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PROLOGUE

Camden

Nine Years Ago

O

aklyn fucking Rose

, I thought as I walked into my sister’s bedroom after having just seen Hannah’s best friend in a bikini for the last hour, a bunch of us hanging out in our hot tub. Holy shit, that girl gets hotter by the day.

Tight body.

Nice rack.

At this age, I was sure she was a virgin—most of the girls in our sophomore class were.

And that was the reason I’d come into my sister’s room after the little party we had. Everyone had already gone home, Mom and Dad were due back any minute, the empty beer bottles were hidden in the trash, and buried beneath those was a jar of water with all the cigarette butts swimming inside. We hoped the bath would drown out the smell of ash.

My sister and I were always careful, hiding all the evidence.

Except for now, apparently. Her drunk ass had a beer and was sipping on it while she sat on her bed, still in her wet bathing suit.

“Wanna share that?” I took a seat next to her in my soaked swim trunks and held out my hand.

If she didn’t care about getting her bed wet, then neither did I.

She handed me the bottle. “Tonight was the best time ever.” She had a solid buzz—I could hear it in her voice.

“Good time, for sure.”

And the perfect opportunity to bring up her best friend.

“Hey, you know your girl, Oaklyn? She’s really turned into quite a hottie.”

She laughed. “She’s always been a hottie. Maybe you need glasses. When was the last time Mom took you to the eye doctor?”

“Hannah, that’s not what I mean.” I took a drink and handed the beer back to her. “What I mean is, what do you think about me asking her out?”

She tapped my arm like it was the top of our golden retriever’s head. “You’re funny.”

“I’m serious.”

“No. No. Nooo.”

“Why not?”

She faced me, crossing her legs, her hair clinging to her cheeks, which she eventually tucked behind her ears. “You’d crush her. I can’t let that happen.” She wiped her mouth after she took another drink. “Oaklyn can’t handle someone like you.”

I pointed at my bare chest. “Someone like me?”

She nodded. “My brother is the ultimate heartbreaker. I can’t lose my best friend because of a shattered heart.”

It was almost like I wasn’t even in the room and she was talking about me, not to me.

My brows rose as I stared at her. “Are you being serious?”

She gave me the beer back. “Heck yeah, I am.” She then held out her pinkie. “Make me a promise, Camden Dalton, that my friends are forever and ever off-limits.”

Shit, she was being serious.

But just to confirm, I said, “All of your friends?”

“Just my super-close ones, like Oaklyn, Suz, Tracy, and Justine.”

Fuck.

When my sister gave me her pinkie, that was our solemn promise to each other. We didn’t do it often, but when we did, nothing could break that promise.

Therefore, I had no choice.

I couldn’t fight her on this.

I had to fold.

And that meant I could never touch Oaklyn Rose.

Damn, that sucks.

I locked our pinkies together and gave her the words she wanted to hear. “I promise.”

ONE

Camden

T

here was no way in hell that my twin sister, Hannah, should leave me alone with her best friend in their apartment.

That was rule number one.

Rule number two was that I shouldn’t be mentally stripping the jeans and sweatshirt off Oaklyn’s perfect, tight, lean body. I shouldn’t be fantasizing about wrapping those gorgeous legs around my waist and slowly burying my dick into her pussy. I shouldn’t have this desire to make her scream so fucking loud that the neighbors on both sides would come banging on the door.

But that was what I was doing.

Because, goddamn it, she was so fucking hot.

So enticing.

So sweet. I just wanted to twist her long brown hair around my wrist and dirty her up a little.

Oaklyn Rose was the one girl I’d always wanted and the one girl who had always been off-limits.

The twin brother couldn’t touch the twin sister’s best friend.

And normally, I didn’t break rules.

But rule number two had been shattered a few hours ago when I came over to their place for dinner and immediately caught sight of Oaklyn bending over to take a pizza out of the oven, showing me that spicy, heart-shaped ass. And rule number one was about to be broken since my sister had just been called into work.

“Shit!” Hannah shouted as she got off the phone with her boss, sprinting into her room to get changed. “Have I mentioned how much I hate him? Because I do. With a passion I can’t even describe.”

My sister was bitching about Declan Shaw, her boss at The Dalton Group and the top litigator in the state of California. After meeting him this past weekend, I’d learned he wasn’t just a pit bull, but also one that fucking snarled. You would think that when you interned for your family’s law firm, like Hannah, you would get to choose your mentor. Not at The Dalton Group. They didn’t play that way. But there was an advantage to working under someone as skilled as Declan, which Hannah would eventually realize, and I hoped once I graduated law school this spring and moved back to the West Coast, I would become a clerk on his team.

