by Maisey Yates
“Let me off the...?”
“Of our deal. Every night. My bed. I don’t want to do that tonight.”
“Why?” he asked, knowing it was a stupid question, and yet he had no idea how to fix the situation he found himself in. Leah had been different in the candy store. Softer for a moment. More like the Leah he’d always known.
But now her guard was up, walls strong and high around her. He couldn’t reach her. Didn’t know what to say or do.
“I have a headache,” she said. “Something to do with overexposure to flashbulbs. Good night.”
She stalked out of the room, and Ajax walked to the bar. He kept a bar in his house, and it was fully stocked. He told himself it was for guests, but deep down he knew. He knew he was waving a red flag in front of the beast, tempting him.
And tonight...tonight he nearly took the bait.
He gritted his teeth and turned away from it. He was in control. No one would take that from him, not even Leah.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LEAH WOKE UP feeling horrible, and her mood lasted the whole day. Last night’s encounter with the press had been the embodiment of her every past insecurity. Of her every current insecurity. So many people so certain she wasn’t good enough. So confident in saying it. In reminding her that her husband, the man she made love with every night, didn’t really want her.
She had ample time to get grouchier since Ajax spent the whole day at Holt and she spent the whole day replaying the press fiasco, and every lame encounter she and Ajax had had since their marriage, without the memory of recent good sex as a buffer.
She was digging through his freezer, looking for something for dinner, when he came back home.
“Leah,” he said, coming into the room, “I hope you didn’t eat.”
“That was actually why I was spelunking through your freezer. I’m hungry.”
“I don’t have much of anything in this house. I’m not here often enough.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Order a pizza?”
“No, I thought we might go out.”
“Why?”
He held a newspaper out in front of him, folded open to the society pages. There was a photo, a huge photo, of her and Ajax, walking out of Leah’s Lollies last night. They both looked strained, and they had a gap between their hands that looked extremely...significant. She imagined the facial expressions were from the camera. As for the not touching...well, she wasn’t allowed to touch him. Not when he didn’t want. So that was his fault.
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?”
“Break her in. She’s a virgin. You’ll like her.”
“Oh,” Leah breathed, the one syllable filled with pain. For him. For Celia.
“She was just a girl. Sixteen like me, I found out later.”
“How did you find out?”
“Because the minute I sobered up enough to do anything but lie on the bed and cry with her over what was happening in me, about what I’d nearly done, about what my father did, we ran. I took her back home. She wasn’t a prostitute. She wasn’t there because she wanted to be, or even there to get drugs. She’d been kidnapped. I couldn’t go to the police. Because I knew well that many of them were on my father’s payroll. How else does a man with such a transparent operation last so long? And for that betrayal...for that betrayal he would have killed me. He very possibly would have tracked down Celia’s family and had her killed, too.”
�
��Ajax that’s...terrible. You had no help...no way to get out.”
“She wouldn’t have needed help if not for my father. If not for me.”
“And you saved her.”
“Do not turn me into the hero of this twisted story. There was nothing heroic about what I did. It was the absolute least that a human should do for another human. I will never...I will never be that man again. That man who felt like everything was for him. That man who threw off all control, who threw away everything good in him in pursuit of pleasure.”
“Pleasure you didn’t take.”
“Stop trying to spin it so I come out looking good,” he said. “A murderer might stop his knife just before it hits his victim. He might stop. But he is still, in his heart, a murderer.”
“And you think you would hurt me if I pushed you too far?”
He took a deep breath, and looked at her, his black eyes blank, bottomless. “That’s the thing. I have no idea what I would do. I have kept myself, so much of myself, chained for so long. All I know is that the beast is hungry. I don’t know what it wants. And I damn sure will not find out at your expense.”
“And this is why you were never with a woman?”
“Sex, in my mind, has a place. It is not the halls of a mansion where everyone can see. It’s not with a frightened girl kidnapped from her home. Sex like that? It has a victim, Leah. I thought in marriage that dynamic would be erased.” His skin turned ashen, his expression like stone. “I haven’t made a victim of you, have I?”
She tilted her chin, trying to look confident, trying not to look as if she was breaking inside. Breaking for him. For all he’d been through. For how he saw himself. Ajax believed he had a beast in him. More than that, Leah thought he probably believed he was the beast.
“Ajax, I asked you to sleep with me. I told you I wanted sex. You have never done anything I haven’t wanted you to. You tie my hands because I let you. I only submit because I want to. I’m strong enough to handle you.”
“But I fear I’m strong enough to break you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Ajax...the man you are today, the man you are now...could you possibly be that man without that moment with Celia?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Without that moment of clarity, that moment where you first saw who you were, would you have ever changed?”
“I don’t... Leah, I can’t...”
“What is your father doing now?”
“He’s in jail,” Ajax said. “Because I used my connections to find a way to put him in there. I hope he’s dead, Leah. I pray it’s so.”
“You put him behind bars?”
“Yes.”
“And the women?”
“As far as I know, with access to all of his computers, they rescued a record number of people.”
“Because of you. Because that’s who you are.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Do you have to punish yourself?”
“I’m not punishing myself. I’m keeping those around me safe. Except you.” He met her eyes, a knot forming in his chest. “I fear I’m not keeping you safe.”
“Trust that I’m strong enough to keep myself safe. And to know what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
“Dolmades. Take me someplace Greek.”
