Page 62 of The Forbidden Bride He Stole

And that was when he let the ring fall from his hand and onto the floor. Because he had become that person. The one who would buy someone else’s body. The one who would pay for them to be in his bed whether they wanted to be there or not. Because he was so broken, so damaged, he needed to take from another person in order to be whole.

Time and money had made him the thing that he despised. He would turn her into his whore if he could. And nothing had ever terrified him more.

“No,” he said. “I won’t do that.”

“I can’t be alone like that. Not anymore. Please. Don’t ask it of me. Let me go, Apollo. Let me... Let me make a life for myself that is nothing to do with you. Let me make a life for myself that is nothing to do with all of the things that have haunted me for all this time.”

“Your father’s company is good enough for you, but you must cut ties with me?”

“My father’s company isn’t a human being. It doesn’t have the power to wound me. I’m not expecting it to have feelings for me, I just want to do a good job. I want the freedom to find someone who can love me. And maybe no one ever will. Maybe I will never be compelling enough, or interesting enough for somebody to—”

“It has nothing to do with you. The reason that I...” But he couldn’t even say it. “I don’t even know what love is, Hannah,” he said, and he felt foolish, because he was a thirty-five-year-old man admitting that he had no concept of an emotion he was quite certain small children understood. But he didn’t. He had no idea at all.

It was the thing that people talked about. Wrote songs about. Poetry. It was something that concerned so many aspects of the world. The power of a mother’s love was supposed to drive so many things and yet in his life it never had. Fathers were supposed to love their children and protect them, and yet his had abandoned him. Sex and love were supposed to be linked, and yet for him it had been tied together with money. With the basest of lusts.

He felt something different when he was with Hannah, but what was love?

Was it this feeling that he would die if she wasn’t beside him? Or was it the need to let her go free so that she could be happy?

And if it was the latter, then did that mean it was enough to convince her to stay with him? Enough to give her a promise?

He didn’t know. And he needed to figure it out. But he didn’t know how to do it.

“I will go back to Athens,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Apollo...”

“You are right. This isn’t healthy. It’s not something I can ask of you. I’m older than you. And I have had time enough to sort through things that I have not managed to fix. It is not your job to fix them for me. And I am very sorry, Hannah. I should’ve turned you away when you came to my study.”

“Don’t say that. You shouldn’t have I...”

“I should have. It was selfish of me. To take what you offered. I wanted it, and I wanted you. Being lonely is one of the single most terrible things in the world and I will not allow you to be lonely because of me.”

He stood, and left the rings on the floor, not looking back as he walked out of the opera box.

She could only sit there, feeling devastated. What had just happened? She got off the chair and knelt down, picking up one of the rings from where it had rolled onto the ground. He had... He had proposed to her. Really. Truly. And she had... She turned him down. She had to. She had to. Because there was no way that he was ever going to stay with her. Why would he? He was an interesting, vital, beautiful man, and in her experience she was...

What was she? She was a lonely child who had never gotten past the isolation of her childhood. She was a lonely girl who had never been able to tell her parents how much she had just needed them to be there.

What is love?

He had asked her, and she didn’t have an answer. Except it couldn’t be this. It couldn’t be the sharp, painful uncertainty. This plunge into the unknown. When she had imagined going off and living her life, taking over the company, doing whatever she wanted, going out and having fun with her friends, and being free to date, it hadn’t felt sharp. Love could not be this painful.

And yet she felt like she was bleeding out. And she was afraid she loved that stupid bastard in spite of everything she had told herself. That it was a crush, that was all it was. That she knew better.

“Damn you,” she said. “Damn you, Apollo.”

Because she might as well be the doomed woman at the end of the opera, consigned to dying in a man’s arms. When was it love or was it just a sickness over the chemistry between them?

How are you supposed to know?

She had been shoved into his sphere when she was sixteen years old and her crush had been incubated in the heat of her grief. How could she trust it?

How could she trust him?

She had done the right thing. She had done the strong thing. She was standing up for herself. She was taking what she needed.

Are you saying I’m too much for you?

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