Chapter One
E scaping teenage heartbreak was usually pretty easy. Step 1: leave your hometown. Step 2: don’t go back, and if you do, stay out of his favorite haunts.
Don’t go to his favorite bars, don’t drive past his house.
Very basic stuff.
It was much more difficult to do, however, if your great teenage heartbreak also happened to be your stepbrother.
And that was the essential problem that faced Lily Rivers every time she came home.
He was family. So she should be used to it.
When their parents had first moved in together, they had been seventeen. They had cohabitated for eight months. And then blessedly they had gone off to college. Which meant they were mostly confined to interacting during holidays.
The problem wasn’t that he was mean to her. It was that he was fine. Aggressively and totally fine.
And why shouldn’t he be?
They had dated for a couple of months when they were teenagers. He had been her first kiss. Her first...well, she was a little fuzzy on which base was which. They hadn’t had sex , but they had done stuff .
Stuff she couldn’t get out of her head. Stuff that haunted her.
Made her wake up in a cold sweat.
With her heart pounding and her body aching and...
And then she had gone and imploded their relationship by breaking up with him because she could see that her mother was into his father, and the rest was history. She had told him their relationship was probably doomed—and it had been.
She had also told him it was very important they not get into a situation where their dating got so serious that if they ever broke up it would be impossible for them to be around each other.
That had been the smart thing to do, all things considered. The responsible thing.
And anyway, she had been so certain they were young, and they would find other people, and that would be that.
It should’ve been that.
That was the problem.
Well, the real problem was that nothing had faded. Time hadn’t pushed the way that Colton made her feel into the recesses of her memory. So every single time she had to gear up to do a big family thing, she felt...
Like she was being skinned alive.
She didn’t need to ponder that now. Not while she was driving on extremely slick and windy roads. It was so cold. Usually the coast was a bit more temperate in Oregon, but it was freezing, and so were the roads. It had started snowing when she was inland, and she’d paused to check the weather in Lone Rock, where her parents were coming from, and had seen that it was snowing there too.
It was a little more festive than she was looking for.
She turned up the radio and started to sing. Trying to drown out the intensity of the feelings rolling through her.
She was twenty-three. She really should be over it by now.
Colton had moved back home after graduation. He had gotten a house in the mountains near his dad and her mom and was working on their ranch.
She had decided to stay in Eugene. She had gotten a job there as a researcher, and it was decent work. She had aspirations of someday reinvigorating the museum in Lone Rock and working as an archivist there, but that was a someday fantasy.
And she would have to contend with him if she moved home.
Of course, she would be closer to her mom, to her other two stepbrothers and to her little half brother and sister, who had been born during her first and last year of school.
It wasn’t anybody else’s fault that she couldn’t get over him. It was dumb. Because it wasn’t like she was in love. How could you ever call something like that love? It was juvenile. It was... He was... She was going to calm down.
She was very chill. Of course she was.
She breathed a sigh of relief when she pulled up to the family beach house, because the road conditions had been slowly twisting her nerves.
The ice. Definitely. The twisting was not due to thinking about Colton.
The house itself was practically a tourist attraction. Strange though it was. But legendary country music star, Tansy Martin, was Lily’s aunt by marriage and had written her breakout hit there. Which happened to be a devastating breakup anthem about Lily’s uncle by marriage. It was a whole weird thing.
The family often went to the house at Christmastime, and this year was no exception, although only her mom, stepdad and stepsiblings and half siblings were coming. Only. Like that wasn’t a massive and significant number of people.
The house was beautiful as ever. A glorious two-story home with stunning views of the Pacific Ocean, the majestic rocky Oregon beach below, the waves against the rocks deafening, even from where she sat in her car.
She could see a tree through the window, twinkling brightly, and Christmas lights going strong all around the outside. Her parents always had the house decorated for their arrival, and it gave her a profound sense of homecoming, even if it wasn’t her home, technically.
It was traditional. And lovely.
She was the first one there, which was somewhat blessed. It gave her a chance to gather her thoughts. To get her emotions together. Sometimes, when she thought about Colton, she imagined her feelings bubbling up, boiling over, and she just needed to turn the heat down on them to get them back in their proper place. She imagined herself doing just that. Turning down the heat on the burner. She took a breath, then another. She got out of the car, and the mist enveloped her, the scent of the sea. She took another breath.
She was regaining control of herself. She was finding her center.
