by Maisey Yates
And that made it harder to pretend it was the reason he hadn’t touched his wife. He pushed the thought aside. Of course it was a reason. It was practically the reason.
“Two weeks? And then we just start...living as a real married couple.”
“It has to happen sometime. Preferably when we can focus on each other.”
“I see...and...and besides sex, what is marriage to you, Ajax? Is it love? Is it companionship? Friendship? What will I be to you?”
“I...I will share your bed,” he said, his voice rough. “I will protect you. I will give you children. If you reach out in the dark...I will be there.”
These were his real marriage vows. His promises to her. And he found he meant them. That he would carve them onto the remains of his soul if necessary.
He was changing direction, but this was still a path he could walk. Love wasn’t necessary. There was no need for a heavy, emotional attachment. Not when there was honesty. Not when there was faithfulness. Loyalty.
He wasn’t even certain now if he knew what love was. Rachel had been the symbol of his dreams. His finish line in so many ways. She had come to mean so much to him in what she had represented that it had been easy to imagine it was love.
But now he wondered. Leah had accused him of seeing Rachel as an ideal, not as a woman. Perhaps that was true.
Perhaps he was simply incapable of love. In a strange way, he found that comforting. Love was an awfully big emotion, one he imagined was hard to control. He couldn’t have such a thing.
“Nothing more?” she asked.
“That is everything, Leah. From me, that is everything.”
She looked away from him, lifted her hand and scrunched her ponytail, the curls springing back the moment she released it. And he remembered sifting his fingers through it last night. It had been straighter then. He wondered how it felt with all the curl in it. She bit her lower lip, and he remembered doing the same last night. And the little sound of pleasure she’d made.
His stomach tightened, and so did his groin. His lack of control stunned him enough that it took a while to get any back. All he could do was look at her, look at her and focus on the heat that was coursing through his body.
“I am giving you everything,” he said slowly, “because you’re my wife. And there is no other woman who holds that position now or ever. No matter how the marriage started.”
“Thanks, Ajax,” she said, her voice a whisper, sadness in her eyes.
He wanted to offer her more. To offer her comfort. The problem was, he was the last person on earth who should ever be allowed to offer comfort. To give tenderness.
Because if he ever let the walls down, the darkness would start to bleed out.
* * *
Normally going back to Holt felt like coming home. But Leah didn’t feel at home when she walked through the glass revolving doors and into the familiar, gray-marble lobby.
It was the same, but everything had changed. Her father wasn’t here. He was in Rhodes. And while there was nothing too unusual about that—ever since her father had first visited the island, he’d been in love with it and had made it a second home—there was no longer a desk here with his name on it, and that did make it different.
Holt Enterprises had always been Joseph Holt’s domain. Now it belonged to Ajax. And it belonged to her. Interesting because she’d never imagined that happening. Now that it had...now that it had she realized how much she valued being a part of it.
Because Holt was important. To her, to her future children, to the people who worked here. And to Ajax. Ajax loved Holt. She couldn’t fault him there. He would do the very best he could by it, and if the success of Ajax’s personal corporation was any indicator, the best he could do was very good indeed.
His husband skills were a bit more murky.
But the vow he’d made to her in the study at his home, where he had made plain the importance he put on her position as his wife...that gave her hope at least. Hope that things could be good. Better than they were. And it made her want to lower her defenses a little bit.
It made her want to try.
As they walked through the reception area, almost empty at this hour of the night, most of staff gone home, she had a strange sense of déjà vu. How often had she followed him like this back when she’d been a teenager? Before she’d put up her walls. Before she’d been aware of how she looked to other people.
Trailing behind him, gabbing about something or another, soaking in every ounce of attention he gave her. Trying to get him to look at her. Trying to make him smile.
At the time, she’d felt like he was her friend. Like he might have feelings for her. As an adult, she saw herself for what she was: a delusional, chubby girl, following around an older, sophisticated man who had no time to listen to her drone on about her plans for her future candy shop.
And yet he had. He had never once been unkind or made her feel unwanted. If he had, she probably wouldn’t have retained her crush for so long.
Even now she wasn’t immune to him.
That kiss...
She followed him into an elevator and crossed her arms beneath her breasts while he pushed all the appropriate buttons. She’d had fantasies about him and elevators. All the times they’d ridden up in them together. In her very fevered teenage imagination she’d pictured him pulling her into his arms and bending her backward, kissing her neck, her lips.
All very impassioned at the time, but her imagination could do better than that now.
Yes, the fantasies she could spin about an elevator now were not half so innocent. They picked up where they’d left off the night before. With her against the wall. And her skirt shoved up around her hips—never mind that she was wearing dress pants at the moment—and him putting his hands between her thighs to help answer the pounding ache that was threatening to...
“So,” she said, overly bright, trying to blot out the images running rampant through her mind, “do you have any artwork picked out for your office yet?”
