The Wrong Brother's Temptation novel Chapter 148

Chapter 148

Sienna

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I was lost in thought when there was a knock on my side of the window.

Connor had stepped out of the car.

“Come on”

I hesitated but he opened the door and then leaned on it.

“Dont make me touch you just to drag you out of the car.”

I rolled my eyes at him and finally stepped out to look at the beautiful little cottage Connor used to call home. Instead, I caught myself staring at him.

Connor simply slid his hands in his pockets and stood beside me, looking at the cottage with a very vulnerable expression.

I studied his profile in the dim moonlight-the sharp line of his jaw, the way the faint stubble caught the glow, the small crease between his brows that only appeared when he was thinking too hard. He caught me looking and one dark brow of his lifted.

“See something you like?”

I turned back to the cottage, heat crawling up my neck. “Just checking you hadn’t grown a second head. That would explain your mood swings.”

A soft huff of laughter escaped him. “There’s the mouth I remember.”

“My mother bought this place before she became Luna,” he said quietly a second later.

“Whenever the pack politics got too loud… she came here. Every summer I spent with her was here.”

“Oh” I managed.

“I still look after it.”

Something in his voice made my chest ache.

I followed him up the short path, the gravel crunching softly under my heels.

The cottage sat nestled against the dark water of the lake like it had grown there instead of being built. Wildflowers spilled around the porch in messy, cheerful clumps of lavender, wild roses, little white things I didn’t know the names of.

Ivy climbed one wall and the forest pressed close behind it.

It was a beautiful yet lonely place.

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The Wrong Brother’s Temptation

Connor unlocked the door and pushed it open.

The scent that drifted out stopped me in my tracks.

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I caught a whiff of aged paper and rain-soaked timber among the mix of wildflowers and the lake.

There was no sign of the sharp, abandoned smell of a place left to rot. This cottage smelled lived-in and loved like someone still came here often enough to keep the memories from gathering dust.

I stepped inside slowly, realizing this was Connor’s sanctuary, a place truly close to his heart.

I looked to the left and saw tiny muddy rain boots still sitting beside the entrance, far too small for the man now standing in the room.

The rubber was cracked at the toes and one of them had a faded cartoon frog sticker peeling at the edge.

On a wooden support beam someone had carved a height chart in careful pencil marks, his mother probably. I slowly approached and squatted down to read the faded but still legible writing.

Connor’s name was on the top and numbers starting from the base- one to eleven, climbing up the beam as he grew and his height increased.

Beside one of the marks, neat handwriting had added the words ‘Connor cheated.’

I smiled before I could stop myself.

Connor groaned, rubbing the back of his neck as he came to stand beside me.

“I was standing on my toes.”

I looked lower and there was another marking which said ‘I noticed.

An involuntary chuckle left my lips. The sound felt strange in my throat-too bright for the boy who used to make me cry in school hallways.

“She always caught me,” he muttered.

“Sounds like you weren’t too smart for your age

“She was the smartest.” He acknowledged,

then.”

“I would try to invent the craziest of lies to not go to school but she would always figure it out. It annoyed me to no end”

Connor continued speaking as he moved through the cottage, and I simply leaned on the beam, watching him move around the place.

He straightened a photograph that wasn’t really crooked, opened a window to let the night air in, the cool breeze carrying the scent of water and pine.

I smiled as I soaked in the sight of him absently adjusting a rocking chair near the fireplace so it sat just right

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The Wrong Brother’s Temptation

and dusted a shelf that didn’t need dusting with the side of his hand.

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And I noticed he was smiling too as he looked around fondly, tidying the place that didn’t really need tidying.

This was a home to him in a way the Ashford mansion had never been.

He turned around when he realized I hadn’t moved away from the beam.

“Am I rambling too much?”

I shook my head. “You are rambling just enough”

I stepped forward and approached the wall with the framed photographs.

In one, Connor was covered head to toe in mud, proudly holding a frog up to the camera like it was treasure, in another Connor was asleep on a couch with a worn rabbit plushie tucked under one arm, mouth slightly open. Then there was Connor presenting a thoroughly burnt loaf of bread while his mom beamed at him and was clapping.

Then I stopped in front of another frame entirely.

Connor, no older than seven, was leaning against his mother’s shoulder beneath a large oak tree. An open copy of Peter Rabbit rested across both their laps. Both of them were smiling.

I watched that photograph a bit too closely and tried to recall if I had seen him smile like that in childhood. And I realized, I had never once seen the kind of open, unguarded smile on his face as a child like the one in all these photographs when he was busy making my life miserable.

My throat tightened.

This was the boy who had existed when I wasn’t looking. The one who got mud on his clothes and burned cakes and let his mother rewrite fairy tales. The one who had been soft in ways I never knew were possible.

The bully who put glue in my shampoo and laughed when I cried felt like a different person entirely. Or maybe it was the same person wearing armor I had never thought to look beneath.

Connor knelt in front of a built-in bookshelf that stretched almost from floor to ceiling.

“And this is what we came here for,” he said, gesturing his hand towards the huge shelves packed with books.

Hundreds of books filled every shelf.

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