Page 125 of Guarded King

He looks up at the ceiling. “Hollow. Looking for someone or something to fill her up.”

“Someone like you?”

“Not just me.”

Suspicion niggles. How can it not with what I already know? “Your father?” I ask tentatively.

His eyes flash down to mine, but he doesn’t tense the way I expect. “Yes.”

A deep well of sorrow wells up in me in response to his simple answer. God. His father and his wife. I can’t imagine how that would feel. “What happened?”

“I was young and stupid.”

I brush my lips over his chest. “I can’t imagine that.”

One corner of his mouth turns up. “My relationship with Dad was… complicated. When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him. He demanded power and respect, and he brought me up to want those things too. But the older I got, the more his behavior bothered me.”

I listen carefully, hoping he senses my silent support.

“I didn’t like the way he treated me and my brothers or the way he played us against each other. I didn’t like the way he treated Mom, even though she’d never been particularly motherly. It still felt… disrespectful. And as much as he tried to encourage me to follow his example, I didn’t like the way he treated the other women either. The ones he screwed and discarded. I was torn between striving to be like him and questioning who he was and who he expected me to be.”

“That must have been confusing.”

His lips thin. “It shouldn’t have been.”

I push myself up on an elbow so I can look him in the eye. “He was your father. Of course it was confusing. He groomed you from a young age to look up to him. Regardless of what you learned later, that’s not easy to turn away from.”

He runs his thumb along my jaw, his mouth lifting at the corners. “Always from the heart with you.”

The organ in question squeezes so tight, my breath catches. How can there be so much tenderness hidden behind such a guarded exterior?

Hand smoothing down my back, he keeps going. “When Katherine started working for Dad, she seemed different from his previous assistants. She was beautiful, of course. Dad alwayssurrounded himself with beautiful women. But she seemed sweeter, shyer, even when she flirted with me.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in the sound. “I knew if she was working for Dad, chances were he was sleeping with her, or was trying to, anyway. So I flat out asked him. He laughed and said she wasn’t his type—too innocent, too difficult to get into bed. He told me if I wanted to put in the effort, I was welcome to her.”

I scoff. “How kind of him.”

“Kind is not a word anyone would use to describe my father.”

Would he believe it’s a word I’d use to describe him? I wonder what he sees when he looks in the mirror. Does he see himself, or does he see what his dad wanted him to see? How has his life been colored by his dad’s emotional manipulations?

“When I started seeing Katherine,” he continues, “she seemed like the perfect girlfriend. I knew I was expected to get married at some stage, to follow in my father’s footsteps as the future CEO of the company. Dad had drummed it into all of us—that marriage should be for practical reasons, for producing heirs, for business advantage, for appearances. Anything else was a weakness.”

He pushes his hand through his hair, the skin around his eyes tightening.

“Even then, I wanted to prove him wrong. Some small, stubborn part of me hoped marriage could be more than what I’d seen in my parents’ relationship and others in our social circle. I let that hope blind me to the truth. After just a few months, I proposed. I told myself I was marrying Katherine because I wanted to, because I loved her. Because she loved me. I expected Dad to be furious when I told him—maybe I even wanted him to be. After all, I was defying everything he’d ever taught me. But instead, he laughed. Said he thought I’d have higher aspirations, but if I was truly in love, who was he to get in the way.”

A sick feeling squirms in my stomach, along with a flaring-hot hatred for his father.

“Things went downhill pretty quickly after the wedding. Katherine changed. She’d go on spending sprees with her friends, have expensive nights out on the town. The money wasn’t an issue. But I did have a problem with the way she switched from pretending she didn’t care about any of it to embracing every aspect of it. I had a problem with the way her personality and priorities changed almost overnight. As if she’d gotten what she wanted with my ring on her finger, and now she felt free to let her true self out.”

I press another soft kiss to his chest, and he strokes his hand over my hair.

“It caused tension between us.” A muscle pulses in his jaw. “If I brought it up, she’d complain about being lonely. She’d say I worked too much and wasn’t paying her enough attention, even though my work habits hadn’t changed after the wedding. When I made an effort to be home early, she’d tell me she was going out anyway. We argued, and with each passing week, the fighting got worse. One night she came home drunk, we argued, and she screamed at me, saying I was just like my dad.”

My fingers flex against his skin as my body tenses. I knew it was coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier to hear. He looks down at me, his expression shuttered. God, it must be agonizing, recounting this. I almost regret asking, but maybe it’s good for him to get it out.

“She realized straight away what she’d done and tried to backpedal, but it was too late. The next day I walked into Dad’s office and asked him for the truth. He laughed again. Said that of course he’d slept with her. That he’d started sleeping with her a few days after she started working for him and kept it up the whole time we were dating. It only stopped once I proposed toher. Probably because she didn’t want to risk getting caught once she had a ring on her finger.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand what she was trying to achieve.”

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