She did not have to think about what it had been like when she used to make out with Colton. Before he had been her stepbrother.
Really, it was just bad luck. How many people did that happen to? Meet a guy, get bowled over by your chemistry, have your parents end up falling in love.
She sighed and took all her things out of the trunk of her car, one bag with all her supplies and another with all her presents for her family, and closed the back of the car, heading toward the house. She entered the code and retrieved the key from the lock, letting herself in and taking a breath of the pine-scented air.
It really was Christmas .
She walked slowly up the stairs and cracked open the door to her bedroom, which was just as she had left it last time they’d been here. Her dark red bedspread, velvet and seasonal, was spread out on the mattress, with round, fat pillows propped up against the headboard.
She’d seen a movie when she was a kid called A Little Princess , and there was a scene where one of the girl’s rooms had been transformed for Christmas as if by magic, with warm shoes and cozy blankets and finery.
Lily always felt that way coming to this house. Coming into this room.
Like it was a magic miracle that could all disappear in a puff of glitter.
It made her ache.
It was such a strange thing. She and her mother had lived hand to mouth for most of her childhood. It had been comfortable, and it had been nice. Her mother was such a hard worker.
But her stepdad was rich . His whole family was rich. They had multiple houses. Her aunt Tansy had a private jet. It was just a whole new kind of life, one she’d been thrust into when she was seventeen. She’d gone to college not long after, so she dipped in and out of this life, and she’d never gotten used to it.
She knew that her stepbrothers were just as overawed by it as she was most days. They had been adopted by her stepdad when they were teenagers, so the change to their lives had come around when it had come to hers. In that sense, they were united. If she didn’t feel so awkward around Colton, she might feel a kinship to him.
He, however, didn’t seem to feel any awkwardness at all. Not that she could see. But then, maybe that was because Colton wasn’t awkward, ever.
No. He was just hot. Overly confident in all things. It was deeply annoying. Because she just didn’t feel like she was... It was hard to articulate. He seemed to have taken to everything in his whole life better than she did. He was gorgeous. Self-assured. He seemed to step into his role in their family with ease. He had become a Carson effortlessly.
She still felt very much like she had been grafted onto the tree, not because of the way anybody treated her. Of course not. The Carsons were wonderful. But she just mostly felt like the girl who had been raised by a single mother, whose dad was an absolute dickhead and who had lovely grandparents who lived in a modest house on a regular old street.
It still felt like she was going to a museum when she visited the Carsons. With their massive mansion in Lone Rock, and yet...
And yet there was something reassuring about this place. She couldn’t quite pinpoint why.
Her phone buzzed, and she took it out of her pocket.
She had missed a call from her mother.
She wrinkled her nose, and then hit the button to call her back. She started to walk down the stairs with her phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Hi Mom,” she said. “Sorry. I got here safely, the roads were sketchy but I’m fine. I just put my bag in my room. I don’t know why my phone didn’t ring.”
“Thank God. Because apparently the highway between Lone Rock and the coast is closed.”
“What?”
“The road is completely impassable.”
She’d been coming from the north, and her family was coming in from the east.
“I don’t...” Her head was spinning. She didn’t want to spend Christmas without her family. Surely it would clear up in the next couple of days.
She heard tires on the gravel driveway out front.
“Hang on. Somebody’s here.” She craned her neck to try and see out the front door window. “It might be... Did you get food delivery?”
“Yes. And Christmas dinner is going to be catered.” They always did that. They got a fully cooked meal delivered.
Her mom did meal prep for a living so the holidays were a time when she absolutely didn’t prep anything.
“ Surely you’re going to be able to get here for Christmas.”
This was starting to feel like a bad holiday special.
“I don’t know. It’s going to depend. They can plow the road, but I imagine it’s going to take several days to clear since it’s both the snow and the downed trees, and that’s if the weather behaves itself. We got about an hour from home and had to turn around, and from what I heard it was even worse up ahead.”
“I really want to see you,” she said.
Her mom’s voice softened. “I know. I really want to see you too. It won’t feel like Christmas if we aren’t together.”
Lily was expecting a knock at the door, but there wasn’t one. Instead, the handle turned. The door opened, and her heart dropped into her toes.
Because of course her whole family was stuck. Of course her whole family couldn’t get here.
Except for Colton Carson.
The bane of her existence, the love of her life.
Her stepbrother.