Page 50 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

He had to laugh. At the role reversal. At the way she was treating him like he was the virgin.

“Do you find me different now? Do I disgust you?”

“No,” she said. “Why would you? You did what you had to do to survive.”

“That’s a lie. Many people survive without selling their bodies. I wanted to do more than survive. I wanted to escape. All of it. But you know, I’ve been living under the delusion that I’m better than my mother. When I’m not. I didn’t fall in love with any of my clients, but that hardly makes me better. I fell for the lure of easy money. And once you step into that bear trap you cannot get out of it. With connections, and some investments from Sandra we eventually started the tech company. She was our first major backer. So even in that, it’s all sex for money. Sex to get where I am now. So when I tell you that I know sex is not just a handshake, it comes from the fact that I treated it like one for a number of years. At great cost. Do you know how afraid I was to step through the door of that church. Because I hadn’t been in one since I...”

“Your mother still went into them.”

“Yes,” he said. “She did. I decided that I could too. For that very reason. I think I just wanted to feel like maybe I wasn’t so broken.”

“Did you... It doesn’t matter but...”

“You want to know about my clients?”

“A little. But it feels wrong to ask.”

“There are more men willing to pay than women,” he said, his tone stark. “And I... I am in no way attracted to men. But I do like money. So yes. I did a great many things I did not especially wish to do. And you cannot walk away from situations like that without feeling violated.”

“Have you ever talked to someone about this?”

He couldn’t help himself. He barked out a laugh. “Like a therapist?”

“Yes. Like a therapist. This is complicated. It’s like... It’s like untangling years of sexual assault.”

“It’s not,” he said, the denial coming harder than he intended it to. Because he had admitted, even in himself, that there were certainly aspects of it that felt that way sometimes. But for some reason right then he felt the urge to deny it. “I put myself in those situations. I agreed to do those things. Nobody forced me.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, I think.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I could never afford to allow it to be complicated. I made my choice, and I kept it in the past. Back then I thought it was worse whatever the consequences might be. And so now I am left with the consequences. But also money.”

“Apollo,” she said, her voice so filled with compassion that he wanted to reject it. And yet he needed it. “I don’t know what to say. It’s just... I am so sorry that you were alone. And that you had to... That you felt it was your only choice. Because whatever you say now, I do believe that then you must’ve felt it was the best and only thing you could do.”

He could remember feeling that way. Feeling like he was spinning his wheels. And the amount of money he had gotten offered by some guy in an alley had changed things for him. He had finally seen a way forward.

“I think there are other people who can handle such things better. Cameron is one of them. I’m not saying he isn’t his own mess. He is and always has been, but he was never quite so wounded by what we did. I was. It went against my nature, and... I violated myself, Hannah. And it is something I have to live with. I traded myself, my soul, for this life.”

She put her hand on him and he resisted the urge to remove it.

“You didn’t trade yourself for anything. You’re still here.”

“Not the way that I used to be. This is a version of me. But nothing more.”

She nodded slowly. “I think we’re always changed by the things we go through. But that doesn’t make us someone different.” She moved closer to him. “I know that you’re the one that is supposed to take care of me. And I know you’re so much older than me, and honestly, you have lived through so much more. But... You’re more than that. You are not going to be that forever. You have to forgive yourself.”

“It isn’t that easy.” It didn’t shock him that she couldn’t understand. It wasn’t a matter of forgiveness, but acceptance. He had proven himself to be the same as his mother, really. And that was the thing that he had to live with. The stark reality of his own weakness. Of the truth that he was no better than the woman he had spent quite a long time despising.

His parents were people he could never truly respect. And he had no evidence that he wasn’t ultimately cut from the exact same cloth.

Maybe that was what bothered him most of all. “You haven’t explained, though. How it connects to my parents.”

Discomfort lodged in his chest. He had talked to her father about this, when he had first made the provision for Apollo to be Hannah’s guardian.

“This all seems very out of the blue.”

“I trust you. You understand.”

“I do. But... Nothing is going to happen to you.”

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