking a careful step towards me.

“Kat—”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

Then I ran.

My sprinting heart took off, blowing me past Dominic and his mom, breaking out of the shed, and running up to the back patio. I crashed through the doors, practically spilling into the house which was now half full of nameless faces with prudish pouts. The sea of Prada and Gucci overwhelmed me, throwing me back like a wave, engulfing my lungs with stinging saltwater.

I didn’t know where I was going, but I had to keep moving. Keep moving and keep the blood pumping so I didn’t fall apart into a mess of weak limbs and guilty screams. I looked all around me at everything and nothing, stumbling forward until I stumbled right into one of those nameless faces.

The woman let off a chiding scoff, pulling her posture so far back, I thought her spine might snap in half. Blue eyes cut of ice sneered down at me by the raise of her chin. She wasn’t much taller than me, just had her nose stuck so far up in the air that she felt at least a foot taller.

I knew I should have apologized, but the words weren’t coming. All that did come out was a frank and impatient, “Excuse me?”

The woman batted in subtle shock, neck dressed in pearls pulling back as she gave me a once over.

Then a second over.

Then a third before she focused back on my face, glacier eyes fixating with a biting curiosity. She didn’t say a damn word. Just kept sweeping her poised stare over every inch of me she could reach, like she was taking inventory of the bitch who’d just tried to run her and her dirty martini off the road.

She looked to be about in her fifties, all dolled up with makeup like she was trying to forget she wasn’t still twenty. There was something very… heavy about her. Almost like her daggered stare could actually kill, and she wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep about it.

Maybe if I wasn’t in the midst of a panic attack to rival all others, I’d have stayed and talked to her and found out what her deal was, but I didn’t. I just pushed around her and beelined it for the hallway bathroom.

Except it was locked. Fucking locked.

Someone was using it, and I was trapped out in the open. What a fucking oxymoronic thing to be. I spun in circles, seeking out anywhere to hide, anywhere to throw myself into so I could lose my mind in peace, but before I found a safe place, the consequence of fate found me first.

“Ms. Sanders.”

Her voice tracked icy tendrils down my arms and legs, turning my body into a hyper-aware chasm of dread. She was behind me, and the tone of her voice dared me to turn around. I did—somehow—on feet that had gone numb.

Heather was waiting for me, primed for my slaughter from the looks of it.

Her voice came out the lowest pitch I’d ever heard it.

“A word?”

She didn’t wait for me to respond—just walked right past me and let me follow her as she veered off into the corner of the house where her office sat. I went inside first. She closed the door behind me.

Then we were alone.

There had never before in the existence of silence been a moment as quiet as this one. It was next level torture. Pins and needles dropping had nothing on this silence. Even my thoughts were too loud in here.

Heather rounded me, heels clicking in slow taunts as she brought herself around to her desk. She didn’t stand behind it though. She placed herself dead center in front of it, leaving nothing between us but the silence and the dirty little secrets that screamed through it.

My pulse was in my ears now, blood rushing my head like it was trying to make me dizzy. It felt like my body chose a side in this Heather vs. Kat face off, and it sure as shit wasn’t mine. I swayed on my two feet, curling my toes into my flip flops to try and grab some grounding.

What Heather said first threw it off completely.

“I’ve never liked you, and you’re not dumb enough to not know that.”

Straight to the bulleted point.

“From day one, you have been rude,” Check. “Obnoxious,” Check. “And disrespectful.” Three for three. She was on a roll and I was on a quick downward spiral.

“You have no manners,” she sneered. “Some of it can be excused by your less than civilized upbringing, but something tells me that no matter what your junkie mother did to raise you, you would have turned out to be this leech of a person regardless.”

My temper tangoed with my anxiety, pirouetting my sanity into a tailspin.

Everything was hot. My skin prickled and my heart was aflame, given up all attempts at running and simply trying to burn itself alive to escape.

Also… Dominic told her about my mom? I couldn’t place why in the chaos going on inside my head, but that felt like the deepest cut he could lay on me. That was personal. He knew how personal it was and how ashamed I was of that part of my backstory, but he still told her.

Heather folded her thin forearms over one another, her pale pink lips pulling back over her perfectly straight teeth. “I never wanted you in my home. I never wanted you around my husband, and now this house reeks of you and your filthy attitude.”

Her manicured nails dented into her arms as her anger grew, and her porcelain facade cracked for just one, ugly moment.

“I knew you would be bad for Dom. I knew it.”

My lungs heaved like I gasped, but I didn’t take on any air. What the hell did that mean? Did she know?

Did she know, did she know, did she know?

My eyes jumped back and forth between hers, unable to hold my focus anywhere for more than a second. I probably looked as drugged up as I felt, overdosing on panic and willing the blackout in faster so I could be done with all of this.

I didn’t want this. I never wanted this.

