My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 249

Chapter 249

Gianna

I sat back down, but the code on my screen might as well have been hieroglyphics. I couldn’t focus. My skin was still buzzing from being near him in the dark, like it was waiting for something to happen. I pulled my knees up to my chest, hugging them, and stared out into the shadows of the garden.

Then, I saw him walking over to me.

And for a second, I forgot how to breathe. He had washed the dirt off his hands, but he hadn’t put his jacket back on. He was just in that white dress shirt, the fabric was thin enough that I could see the hard, rigid lines of his shoulders and the way his muscles moved underneath. He’d unbuttoned the top three buttons, leaving his collan open, and my eyes immediately tracked the golden skin of his throat down to where his chest started.

He was rolling his sleeves up even higher as he walked. The white fabric was bunched up past his elbows, showing off his forearms. I watched the way his tattoos disappeared under his sleeves.

He pushed his black-rimmed glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. They should have made him look like a nerd, but on him, they just looked dangerous. They made him look like the kind of man who would take you apart piece by piece just to see how you worked.

His walk was what really got to me. He moved with so much confidence, his long legs eating up the distance between us, his body swaying just a little with every step.

As he got closer, the smell of him hit me again. My stomach didn’t just flip, it felt like it was melting. I stayed frozen in my chair, my heart hammering against my ribs so hard I was sure he could see it through my t-shirt.

He didn’t say anything at first. He just reached the table and stood over me, his shadow falling across my laptop. He looked down at me, his eyes dark behind the lenses of his glasses, and the corner of his mouth gave a tiny,

Raphael didn’t say a word, he simply leaned in.

The heat from his shoulder seeped through my thin t-shirt, making my skin tingle. He smelled so good, like rain and something sharp and expensive and it was making it impossible to remember why I was even holding a pen.

He reached out, his large, ink-covered hand moving over mine to grab the mouse. He didn’t touch me directly, but his arm was so close to mine that I could feel the soft friction of his shirt sleeve. He clicked through my tabs, his eyes scanning months of my hard work in seconds.

“You’re over-complicating the loss function,” he whispered, “You’re trying to force the data to be something it’s not. Look.”