The food was good. Freshly caught fish, home grown vegetables from the garden both Marias tended. It should have whetted her appetite, but she barely picked at it while saying nothing to him and avoiding his gaze as much as possible.
She had never been sullen before. She had been sassy, professional, poised, and earnest, but never like this. Never quiet and withdrawn and sad.
“You're not eating.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Alex was not sure precisely how to deal with her. If she was being petulant, another thrashing might well be in order. However, if this was delayed trauma seeping out over the sturgeon eggs, then beating her would be cruel.
“When are you going back to the office?” She asked him the question, though he heard it as she more likely intended it: are you going to leave me here all alone?
“I’m going to be telecommuting for the next few months at least,” he told her. “So I will be here, with you.”
“Well. Not with me,” she said, taking a sip of water.
There it was, a not-so-subtle hint that she was interested and feeling out of sorts at what she no doubt considered a rejection.
He had known for some time that she had a crush on him. The moment they met, there had been undeniable chemistry. And it was bold of her to have made a move, of sorts. But now was not the time, if there was ever a time.
“Sophie, you’re a very sweet girl, but…”
“I don’t need to hear the but,” she said, blushing. “This is embarrassing enough as it is.”
“You do need to hear the but,” he replied firmly. “I am not the sort of man you should be involved with. It’s not just the fact that I’m old enough to be your father, or that I have more traditional views than you do, it’s that…” he paused.
“You’re not attracted to me. I get it. It’s okay.”
She filled the silence he was attempting to put thought in.
“You have to stop doing that,” he chided her. “You don’t know what is inside my head. You know very little about me.”
“I know more than you think,” she said. “I Googled you.”
He snorted with laughter. “That describes your generation perfectly. You think you can discover all you need to know about a person online. Social media masquerades as meaningful interaction. You don’t know a thing about me. You don’t even know my real name.”
“It’s not Alex Roth?”
“No.”
Chapter 14
A little creeping chill ran down her spine. “What is it, then?”
“Alex is fine for the purposes of our conversation,” he said. “But believe me, Sophie. Places like Apex, they’re much more than businesses. They’re empires, and they run by their own rules.”
“Does that make Christo the emperor?”
“It makes him the idiot boy king,” Alex replied with surprising honesty. At the office, he had always behaved with completely propriety. She had come to expect him to always be stiffly professional. But they were no longer in the office. They were on some far flung Greek island, and he was revealing himself to her in slow degrees.
“But you were in the military, weren’t you. A marine?”
“The military is another place which plays by its own rules,” Alex replied. “Yes, I was a marine. Most of what you know about me is true. It’s just not everything there is to know.”
“So tell me.”
She was being bold, but that was because she was curious.
“It’s best you don’t know,” he said, retreating behind that professional veneer which up until a few minutes ago had seemed completely impenetrable to her. “My secrets are dangerous ones — as are the ones you are beginning to gather for yourself. The next…”
“Yeah. Okay.”
She got up from the table, not knowing why she had bothered to sit down in the first place. She had known she wasn’t going to eat.
“I’m not finished speaking, Sophie.”
“Well, I’m finished listening,” she shot back.
The things this guy did to her pride, she could barely tolerate them.
“Don’t leave the house,” he said from behind her.
Of course she left the house. Staying inside was a kind of madness. She couldn’t sit in her room and stare out the window and run the events of the last few days through her mind yet again. She could have wandered through the rest of the place, except for the fact that most of the complex was locked away behind various coded doors. Some of them might have been where the Marias lived. Or there might have been missile silos back there. Who fucking knew.
What she did know is that she needed some fresh air, and in a house full of locked doors, the front door was still open, which told her everything she needed to know. If Alex actually wanted her inside, he would have had that one sealed hermetically shut.
She stepped outside and into the world of his making. So this was how the 0.000001 percent lived. He was like a small god, drawing matter together and condensing it into wild beauty. She couldn’t imagine how much Alex was actually worth — or what is name really was.