Page 12 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

They were billionaires. They had more money than a single person could ever spend in a lifetime, but Apollo would never take that for granted. How could he?

The wolves of poverty ever snapped at his heels. The wounds never fully healing. He knew what he would do to survive. He did not have to wonder. He would do it again. But it would cost so much more now. Because, as a boy, he’d had no pride. As a man, he did. And therefore, failure was not an option. Not now. Not ever. He simply could not and would not allow it. But Cameron was healed now. Not because of Apollo, but because of Athena.

The woman who had stumbled upon his castle a few years back, running away from her own troubled past. Cameron had fallen in love with her, whatever that meant.

Apollo couldn’t be certain.

He did not understand it. He knew what it was to be bonded to somebody because of flame and fire. He knew what it was to feel as if he owed someone a debt. As far as romantic love went, to him, it looked as if you simply chose a person you wished to have sex with for the rest of your life.

Apollo had never been the playboy that Cameron was.

The way that Cameron handled the trauma of their youth had been to shag everything that moved. Once he had money and power. Cameron was always taking delight in how his beauty caused those around him to do foolish things. It was why his accident had taken so very much from him. It had been the way he handled the world.

That face of his.

As for Apollo, he often felt fatigued by sex. The transactional nature of it. The way that it sometimes pushed him into a strange hollow cavern inside of himself. Where his body was moving but his mind was no longer there.

That was another difference between himself and Cameron. Cameron had never cared who he slept with. Other than his wife, who was now the only person he would ever want, he had gotten so much pleasure out of the act of being the desired object that age, gender, nothing, none of it mattered to Cameron.

An advantageous position to be in in a life such as theirs.

It did matter to Apollo. He’d had to do things he had not liked. With people he had not wanted, and he’d had to figure out how to manufacture a response to them.

It was difficult to break old habits. And that was why he found himself sometimes retreating during the act. All these years later. It didn’t make sense to him. And it was frustrating, because he liked women. He liked sex. But it could never entirely be divorced from the way he had once used it, and that outraged him. Because he was a man who had defeated the systems of this world. A man who had climbed up from the gutter defied all odds, and in many ways, he had escaped.

And yet, a film clung to him, and he did not know how to clear it away.

And then of course, there was the matter of Hannah.

He was doing his best not to revisit that night.

The way that his body had responded to her, because what he’d said to her had been alive. It was true, arousal, desire, was cheap for many. And bought expensively. He knew that better than most.

But for him? He had eminent control over his own responses. Always. Whether he chose to react or chose not to.

But he had chosen nothing with her. When she had looked at him with that beautiful face, her lips parted, her expression earnest, and told him that she wished to get on her knees and thank him for what he had done...

The twist of self-loathing in his gut was intense.

She was offering him payment. He had wanted to take it.

It made him feel... Wrong. All of it was wrong.

He wanted to go back to the night before he’d first confronted her about going out. To before he’d seen her in that dress that had barely covered her body. He did not want to see her as a woman, but as a symbol of his redemption and he was outraged she had pushed things to this point.

As if you did not have a part in it, putting your hands on her body and carrying her out of the club?

He had refused her. That was what mattered.

He had prevailed.

“Are you going to tell me what the problem is?”

“No,” said Apollo. “Because there is no problem, Cameron. The presence of a problem implies I’m concerned there is something that I cannot fix. We all know that can’t be true. I don’t lose.”

“You didn’t fix me,” Cameron pointed out.

“I triaged you. Until your wife appeared.”

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