Page 1 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

CHAPTER ONE

HEWASGOINGto kill her.

This was just another stunt in a long line of stunts Hannah had pulled over the past six months threatening to drive Apollo over the edge. And Apollo didn’t do the edge. He’d been over it before. Hell, he’d been born over it. He had no intention of going back again.

Least of all, because of a bratty twenty-two-year-old whose well-being was his responsibility.

Taking Hannah in was the only good thing he’d ever done in his life. Everything else had been for his own benefit. Either financially or to feed his own depravity.

He was a strict guardian. When Hannah’s parents had died, she’d been a straight A student on the path to certain success. He’d wanted to keep her there. At sixteen, she’d had two years left of high school. She’d gone to a boarding school, and he’d checked in with her often, his best expression of appreciation for the friendship her father had given him—another relationship that he supposed had become about more than what he could get from it—was to make sure Hannah carried on how she might have if they’d lived.

Her finances were in a trust that not even he could access until she was twenty-five or married. He paid for her life while she was in his care, and while he gave her a decent allowance, he wanted to make sure he kept her focused on her studies.

She’d done well. She’d graduated top of her class in high school, then gone on to university, where she’d studied technology and hospitality, which put her in a unique position to work for her father’s hotel brand and liaise with his tech company, implementing unprecedented smart tech into the luxury resorts.

That was a reflection of a job well done.

He hadn’t allowed her excess funds because he felt that would lead to others taking advantage of her. It would be a distraction. Even when she was in university, he made his expectations clear. No parties. No dating. No drinking.

He’d never had the chance to have an education, and it felt good to see her have a top-tier one he ensured she took seriously.

All had been well until she suddenly had a personality transplant after graduation. She had been living with him since vacating her college dorm, lacking the money to afford her own lodging but apparently making plenty enough to be the life of the party. She had gotten a job—but not at her father’s company. At a competitive hotel chain, not as an executive, but as a concierge. She’d suddenly developed a taste for nightclubs, parties, and staying out late.

Last night he’d told her in no uncertain terms was she to go out tonight. And it was past 2:00 a.m., and he’d gone in to check on her, and she was gone. It was rare for him to be bested by anyone, let alone a near child.

The issue was that he hadn’t treated her as a prisoner.

He would now.

Until she was twenty-five, she was his ward. Perhaps he should have expected this. Perhaps it was unavoidable that her trauma over her grief would eventually turn into a meltdown of some kind. Was it not his job to protect her from this also?

That was when he heard scrabbling outside. Coming nearer to the second-floor library where he sat, drinking a scotch. He knew she would pass through here because he’d figured out it was how she was sneaking out.

So, he’d decided to lie in wait.

The window opened, and in she tumbled. Ingloriously. Shoes in hand, a dress so short it was more like a glittery T-shirt. She stood straight, her hair cascading in a tumbled, curling mane around her shoulders. The dress left nothing to the imagination. Her curves were out, on full display. And Apollo saw red.

“What the hell are you playing at?”

Hannah was frozen to the spot, pinned by his dark magnetic gaze. Even in the dim firelight, she knew his features, all too well. The sharp cheekbones, the square, granite jaw.

His heritage was Greek and Italian, but he had always put the marble statues to shame. He was broad and tall, well-muscled. She had a map of his body drawn out neatly in her mind, and she could refer to it whenever she wished. She did more often than she’d like to admit.

She’d had a crush on him from the time she was fourteen. When she was sixteen, he’d become her guardian. If those weren’t the most confusing, mixed-up authority figure issues, she didn’t know what was.

Worse still, from there her crush bloomed inside her and grew like ivy, wrapping itself around every part of her, turning into devastating, paralyzing love.

Now in her twenties, Hannah understood how it had happened. Apollo had been an object of fascination to her already. Then when her parents had died, he’d become her everything. The one who was taking care of her. The one she found most beautiful. The one who had known her most of her life. The one who had known her parents.

Not loving him would have been an impossibility. Loving him was too, though. The more she understood her feelings, the way things were between women and men, the more she resented the dark pull he had on her.

Because at fourteen she’d wanted to marry him. At sixteen she’d wanted to give him her virginity. She’d had foolish fantasies of trying to seduce him—which in hindsight made her cringe because he’d have sent her packing and rightly so.

But now, at twenty-two, she wanted to be consumed by him. Her fantasies were no longer hazy and romanticized. She recognized that what she wanted from him was everything.

It was an obsession.

Also unhealthy. Also why she was desperate—so desperate—to recast her role in his life? To gain her independence. Because how else was she ever going to exorcise these unwanted emotions and needs?

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