* * *
Ajax’s heart was about to wear a hole through his chest. He was still high on adrenaline after his confession to Leah. Dinner hadn’t done anything to take the edge off. He wondered if he even deserved to have the edge taken off.
Because the truth was ugly. So ugly. And he deserved to burn for it.
The restaurant was small, a trendy, darkly lit place where people who were truly famous went. It was where people went who didn’t want privacy. The perfect place to go to encounter the press. To have pictures taken.
The press. He had to think of the press now and not just his past. Not about the monster prowling around inside of him.
“Do you want to dance?” There was a small dance floor, near the stage. It was intimate and crowded. Just the sort of thing a newlywed couple would be drawn to. He supposed.
“I didn’t think you danced.”
“I don’t,” he said. “Now, would you like the dance or not?”
Leah cocked her head to the side, her curls spilling over her shoulder like a dark waterfall, her eyebrows locked together. “Yes. Yes, I’ll dance with you.”
“All right.” He stood and offered her his hand. “Try not to look like I’ve asked you to join me in front of the firing squad, okay?”
She smiled then. “Aw, Ajax, are you trying humor?”
“Yes. Have I succeeded?”
“Almost.” She took his hand. He curled his fingers around it, relishing her softness. Her warmth.
He took her down to where the other couples were, moving in time with the music and pulled her against him. Before he realized that he truly had no idea how to dance.
“I’ve never done this before,” he said.
She laced her fingers through his, one hand on his shoulder. “That can’t be. You’ve been to hundreds of events with Rachel.”
“And I always told her what I told you that day after our wedding. I don’t dance.”
“So why are you dancing now?”
“Because you’re right. I can’t go storming into the newsroom and threaten to kill people. It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Not even a little.”
“And I can’t stop them from printing things like they did today. But dammit, I can work to kill the rumors. I can do my part to make sure no one, anywhere, ever assumes that you’re a backup for anything.”
She blinked and rested her head against his shoulder. “I am, though.”
“I didn’t know Rachel,” he said. “Not really. We never once had a deep conversation. I never told her about my life at my father’s compound. And she wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. She was content to just have a facade, and that was fine by me. Preferable even. But I didn’t know her. She didn’t know me. I didn’t know you, either. But I’m starting to. And I think...I think you now know me better than any other person on earth.”
“Really?” Her words were muffled by his suit jacket.
“Yes. Really. Starting from when you used to come and visit me. Do you remember that?”
She laughed, a watery sound. “Of course.”
“You brought me chocolate. It always made me... I felt like someone was thinking of me. Me, not my business acumen, or anything else. Just me. And now you’re the only woman who knows about my past. The only woman who has ever been with me...as a man. As anything other than the stupid, selfish boy I was. So I think you officially know me better than anyone.”
“I guess I do.”
“And you’re here with me. You didn’t run. And now that I know you, now that I know you as a woman, a woman who will not hesitate to yell at me, to take a cut out of my ego with a sassy remark, I find that...I find that I don’t believe another woman would be right for me.”
“But am I right for you? Or is it just that anyone would be wrong?” She lifted her head and looked at him, golden eyes sparkling.
“I don’t know. But we’re together.”
“After three weeks of marriage. Someone get us a medal.”
“I don’t know that I really understand love... I doubt I ever will. I thought I did, but it’s become very clear that I knew an attachment for convenience, and not any sort of real affection or deep emotion. I don’t know if I’m wired to...to know how to give it. My father didn’t love anything but money and power. He taught me to view myself as the final authority, be my own god, worship myself and my needs and...that one moment in my life, when I saw her face...” It made h
is chest tight to think about it, even after all these years. “That was the first time I ever looked outside of myself. The first time I considered that other people had feelings and needs and hopes and dreams that were just as important as mine. More important. And that I possessed the power to destroy them if I had a mind to.”
Her fingers curled around his suit jacket, her hold on him tight. He continued. “Just that bit of humanity was a lot of effort to achieve and beyond that...I try to keep my needs, my desires, under control so that I at least don’t hurt anyone. I can’t be everything a husband should be, but I won’t be cruel. I won’t ever hurt you or force you, or do anything that you don’t want me to.”
Leah’s heart thundered, her hands shaking. She was holding on to Ajax as tightly as she could to keep from crumpling to the floor.
He was telling her about himself. Everything he believed about himself. And he was, in the same breath, promising never to hurt her. And his words were destroying every wall she’d built between them.
Didn’t he know? Didn’t he have any idea that marriage to a man who kept half of his heart, half of who he was, prisoner deep down inside himself would be able to do nothing but hurt her? Even if the hurt only came from watching him. Day after day, struggling with what he considered to be an inner demon, when it was simply Ajax. He fought against himself, waged a war on appetites most people embraced. The appetites most people found made life worth living.
Didn’t he know that it would kill her to watch it?
She looked at him, at the horrible blankness in his eyes, and she pictured his fire, his life, pushed down deep in his body, crying our for release. For freedom.
She had spent her life idolizing Ajax Kouros. A man who she thought had it all. A man she thought to be perfect. But she hadn’t known Ajax. Hadn’t known the struggles he’d faced, where he’d come from, or why he was headed toward his final destination with such singular purpose.
She hadn’t known how hard his fight was. Hadn’t known that every day cost him more energy just to keep himself in line than most people would ever have to expend.