Page 11 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

“It means that you see me as—”

“It meansnothing,” he said again. “You are a silly child, and the fact that you think it signifies anything reveals your inexperience. No, spare me. Your tantrums and your paltry attempts at manipulation. That you think I would break all that I am for the chance to touch you is the most foolish thing I’ve ever conceived of. I can find someone to take care of this as soon as I get you locked up in the house.”

She had thought he might react badly. She hadn’t truly imagined this. His cruelty. The way he cut her with such unerring precision. Hit at everything she felt insecure about.

And it all boiled over.

“I hate you,”she said. Then she meant it. With every fiber of her being. As much as she had ever loved him.

“Good. Perhaps you should hate me.”

He picked her up and carried her to the car then, and she felt scalded by his touch. Outraged. But she didn’t wish to protest too much because she didn’t want to rub her body against him. They were silent on the drive home, and then she went to her room and locked the door defiantly behind her. She took her phone out of her pocket and called Mariana to let her know she had gotten home safely. And what had happened.

“Rocco told us.”

“A lot of good Rocco did.”

“Well, you can’t exactly blame him for not wanting to have a fistfight in the middle of the club.”

It was true. It wasn’t like he was her boyfriend or anything. Or her...

“Mariana, I have to call you back.” She hung up. And then she dialed Rocco.

Her hands were shaking. And she was desperate. Desperate to get Apollo the way he’d gotten her.

“Thank God,” he said. “I was worried.”

“Rocco,” she said. “I think you should marry me.”

CHAPTER THREE

APOLLOSPENTTHEnext two weeks in a vile temper. He had taken his feral mood off to Scotland to see Cameron, business partner and friend, and his wife, Athena.

“Stop brooding,” Cameron said one night. “You’re doing a classic impression of me.” He grinned, his scarred face shifting with the expression.

“My friend,” Apollo said, “it is not an impersonation of you unless I lock myself away in a castle for more than a decade and make my business partner do every last one of the in-person appearances we have scheduled for the company for the duration.”

“I am sorry about that,” Cameron said.

Then he laughed. It was good to hear Cameron laugh. He had not done so for a long time before Athena came into his life. Truly, he and Cameron had never had much to laugh about. But his friend had always been gregarious and beautiful, so handsome that the people around him paid dearly for the chance to spend time in his company. And when they were younger, had paid astronomical sums for a night with him.

He had seemed unscathed by all of that until an accident killed his lover and stole his looks. And yes, during that time, he had been a veritable beast.

Apollo would love to claim the way he had handled Cameron as another of his good deeds, but he could not. Cameron was his brother. In all the ways that it mattered. They had come up together on the streets, and they had kept each other from dying. Apollo had spent the early part of his life in Greece with his mother, the bastard child of her affair with an Italian man who’d left before Apollo was born.

She had gone to Scotland on the promise that a man there might care for them, but it had turned out to be little more than human trafficking. His mother had lost herself during those years, and Apollo had run away from home.

It was too dangerous, being around his mother’s various clients. He had managed to remain unmolested. Until that was, he had decided that charging money for access to his body before people could take it for free was perhaps the way forward.

It was the kind of work that took pieces of your soul. He and Cameron had not done it because they’d had a vast array of choices before them. They’d had certain assets and had used them how they could.

They were also brilliant. Smart with technology and had begun working at getting their hands on all the pieces of old technology that they could so that they could begin understanding the inner workings of all of it.

The ugly truth was that they had been prostitutes. The uglier truth was that sex was a commodity people paid dearly for. He did not feel guilt over his past actions. He had done what he needed to do. But it had changed him. When your own body was for sale, it forced you to live in your mind. He and Cameron had done so to their own benefit, and with connections they’d built—and some exploitation that verged on blackmail—they had managed to begin establishing themselves in the tech world. Starting their own company. Letting go of that old life.

Yes, he would love to say that staying connected to Cameron during his crisis, keeping him moving, keeping him going, had been an act of charity on his part. It wasn’t.

He hadn’t known how to live in a world without Cameron, and beyond that, his financial success was tied to Cameron. And he would not allow failure.

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