Page 55 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

Without thinking, she called him. He didn’t pick up.

She ignored the sinking feeling in her chest.

He was busy. And anyway, why had she called him?

It was so complicated. He was tangled in so many aspects of her life, and they had only made it more complicated, then they had married each other, and she had made it more complicated still when she had seduced him in the library.

She felt so powerful sometimes. The object of his desire.

Especially understanding what that meant.

She looked down at her phone, and then opened up a spreadsheet on her computer, trying to focus.

And that was when the door to her office opened.

There he was. Dark thunder and intense black eyes.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I couldn’t stay away,” he said.

His voice was rough and filled with intensity, and it was everything she had ever wanted to hear. He couldn’t stay away.

It was why he hadn’t answered his phone. He hadn’t been busy. He had been on his way here.

And right in that moment, a brilliant, bright light of need ignited within her.

He couldn’t stay away.

It was all there. The truth of it. He didn’t look at her like she was his charge. Didn’t look at her like she was a ward to be taken care of. He looked at her like she was a woman, and he was a man who needed her.

He closed the office door, and turned the lock.

“Apollo,” she said, looking around the highly polished corner office, the windows facing other buildings and the streets below.

He pushed a button, and they didn’t. She knew that they did that, a highly glossed film within the windows that would lower to make it impossible to see inside, but they could still see the outside world.

“Give yourself to me,” he commanded.

“I...”

This was heat and fire, this was the opportunity to meet him. As equals. They’d made love more times than she could count over the past two weeks, but there were moments that had shifted things, moments that she couldn’t ignore. That stood out in her mind. Of course the first time, had been about her. Her needs, her virginity. He had been skilled, and he had been good, but it had still been different than that time in the penthouse when he had begged her to help him. Because the feelings within him had been so foreign, so beyond his control, and so close to the bone that he had needed her to hold him. That had been about his desire. I desire that went beyond the physical.

And this?

This was about the two of them. Coming together with no walls.

But she had to be brave enough to close the gap between them. Brave enough to banish the anxiety within her.

It was only a year. This thing. It wouldn’t last forever. Why relegate herself to a corner of her own soul? Why consign herself to more loneliness?

It was inevitable. It had been a part of who she was from the beginning of her life.

She knew what was going to happen at the end of all of this. And whether or not she threw herself into their thrilling sexual connection, what difference did it make?

It would all be the same. In the end he would leave. In the end, she would ask him to.

They would divorce. Because it was the agreement. They would divorce, because they both had real lives to get back to, and they weren’t these.

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