He gave her a strange look. “No.”
“Well, you’ll want to...personalize it, right?”
“No. I won’t be working from here. Someone else will be put in charge.”
“You’ll have an office, though.”
“Yes, but I won’t be spending much time in it.”
“Your lack of desire for frivolous things is sort of annoying, Ajax. Do you have any idea how obnoxious it is to try and make small talk with someone when they don’t seem to think about anything small?”
“I’m sorry I can’t accommodate your need for me to care about trivial things.”
“You suck at conversation—do you know that?”
“It’s not this hard with everyone.”
“It didn’t used to be this hard with me. What changed?”
He arched a brow. “You stopped talking to me.”
Oh. Right. So she had.
“I suppose I did.” She followed him down the hall, and she was assaulted by another punch of the familiar. How many times had they walked like this? And how had she missed that even though she was walking with him, she was walking alone.
He didn’t need her there. He didn’t want her there. He just...accepted her presence. It seemed like there had to be more. Like they needed to find more. But she was trapped between her desire to protect herself, and her need to make more from her marriage than just two people who could barely make eye contact.
That was why the candy she’d bought him was in her purse, and not already sitting on his desk. Because she hadn’t decided what she was going to do with it yet.
He pushed open the door to what had been her father’s office. The pictures on the wall were gone. His nameplate on his desk, gone. She swallowed, or at least she tried to. A lump stopped her accomplishing it
.
“Wow. I guess it really is yours now.”
“He was prompt in removing his things,” Ajax said, looking around the space.
“Ajax...” She bit the inside of her cheek, trying to stop the question, the random, stupid, insistent question that wanted to come out at this, of all times, but she couldn’t stop it. “Did you sleep with my sister?”
His focus zeroed in on her, his expression one of shock. Well, shock for Ajax, which meant a raised brow and deeper frown than normal. “Why would you ask that?”
“Morbid, oh Lord is it ever morbid, curiosity. I know you told me never to compare myself to her, but in this instance...well, I need to know if you’ll be comparing us.” She flinched, because really, what were the odds that Ajax had never slept with Rachel? They’d been together for a long time, and Ajax was an incredibly sexy, virile man. Leah never, ever, ever in a million years would have been able to keep her hands off him for all that time.
Hell, she’d attacked him and pushed him against a wall after two days of close proximity.
“I told you that?” he asked, turning back to the desk, then back to her, as if he wasn’t sure where he was supposed to be looking.
“Not to compare myself? Yes. Don’t you...do you remember that?” She looked at his expression, his eyes blank. He didn’t remember. How stupid to think that he would. That one of the defining moments in her life, in deciding how to act in public, how to deal with the press, would even register on his radar. So very, very telling.
“Anyway... I just... I wanted to know,” she finished, her words hollow in the silence.
“We didn’t.”
“What?” The admission pushed the air from her lungs. “How is that even possible?”
“We were going to wait until we married,” he said, the words tugged from him, the topic clearly one he wasn’t interested in addressing.
“I...I didn’t expect that.”
“Why not?”
“Most men would pressure a girl to get sex as quickly as possible. Why should I believe you’re any different?”
“I am,” he said, his tone light, a dark glint in his eyes that told her his voice was fraudulent. “I am not like most men.” He moved toward her, his expression unchanging. Her heart stopped, her stomach folding in on itself. His eyes never wavered from hers, and she wondered, she hoped, that he would touch her. Kiss her. He dipped his head, traced her jaw with the tip of his finger. “I am much, much worse.”
He pulled away from her and her breath left her body in a rush. She blinked, feeling dizzy, feeling like she was coming out of some sort of trance.
He wasn’t going to answer her. She felt like there was a wall between them. Made of ice and his feelings for another woman. And she wanted to scream at him. For not being the man she’d wanted him to be. The man she’d thought he was.
And that wasn’t really fair, was it? To be angry at him for not being like she imagined. And it really didn’t make sense that it should hurt so much.
She reached into her purse, her fingers curling around the little box of truffles she’d put in there. Her olive branch. Her attempt to make things work better between them.
But not now.
She knew better than this. Knew that you had to protect yourself, or all of your insides would get pulled out and put on display for the public. Ridiculed. She wasn’t dropping her shields for him.
She wasn’t going to expose herself to that kind of pain. The idea of letting him in, of putting herself out there and trying to make their marriage more than just a plan, had obviously been a stupid one.
She released her hold on the box and turned away from him. “I’m going to go back to my penthouse and try to make arrangements for my things.”
“Good. Be back at my house tonight.”
“Why?”
“Appearance, agape, why else?”
“Oh, no. Yeah. Of course.” She wanted to say something tart. To lash out at him. Certainly not so he could be with her. Or something like that. But her throat was too raw and her head hurt. And she wouldn’t risk revealing that to him. “See you later then. I’ll try to make some sort of big hand gesture and maybe do a pantomime of being trapped in a box so I get the paparazzi’s attention as I go back to the house. Wouldn’t want them to miss me being there. For appearances.”
