The Billionaire's Baby Negotiation

“If it seems I must.”

In this, it he was proving that he was nothing like she had imagined.

She had thought that the hardness would give way to something else, because she felt sort of a connection to him.

But it was clear, he made it abundantly clear now, that he did not feel the same.

That underneath it all, he was the barbarian that she had fantasized about him being.

Of course, that had been in a sexual sense. And it was a lot more fun to imagine things in the bedroom, than spilling over into her actual life where there were real consequences and...

She supposed that was the issue. If you had fantasies about large, dominant men who made you feel small and beautiful and like they could scoop you up and handle everything, you had to take the negatives that came with that. Which in this case, turned out that he was a vindictive asshole.

Except... He wasn’t acting like a child. He was not simply lashing out. It was all calm and measured. As if she were the child and this were the punishment that she deserved.

It got its hooks into her. Made her feel shame. Made her feel as if she were the foolish one.

As if she were the one that was small.

“Gunnar, I...”

“You what? You vastly underestimated me. And that is the problem. You thought that because you won a few contracts when we went head to head that you knew the measure of me. But that is not the case, Olive. You do not know me. You do not know... You do not know what I thought of you before, and how this has changed things. And now you must face the consequences of your own actions.”

“You act as if that hasn’t been part of my life, all my life. You think my father was easy on me?”

She felt disloyal speaking of her father, particularly to Gunnar.

She loved her father. He was all she had. And she had loved him dearly. She also knew that essentially, Gunnar hated him, as his father had hated him. They had not had the type of rivalry that she and Gunnar had, where there was sniping but it was...

It was sexually charged. And you mistook it for something else.

Because for all your talk of reading romance novels and understanding the way of things, you were a silly virgin. And you did not protect yourself. At all. You are a silly, silly girl.

She felt silly. She felt absolutely foolish.

She felt as if she had completely ruined everything. Detonated a bomb in the middle of all of it.

She was so used to feeling like everything was well ordered, every risk calculated. And she had been so convinced that she had the measure of things, that she had moved forward with the corporate espionage. That she had moved forward with sleeping with Gunnar because she had found a way to make it all makes sense in her head. Perhaps that was the worst thing that her father had taught her. To trust in her mind.

In this case, she had managed to construct for herself a palace of nonsense.

And she couldn’t live in that damned palace. No she could not. She was in Gunnar’s ice palace.

But she had a feeling he was not going to let it go.

“My father expected me to be every inch the CEO that he was by the time I was twenty-two. He had all those years to become proficient at what he did, but he wanted me to step in to this company that he grew and have the lay of it. And yes, he had the skills to turn it into what it was, but he needed me to take the helm and do so with authority. I have never had another path. I’ve never had another option.” She swallowed hard. “I had never had anyone else. I loved him, he loved me in his way, I know he did. I know he did. And all I have left is Ambient and it’s the only way I can... I can keep on loving him.”

“As you can see, my options were many and plentiful and laid out before me as the bounty of the earth.” His tone was dry. His expression bland.

“I’m not saying you had it any differently. You are perhaps the only person in the entire world that understands exactly what it’s like to be raised by a man like my father.”

“I do not think that our fathers were the same.”

“Don’t you? I think they were. In essence. Certainly they did things differently, at least, in certain fashions. But... Don’t you think... Don’t you think?”

“I do not.”

“Well. It doesn’t matter whether you understand or not. I’m just explaining. If you want to try and find it in your concrete soul to empathize with what I was going through, you now have all the information.”