Page 39 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

“I’m not sure either. Maybe that you were affected by it like I was? Maybe that it was special. Maybe that you care about me, and you aren’t just unmoved by it like it seemed you were last night when you sent me away.”

“If sex were cheap, worlds wouldn’t burn over it. If it were nothing, a sexual assault would be the same as a slap across the face. It is not. If sex was meaningless, indiscretion wouldn’t raze marriages, families, lives, churches, to rubble. Sex is dangerous. And it can be heavy, light, transformative. So I’ve heard.” He stared straight ahead. He didn’t look at her. “I was not unmoved.”

His admission was heavy and she didn’t know what to do with it, where to place it neatly inside of her heart. There was nothing neat about this. It didn’t make her feel better, either. Not really. Because she couldn’t guess what the landscape of his soul looked like, and she felt like she was trying to traverse terrain she couldn’t see. Buried beneath the darkened waters of trauma he didn’t want to share.

And fair, she supposed, because before this past week he’d been an authority figure to her—whatever she thought about that, and it wasn’t very flattering—and now whatever he said things had changed.

Sex had rearranged them.

Everything they had been. Everything they were now.

Apollo was still a sheer rock face, and yet, she’d seen more vulnerability since last night than she’d ever glimpsed before.

“Did I hurt you, Apollo?”

He turned sharply. “As if you would possess the power to do so? And with such a medium.”

“Well, I’m sorry if I did,” she said. “I imagine nobody wants to feel used. Even jaded billionaires.”

“You may rest, Hannah. I did not feel used.”

She didn’t believe him.

“That’s good,” she said. “Least of all, I hope you don’t now. I hope you understand that I... It was my fantasy.”

“Because you...”

“I like you. I mean, I... I liked you. Had a crush on you.” She was underselling those feelings, but how could she tell him she’d thought herself in love with him? That even now it felt like a twisted version of something much, much deeper than a crush.

She hadn’t known him, not really. He didn’t know her, not beyond his need for her to be some token of redemption. How could you love someone you didn’t know? Someone who didn’t see you as an equal?

Even still, the feelings were...powerful. If they weren’t, she wouldn’t have had sex with him. She wouldn’t have felt so wounded by the marriage. She wouldn’t have told him she was a virgin, or that she cared for him at all.

He laughed. The sound filling up the car. “A crush. I don’t know that I have ever been subjected to anything quite so anodyne as a young girl’s crush.”

That hurt. Even though she’d deliberately downplayed it, it felt so...scathing and mean.

“Well, that’s probably because you say things like that. Young girls are prone to having their feelings hurt when grown men laugh at them.”

He did not look abashed, and she felt that was pretty poor manners on his part considering she had just apologized to him and his own feelings.

“Excuse me, I was concerned about you.”

“I did not ask you to be.”

“Apollo...”

“You were the virgin, Hannah. Not me. And while I appreciate what you said, I do, and yes, sex is something. It changes things. It changes people. I agree to that. I believe that. I... I’m not wounded. I’m certainly not going to take juvenile feelings to heart.”

“I would think that you might recognize that what passed between us was not juvenile.”

“No,” he agreed. “What passed between us was not. But surely you must understand that any emotional attachments you have for me are... Pointless.”

That actually made her want to jump out of the car and swim into the sea. Because how could that be? Okay. Maybe she had never been so foolish as to fantasize that they would get married or have a family or anything like that. But the idea that feelings for him, all the way, were completely pointless after so many years of caring for him just felt... Sad. And it wasn’t her she felt sad for. It was him. It was his inability to recognize that he had someone in his life who actually cared for him. Sure, they were spiky with each other sometimes, but he had always been there. He had been a constant. A safe space.

She supposed the real foolishness was imagining that any of those feelings went the other direction. Because why would they? It was easy to imagine that they could, but he really did just see her as a responsibility. A prize to win. A job well done. She had seen him as vastly more.

“Do you care about anyone?”

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