Contractually Wed

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

S HE CAME TO him at dawn, dressed in a thick robe that hung off one smooth shoulder and fell to her ankles. His robe.

He hadn’t been hiding precisely. But after he had tired her out, desperate to control her, own her, bind her to him, whatever restlessness had chased her seemed to have transferred to him.

It was her offer to sign over her stock to him. Mere weeks ago, the same offer would have been a prize he’d counted as his final win. Now, with his feelings all twisted up about her and his own part in where they were, it felt like a...curse. A gut punch.

Even as he’d lain there boneless and sated, her offer had niggled and pricked.

Why had she offered that to him when it was the only thing of any value she possessed? Did she crave her freedom so much? Was it such a chore to be married to him? What was there for her back in New York except a family that would chew her up for all she was worth and spit her out given half the chance?

He had felt unsettled enough, unwanted enough that he found it unbearable to stay near her for one more second. For all she tried to buy her way out of his life, she clung to him in sleep, her legs and arms all coiled around him.

That feeling of not being enough struck some deep, primal part of him that he had forgotten existed.

It was the same thing that had haunted him after he’d found Papa unmoving, the same thing he’d tried to escape by pouring himself into climbing the corporate ladder high enough to own it.

And yet, after all that he’d done to get to this place now, that he could once again be haunted by that feeling...threw him. He wanted to run from it, hide from it, go back into bed and work himself out on Jia until they were both exhausted again and she made no foolish offers to get away.

But he was not a fool, and he knew not to outrun the same problem in the same way all over again.

So he was sitting at his desk in the large airy study, the oncoming dawn a distant pink splash in the horizon. For a moment, he considered telling her to leave him alone. But the words stalled, drowned out by his need to hold her, to have her near.

“You need your sleep,” he said, tempering his tone somehow, intensely disliking the knowledge that he could hurt her with one wrong word.

It was a dangerous power to have, because he hadn’t met a kind that he didn’t wield in the end. Not even Mama’s utter dislike of him had broken his taste for it, once he’d had it.

Hands clamped on the sash of the robe, she walked to him, instantly fitting herself in between his legs, as if she belonged there.

“You’re not happy about my offer.” She pushed her hair behind her ear, confusion writ in her gaze. Her frown cleared. “No, you’re angry about my offer. Why?”

He looked past her and the glass wall into the inky night beyond. Every memory today seemed to bring him back to the helplessness he’d struggled with after Papa’s death. Dios mio , he’d had many sleepless nights, just like this. “What’s your condition for it?”

“Are you sure that I have one?” Her expression was somber now.

He nodded.

“Finish this revenge of yours. Let them be. Let yourself be.”

He scoffed. “I should’ve known.”

Her eyes flashed but she corralled her temper and it was a sight to behold. “Rina told me earlier that Vik is facing the consequences. She’s moving in with her chauffeur. With you having controlling stock, my father can’t afford the delusion anymore that he can come back from this. He has lost everything, Apollo. You have won. So let it be,” she said, clasping his cheeks and tugging until he looked down at her. Her eyes were wide, brimming with an emotion he couldn’t read. “I ask it for you too. So that you can be free.”

He pulled away from her so fast that she almost stumbled. But he caught her, then released her. “I do not need any favors, Jia,” he said, stubbornly. “At least nothing that’s not part of our deal.”

She joined him at the chaise longue, hands folded primly in her lap. “I have spent enough time with your family to realize that your father’s death wasn’t...a natural one. To understand that your need to pay for his loss has caused a rift between you and your mother. I know you enough to see that this revenge has cost you even more than it has cost my father.”

“Sleeping with me for a few weeks doesn’t make you an expert on me.”

If he thought she’d be hurt, he was wrong. Her chin tilted up, a combative expression entering her eyes. “And yet you were right about me. You made me doubt if my mom even saw me as anything but a mistake she had to make up for. You made me wonder if she molded me into this...pushover for the rest of my family as part of her reparation to him. You made me realize that maybe he never truly loved me as he did Rina or Vik. If the mind-blowing orgasms you dole out have given you that much insight into me, why shouldn’t I have the same?” She smiled then, and it was the most breathtaking sight Apollo had ever seen. His chest ached to be in its presence and ached more anticipating its absence. “Plus, like you said, your sisters are blunt and voluble.”