“You look so goddamn guilty, Ms. Sanders,” she spat, taking a dominant step into me, filling up my space with her accusation. “Why might that be?”

She was fishing, right? She wouldn’t be asking if she knew, and if she knew, this office’s stark white walls would be decorated in my blood right now instead of diplomas and certificates Heather had collected over the years.

“I’m not.” I swallowed, my throat dry and scratchy. “This conversation is just making me uncomfortable.”

The rise of one of her thinly plucked eyebrows was drawn out and spiteful. “Uncomfortable? You mean like having someone in your house, around your husband, around your child that you don’t want there?”

Her words made me pause, taking a beat to realize that she was right. That was shitty. It wasn’t my fault that I was here though, and for the first time in this mess, there was something I couldn’t take the blame for.

Maybe Dominic wasn’t as innocent in this as I told myself.

“I understand, and that’s a fair point,” I said, gripping onto a slim barb of grit. “But a job was offered to me, and I took it. As you’ve made sure to point out, my life isn’t all caviar and rich daddies, so I have to take any opportunity I can get.”

Her stare narrowed. “And did you see an opportunity in my husband?”

I sucked back a steadying breath.

“No.”

Not an opportunity. A downfall.

Heather uncrossed her arms, catching me off guard with her height as she crowded me in a few swift steps. My head bent back, neck stiff and my grit slipped, sinking back into the mouth of the anxiety attack. She came so close, I could see the beginnings of age in her frown lines and feel the hate she bore for me radiating out of her like shock waves.

“I’ve seen the way you look at him.” Her affront scratched at my cheeks as if her words could make me bleed. She took her pale gaze all over my face in observing lines, mouth snagging on a low sneer. “You’re way out of your league, sweetie. I could tear your whole world apart.”

Barely standing still, I somehow held her stare as I murmured. “Is that a threat?”

The blue around her pupils flashed with promise.

“A warning, and you’ll only get one.”

Little did Heather know, I only needed one, and I’d already gotten it. My warning came minutes before Heather ever got to me when Dominic’s mom walked in on us, and I realized it had gone too far. All of this. Me. Dominic. Us.

Our thunder and lightning had exploded, and now it was taking victims.

Me, Dominic, Heather, their marriage, Maya’s future, Charlotte. I didn’t want to lose myself for Dominic. I couldn’t die for him. I had too much to live for in Charlotte. She needed me. She needed me to fight this, to inject myself with an antidote even if one didn’t exist.

I wouldn’t survive if I stayed here, if I kept falling sick for Dominic. We’d both let it go too far last night, and it was bound to get worse now that we weren’t hiding our symptoms from each other.

My symptoms had already taken a turn for the worse, a fever breaking sweat on my hairline and shutting my organs down from the inside out. I was sure Heather could see just how badly I was already crumbling, and that’s why she went in for the kill.

“You are nothing. You come from nothing. You have nothing to offer, and that’s all anyone ever sees when they look at you. A poor little nothing who wants what she can’t have.”

Everything I could’ve or might’ve said to defend myself refused to come out. It sat in my chest, strapped down by the heavy ropes of panic. No matter what I did, the words didn’t come. My cheek twitched, jaw locked, nostrils flared, and nothing.

So Heather continued.

“I don’t care what Dom says.” She cast a glance over me like I was literal trash in her way. “I know women like you, and I can smell the slut on you. You have no place in this house, and you certainly have no place in my marriage. Our business is not yours.”

Then, her tone got pointed.

“How I choose to touch my husband is none of your business either.”

Pointed enough to cut some of the ropes loose.

“You can’t hit him,” I pushed out, voice shaking.

The look my response inspired in Heather was breath-taking, and I already had so little air left to give. Her features slanted into something insidious, something entitled and unapologetic.

“I can do whatever the fuck I want because he is my husband, and you are just the help.”

She drew back, taking in the hyperventilating that I was trying and failing to hide with an unimpressed grimace.

“You’re a cliche…” she drawled, tone building to a peak. “And you’re fired.”

Fired.

You’d think that hearing that would have resurrected my lashing tongue or stubborn fire, but no. My stomach gave a whiplash of a reaction, searing in horror before relief quickly smothered it out. The relief is what stayed, and it’s what I held onto as Heather landed her final blow.

“I want you to get that snot-nosed sister of yours and get the hell out of my house.”

Tail tucked between my legs, that’s exactly what I did.

I bolted as soon as she was done, tearing out of that office and not stopping until I found Charlotte. I grabbed her without words, without explanation, without even telling Maya happy birthday. I just grabbed her and ran out of there as fast as I could.

People were staring at me, but I didn’t care. I barely even saw them. All I saw was the exit, and all I cared about was never coming back. Damn this job. Damn this sickness.

Damn Dominic fucking Reed.

My remission started today, and it started by never seeing that man again.