Page 2 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

Her whole body went tight with him sitting there.

She hadn’t been expecting this.

Not quite, anyway. She was sure Apollo knew she’d been sneaking out because she knew her guardian well enough to know he wasn’t an idiot. And he ought to know her well enough to realize she wasn’t either.

She hadn’t wanted to try to swan past him out the front door, but she had wanted him to notice that she wasn’t behaving like herself.

Or maybe she was.

She’d made friends at her new job, and those friends had very plainly and loudly let her know what they thought about her life: That it was effed up.

When she’d explained her situation to the other students at her private university, they’d found it odd, but they’d understood on some level. Because her parents had been wealthy, and Apollo was rich. And it was accepted that rich people handled things differently.

Her friend Mariana thought it was outrageous and hideous and that Apollo was a gargoyle.

And worse, Mariana saw through Hannah and had seen through Hannah, to her most shameful secret.

“You wouldn’t go along with his rules if you weren’t positively gagging for it where he’s concerned.”

“I am not!”

But she’d been blushing furiously because, lord have mercy on her soul, she was. Ever since she’d understood what sex was, she’d wanted to have it with him. Who could blame her? He was far too sexy for an impressionable teenage girl to cast her eyes upon. And she could remember him coming over to her parents’ estate in Upstate New York and swimming in their pool. In a tight black swimsuit that had left little to the imagination, and dear God, the man’s chest.

She’d had her sexual awakening then and there. She’d become awomanthat day.

Her friends in school had sighed over smooth-faced pop singers and she just couldn’t understand the fuss. She’d found the man she wanted. She couldn’t get excited over boys.

The wrenching pain and excitement she’d felt when the lawyer had told her she’d be going to live with him...

It had been like being trapped in a strange, gothic fantasy. Her parents were dead, the estate was being cleaned out, and she was being sent to live with the gorgeous, austere man of her dreams, who saw her only as a child.

Because she had been a child.

She was not one now, however.

She remembered her last conversation with Mariana about Apollo, as she’d tried so desperately to hide her reaction to Mariana even speaking his name, tried to preserve a shred of dignity.

“Dieu, Hannah. You’re in love with your awful old guardian. What a cliché.”

“He isn’t old!”

“You follow his ridiculous rules because you’re so into him that it’s embarrassing. You glow while talking about how he won’t let you go out. Like you’re a child.”

“I can go out!”

“Go out with me then. Dance with another man. Kiss another man.”

It had echoed inside her.Kiss another man.

She’d never kissedone.

Because she’d always wanted to kiss Apollo.

But she’d been the model, well-behaved ward. It didn’t make him want her. It didn’t make him love her. She had stopped believing he might when she was about twenty.

She could remember, viscerally, watching him come into the foyer of his sweeping Athens home, dressed in a perfectly cut tuxedo, and her heart had just...nearly exploded. She’d been on summer holiday and returning to stay with him was always a mixed bag. One part agony, one ecstasy.

The cliché of it all.

---