He clasped her cheek, the need to touch her ever present. “Is it me you want to free from the past or yourself from the present?” The words fluttered between them, dripping with his vulnerability.

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Her confusion was genuine enough that some deep longing in him settled. “If you think I’ll release you from this marriage because you sign over your stock—”

“I didn’t think that,” she said, tapping the side of her head. “After all, as we both know, the real asset is my brain. At least, until you’re addicted to my body—and my mouth,” she said, licking her lower lip, “and then that becomes the real asset.”

He grinned, suddenly feeling light as a feather. It was another new feeling in the box he was collecting of them. And the realization that maybe, just maybe, she truly meant for him to be free, as well as her own father, filled him with awe and that dissonance again.

What did he do with such a woman? He was running out of deals and conditions and contracts that he could use to bind her.

He sat down on the chaise longue next to her and she instantly leaned her head against his shoulder, utterly unaware of how her every touch and kiss and caress unmanned him. “Is it true that you...found him?”

“He was cold when I touched his hand.”

She took his hand and laced their fingers and clasped him so tight that he felt the crust of ice around his heart melt. He hadn’t talked about this with a single soul, not even Mama. And suddenly the words came easy, as if all these years, they’d been waiting to be released. “I was...so angry in those first moments. I could only think of myself and how he had abandoned me when I worshipped him. He was my hero. That he didn’t think I, or any of us, were enough to hold on to, to find a way to move forward. And the only way I could escape that feeling was to channel all that rage into action, toward the right man.”

“I can’t imagine how hopeless he must have felt after losing so much. But he did abandon you, Apollo. It’s okay to love him and still be angry with him over that.” When he let her words soothe him, she scoffed. “Says the woman who craves her father’s approval even though she knows she’ll never get it,” she added with a flippancy.

“All I have fed for nearly two decades is that rage and it has burned everything else down. I’m a stranger to my own family. Mama has never understood that rage, that drive to make your father pay, the need to amass so much power and wealth that no one can ever make me feel like that again.”

Only to learn now that no power or wealth could buy him this woman’s loyalty.

“But you’re here now, with them,” she said, coming into his lap like Camilla’s cat, demanding to be pet, and vined herself around him. “And you could begin again. All they want is a word from you to build that bridge. All they want is to know that the boy they know and love is still there beneath the ruthless billionaire.”

Apollo didn’t miss the wistful note in her words and tightened his arms around her. Neither did he miss the fact that his mother’s sudden approval of him was mostly due to this complex creature he had married, which had come about by her design and his greed. The fact that his fate could have been so much worse didn’t sit well with his need for control.

“So what do you think of my offer? Can you get the paperwork ready?”

“No,” he said instinctively, without even examining the source of it. “I don’t want to take those stock options away from you. Not yet,” he added to keep her dangling.

“But that means you still—”

“Leave it, Jia. You have solved enough problems for him.”

“I told you, Apollo. This isn’t about him.”

“Excuse me if I don’t believe that you can break the pattern of a lifetime in a moment, agapi .”

Within a blink of an eye, she was out of his arms and halfway across the study, fury radiating from her.

“You’re being childish,” he called out, wanting to chase her and pin her down under him like a predator. He was beginning to feel like that was all he’d want for the rest of his life. To have her writhing under him, biting at him with her tart words, softening in those moments when she let down her armor enough to trust him.

Her eyes glowed in the soft light of the lamp as she halted at the doorway. “If you want us to be locked in this...arrangement forever, fine.” She was almost out when she paused, her throat bobbing up and down. “But then I want nothing to do with the house you build. I’m not leaving this house and I’m definitely not starting a...”

Whatever she saw in his eyes, she swallowed the rest of her words. Something unbearably sad flashed across her face before she turned away.

Apollo thought she might have said, So much for a fresh start for you and me. But he was damned if he begged her to explain any more than he already had. Or stay in his life willingly. He had already cornered himself into a weaker position and the uncertainty of it picked at him night and day.

He had married her as part of the deal she herself had struck and he would be a poor businessman if he let her change the terms of their deal now. And he wasn’t done with her father, as she had so naively assumed.