The headline was really nice.
“Strain for Ajax Kouros and his Backup Bride as Holt Heiress Cavorts with Her New Lover. Gee. Charming.” She sucked in a sharp breath and blinked against the sudden stinging in her eyes. “I’m actually a Holt heiress, too. She’s not more of a Holt heiress than me. But I’m usually the Other Holt Heiress. And now I’ve been demoted further than even this. It’s like I don’t have a name. This backup bride title is bull—”
“And it’s why we’re going out,” he said. “A show of togetherness is essential right now. I am not allowing this marriage to become a farce.”
“This marriage is a farce, Ajax.”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her up against him, his dark eyes blazing. “Is it? We seem to have some very real moments.”
“In bed. And even then...it’s a game.”
“Nothing is funny about any of it, Leah. Nothing.”
“I didn’t say it was. But you aren’t real. It’s not real. You have rules, and you’re like a naked referee. I can’t do anything you don’t want me to do.”
“It’s for your own good,” he bit out.
“Really? And since when did you become an expert on my own good, Ajax, huh?”
“It’s not you I need to know—it’s me.”
“And why is that?”
“Do you want to know why I haven’t been with a woman in eighteen years? Do you want to know why I have to control myself. Why I have to tie your hands?”
“Yes,” she said, not sure she did. Suddenly wishing she could stop the train, but it was too late. There was too much momentum.
“The night of my sixteenth birthday I nearly raped a woman.”
Leah went cold. Starting at her lips, spreading through her face, down to her fingertips. The moment, and it could only have been a moment, stretched on and on. Forever.
“You...what? I don’t believe you. I don’t... Ajax, you didn’t...”
“I did. My father never paid much attention to me. I never knew who my mother was, probably a whore, and I mean that in the literal sense. I grew up neglected, surrounded by excess. The night of my birthday, my father actually gave me a party. And drugs. A lot of drugs. Not the first time I’d ever taken them. I was, for lack of a better term, a kid in a candy store after all. But at that age, my father decided it was time for me to truly understand the products he sold, so that when I became a man I could take over the business. When I became a man like him. Not if. When.”
“What...what...?”
“I was high out of my mind, I’d never had so much. And there was a party. It was so damn loud and hot. People screwing in every room in the house. In the hall. Women who were paid to be there, paid to service men, doing their jobs right there in public because they had no other choice. And then there was Celia. I know her name. I still remember it. My father shut me in a room with her, and I was...I was so certain in my own appeal, my own importance. After all, no woman had ever said no to me. Who would dare say no to the boss’s son? She’d been given to me. And I wanted her. I saw nothing else but what I wanted. And hell, she’d been paid to be with me. She was my whore, right? So I was ready to just take her. And I very nearly did.”
He could remember tearing her dress. Her sharp sob, fists hitting him. And everything suddenly becoming clear. Realizing what he was doing. Realizing for the first time that his pursuit of self-satisfaction had a cost for those he used.
Realizing for the very first time that other people mattered. It was not what he had been taught. He’d been taught nothing. He’d been fighting for survival within the walls of his father’s mansion. A mansion that was more of a compound. Taking what he needed, what he wanted with no consequences.
Except on one girl’s tear-streaked face he suddenly saw every consequence. The weighty price of his brand of enjoying life.
“Ajax...you didn’t, though. That’s what matters.”
“No, Leah, it’s not. It’s not. I...grabbed her arm and then I looked at her. I really looked. She was terrified. Crying. Because of me. Because of what I had been about to do to her. Because of what I was too blinded by myself to see.”
“And the drugs. You were on drugs.”
“That makes it better, Leah? I shouldn’t have ever agreed to that. Much less agreed to sleep with a woman who was paid to be there. Do you know what my father said?”
She didn’t want to know. “What?”