“Whatever you feel you need to do.”
Yell at you until I forget how confused I am. “Great. See you later.”
Ajax watched Leah leave, a strange weight settling in his stomach. She’d looked...upset, and that was an understatement. But he hadn’t wanted to have a conversation with her about sex, not when his body still burned from their kiss.
And he hadn’t wanted to admit that he’d never slept with Rachel. Pride? He’d never thought he would suffer from male pride in quite that way. He’d made his choices. Very deliberately and he was hardly going to regret them now.
He looked down at his desk. It looked empty. Because Joseph Holt wasn’t here. He’d removed his presence, and Ajax found that he missed the presence of his mentor.
If there was ever a man he wanted to imitate, it was him.
Unlike his own father, Joseph Holt was a good man. He cared for his family, for people, his staff. He worked hard and found a reward in it. There was an honesty to him, a humanity that had been completely foreign to Ajax when he’d first shown up at the estate, a lost boy with scars inside that would never heal properly.
And Joseph Holt had taken him in and shown him there was another way to live, another way to act than the way he’d seen all of his life. Than the dirty, disgusting hell he’d been brought up in. A hell he’d nearly jumped into with both feet.
He sat down at the desk. His desk now. And he only hoped that with the absence of Joseph, and all of his things, he would still be able to be the man he’d taught him to be.
And then it suddenly hit him why his desk looked so empty. A strange memory from the past that seemed prominent now.
Leah hadn’t left him any candy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DAYS IN New York were basically miserable. Leah avoided Ajax to the best of her ability. She spent time at her shop and her lab, experimenting with flavors.
She didn’t do a lot of hands-on candy creation, not at this stage in her career, but when she was feeling stressed it was a nice distraction.
But her two weeks was coming to an end. In just a few minutes. And that meant it was nearly honeymoon time. Romance time.
With a man she was barely speaking to. Yay. That was just freaking spiffy.
She was meeting him at the airport, because they’d both been too busy to get a car together. Well, no, that was a lie. She could have made time, but she’d lied and said she didn’t have it so she could avoid him for a few extra moments.
Now she was sitting there in the private lounge, waiting for him to come, with bags of candy wrapped in ribbon scattered around her feet. She always took the surplus stock, and this time she’d ended up with a bunch of irregular chocolate shoes thanks to the factory snafu.
It would be really nice if the honeymoon was severely depressing. Binge eating easily accessed. She honestly had no idea what to expect from Ajax, so she’d come prepared.
The door to the lounge opened, and Ajax walked in, looking unbelievably sexy in a black suit with a black tie. The man was buttoned up and knotted to perfection, short hair in place. Everything about him shouted control freak. And she had no idea what it was in her that found it so attractive. She just wanted to loosen that tie, undo his buttons and run her fingers through his hair and get it all messy.
She sucked in a sharp breath and bent down, trying to gather up her candy. “Hi,” she said, scooping the cellophane bags up, the packaging crinkling as she pulled them in tight to her chest. “I’m just...
I got all this candy and I have to, get it now....” She picked up a few more bags and nearly lost one. He took a step toward her at the same time she took one toward him. “Here.” She dumped the bags into his arms. “Take. Please.” Then she bent down and grabbed the rest, and her purse. “Ready?”
He arched a brow at her. “Everything is ready. Your bags are on board.”
“Great. Thanks. So...where are we going?”
“Did I not mention?”
“No, it’s one of those silly little incidentals we’ve never talked about. Like what your favorite color is, the real nature of your relationship with my sister...that kind of thing.”
“Are you really bringing that up again now?” he asked, holding the door open for her. She walked out in front of him and started through the terminal, headed to the exit where the private planes were parked, ready for takeoff.
“I guess so. I hadn’t planned to. But I hadn’t really planned to the first time. I’m suffering from a case of terminal honesty at the moment.”
“It’s not as charming as one might think.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s charming. I think it’s hideously embarrassing. I aim to stop it as soon as possible.”
“Anytime you see fit.”
She led the way out onto the tarmac. “Which plane is yours?”
“The big one,” he said, without a trace of humor. All she could hear was the potential double entendre.
She arched a brow. “Indeed.” She walked up the stairs that led to the interior of the jet. They’d flown in it on the way to New York, but still, to her, a plane on the runway looked like a plane on the runway.
The inside, however, was what truly distinguished it from anything she’d ever seen before. Plush carpets, leather furniture, a flat-screen television and a bedroom made it more comfortable than most Manhattan apartments. And twice as big as some of them, too.
She’d been raised wealthy, and she was used to opulence. To a degree. Ajax’s version was on a whole other level. It wasn’t showy, not in an obvious way. No gold-plated toilet paper roll holders.
