Page 25 of The Billionaire's Accidental Legacy

CHAPTER THREE

HISFATHERWASDEAD. He wasn’t sorry about that.

He had, however, expected to feel triumph.

He’d won, after all. His father had died alone in a care home and he had survived him. Instead, he had felt smothered by a blanket of heavy black darkness. It hadn’t been grief. He knew grief. It had been something worse.

Futility.

He had outlived his father. He had made sure the old man knew that the line would end with him, that the estate was no longer part of the family.

But on the other side of that had been...nothing. Nothing but a strange finality he had not anticipated.

It was like he could no longer find the man beneath the mask. He’d always imagined he’d be there, somewhere. Healed when his father died and yet...the closest he’d felt had been with her.

He had been utterly unlike himself, as had the desire he’d carried for her every day since. She had aroused something deeper in him. Something dark and intense. He’d never been like that with a woman before.

Then he’d gone back to himself. To the Ewan he put on every day along with his suit and tie. And now his father was dead.

Everything was still broken.

Or perhaps that was Jessie.

He hadn’t felt anything like triumph since that night he had spent with Jessie.

Five months and he hadn’t gotten the woman out of his mind. Not just because they were connected by her winning the estate.

Jessie...

He had lost the taste for everything since that night. For anyone else.

That she had been a virgin was a shock. A gentleman would have taken her just the once. Allowed her to recover.

He was not a gentleman. But even beyond that...his behavior hadn’t been about playing into the idea that he was a debaucher. He’d been lost to it. To her.

With her, he’d found something gritty and dark within himself. He’d made demands of her, and she’d met them. It had felt like meeting an old friend, or perhaps just a part of himself long buried.

He’d been a child when he’d smoothed that charm over the top of his intensity, and so he’d never had the chance to connect it to sex and need and desire.

But they had.

He had taken her every which way. He’d bent her over the couch in the living room. He’d had her in the shower.

He’d tied her hands and pleasured her until she had begged for release. And he had refused her until she was sobbing.

It had been the single most intense night of his life. And it should’ve faded into that hazy pool of memory where he kept all sexual encounters.

But it had not faded. It had stayed there. Bright and determined.

Perhaps that spoke volumes about how jaded he had become. It had taken a virgin to show him something exciting. And now he could find no interest in anything else.

Or perhaps it had been that night.

That finality he’d felt having surrendered his title, the estate, severed his ties with that house and his father forever.

She had been a conquest. A victory. And he’d been hers.

The mutual desperation had been unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.

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