After what sounded like a mini tornado erupting in her room, my sister returned to where Oaklyn and I were standing.

Oaklyn placed a soft-sided cooler in Hannah’s hands. “Take this.”

“What’s in it?” Hannah asked.

“Brownies. Fruit. The leftover pizza we had for dinner.”

Oaklyn knew Hannah could be at the office all night and didn’t want my sister to go hungry.

Man, that girl was caring and motherly.

Nurturing.

My dick was fucking throbbing.

Hannah wrapped her arms around Oaklyn. “I love you.”

“Go kick his ass,” Oaklyn replied. “Or better yet, show him why you’re an ass-kicker.”

Hannah released her and moved over to me. “If you want to stay and hang instead of going back to Mom and Dad’s, just crash in my bed. If I’m lucky enough to come home before morning, I’ll climb in with Oaklyn.” She hugged me. “I don’t know if I’ll see you before you leave, and I hate that. Hard.”

What I hated was that I’d only come home for a long weekend, I was flying back to Boston tomorrow, and this was the first time I’d seen Hannah. The previous evenings, she’d been too slammed with work and babysitting our cousin Ford’s daughter to get together with me.

I set my hand on top of her baseball hat, lifting the brim to see more of her face. “Hang in there. You’re going to get through this.”

She gave me the smallest of nods. “See you at spring break?”

“I might go to Mexico with some friends.”

Where Hannah had opted to do her internship her final semester, I’d chosen the fall semester, so that freed up my spring break, and now, I only had to focus on school and prepping for the bar.

She sighed. “You mean, you might come home and hang with your sister because she’s your fave.”

I smiled.

As much as I loved her, that wasn’t going to happen.

She knew that, and she returned my expression with a frown. “See you guys later.”

I watched her leave, and the second the door clicked, I turned to Oaklyn. She was in front of the couch, less than ten feet away, eating a Nutella brownie my sister had baked, a full plate of them on the coffee table.

I pointed at the door. “Should I get out of here too?”

She covered her mouth, a chunk of fudgy brownie at the tip of one of her fingers. “No. Stay. I’m just going to eat the rest of these and finish drinking the rest of that. You can join me.”

These were the brownies.

That was the wine, and there were several more bottles in addition to the one sitting on the table.

I took a seat on the opposite side of the couch, catching a glimpse of her licking the gooey dough off her nail.

The way her tongue scooped.

The way her teeth nipped her flesh.

The way her cheeks sank in as she sucked the remainder of the dessert off her skin.

Fuck.

Me.

Oaklyn and my sister had been friends for as long as I could remember, so she was a girl I’d grown up with. A girl I’d seen grow through every physical stage, starting with the adorable, pigtailed princess, morphing into the sultry twenty-four-year-old woman she was now.

She finished chewing, and her piercing blue gaze connected with mine. “Just a little bit longer, and you’ll be moving back here.” She grabbed her wine from the table and tucked her legs beneath her. “Hannah will be so happy. All she talks about is how much she misses you.”

And I missed her.

But I’d chosen Boston for my undergraduate degree and New York for law school because I knew, ultimately, I would be joining The Dalton Group as soon as I graduated, so I just wanted to get away for a handful of years and have some fun outside of LA and the usual crowd we hung around with.

Besides, choosing Harvard and NYU had meant I could pave my way with a reputation I earned all on my own.

And I’d certainly done that—with the ladies and my professors, neither of whom would ever forget my name, although for entirely different reasons.

“I’m ready to come back,” I admitted, reaching for my vodka. “Ready to get a place of my own and take the bar and start work. Declan’s not going to hold the title of the top litigator for long.”

“Oh, yeah?” She laughed. “Well, you’re going to have to fight your sister on that. She’s after the same title, and she would like nothing more than to rip it away from that dick.”

That fucking word.

I wanted to hear her moan it.

“It’s been a while since we’ve caught up. Tell me about you, Oaklyn. How’s the marketing world? And your dating life? Seeing anyone serious?” I settled into the corner, fixing the pillow to give me a better angle to view her.

And what a view it was.

Oaklyn had this natural look about her—creamy skin and the most arresting sapphire eyes, puffy pink lips that she constantly licked, the wetness she left behind always making them glossy. There weren’t many women who could pull off a clean, makeup-free face and still look fucking breathtaking.

But that was her.

I’d seen her in the morning when she just crawled out of bed, after a full day of skiing when she was soaked in sweat, in a bikini following hours of being in the ocean. I’d also seen her in a gown at prom when her lids were painted and her cheeks were glowing and her lips were red.

Tonight was the way I preferred her.

Raw, unpainted.

Innocent.