CHAPTER ONE
HE WAS GOING to 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?
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 a woman that 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 kissed one.
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.
Then a woman in red had come through the front door. His age. Sophisticated, in her thirties, speaking with him effortlessly.
They’d gone out together arm in arm and she’d understood. It would never be that way between them. She would always be a child to him and he would always be a stratospheric object she wouldn’t be able to touch.
That didn’t mean she stopped having sex dreams about him, that didn’t mean her feelings for him were gone. It was why being around him was still so painful. At least with the agony there had been ecstasy when she’d been able to imagine he might want her back someday. After that, she’d been left with only agony, and as long as she was in proximity to him, as long as he remained in control of her life, it wouldn’t stop.
The violent negative reaction she’d had to the idea of kissing another man had been her wake-up call. No matter what she told herself, she was still in love with Apollo. And that needed to stop.
So she’d gone out with Mariana. She’d tried to find another man to kiss, but when it came down to it, she hadn’t wanted to kiss anyone.
Then when she’d gotten home just past midnight, he’d told her coolly that she wasn’t to do that anymore. No anger, of course. He acted as if she was a wayward child who’d made a mistake.
She’d sat on the edge of her bed with the world caving in around her.
She loved him.
He saw her as a child.
The arrangement wasn’t fair or normal.
It was holding her back. He was holding her back.
She’d said as much to Mariana the next day at work.
“You have to get him to release you from the guardianship!”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Sure, you can. Drive him to the brink! Make him wash his hands of you.”
She didn’t want Apollo to wash his hands of her. No matter the twisted-up feelings in her chest, no matter that she needed to get rid of some of them, he was her only real...family. He meant the world to her. He would never be nothing to her. But he couldn’t be everything like this. She had to be able to breathe. To be herself.
She needed to have the control of her life, of her money, of her work, so that he didn’t have all the power.
She’d told people he was easy. Permissive, even. He wasn’t. It was only that she’d never once gone against him because she was so horrifically infatuated with him that she’d let herself be his cheerful little doormat. She hated that for her.
It was like, through the eyes of Mariana and the rest of her friends, she’d gotten a good, hard look at her life for the first time, and she could feel all her certainty, all that she’d ever believed about herself, unraveling.
She was alone. He’d taken care of her, but he’d never offered her anything...emotional, and she was so enraptured with him it was like the sun shone out his billion-dollar butt.
She accepted far, far too little from the people she gave love to.
Another problem.
Questioning things with Apollo made her go back further, it made her question things with her parents. The parents she could hardly remember—not because they’d died six years ago—but because they’d never really been around when they were alive.
They’d loved her. She assumed. Because parents loved their children in theory. An innate instinct that kept them from drowning you when you were too annoying, she’d heard.
They hadn’t been cruel. But she’d never been as important as whatever adventure they wanted to take, or business venture they’d wanted to embark on. She’d been lonely as their child, she’d been lonely as an orphan.
Because no matter how much she loved the people around her, they didn’t show it back.
And she felt...stuck now. Trapped in the consequences of her parents’ actions, their decision to make Apollo her guardian in case they died. Their decision to bind her in the most patriarchal nonsensical trust fund situation she could imagine.
Under Apollo’s care until well after she was an adult. Unless she was under a husband’s care. And it did say, husband. Otherwise, she’d be tempted to ask Mariana to marry her and offer her friend a kickback for doing her a favor.
She wanted to be free of this. Of him.
What she didn’t expect was to see...there was more than just anger in his eyes now. This was something else. There was heat there, and she was no expert on the goings-on between men and women, but she was pretty expert on Apollo and his expressions, his movements. There was a fire in his eyes like she hadn’t seen before.
And danger.
She sensed danger.
But it wasn’t the kind of danger that she wanted to run from. No, it was a predator’s gaze. Watchful. Waiting. Hungry. It didn’t frighten her, because it mirrored the feelings she’d carried for him for all of these years.
Her breath exited her body in a rush.
He...wanted her.
Or at least for a moment, he had looked and seen her as a woman.
It’s working.
No, that’s not what she was doing! She didn’t want him to be attracted to her, she just wanted to get out from under his authority so she could go on and be a functional, human adult who wasn’t hanging on his every move.
She couldn’t deny that this moment, being pinned beneath his dark gaze, was the single most erotic moment of her life. It was like everything had stopped around her, yet her body had come alive. Her heart was pounding, a mirrored pulse beating between her legs. Her breasts felt heavy, her knees shaky.
She wanted...
She wanted to go to him. She wanted to touch him. She wanted...
And then, as quickly as that heat had flared in his eyes, it was gone.
If you want him to wash his hands of you, follow your teenage dreams and seduce him like an idiot. Do you really think a virgin’s inexpert fumblings are going to make him abandon the Apollo of it all?
No. Apollo was a locked box filled with nothing but honor. If she dared disturb that lock, she would disrupt everything.
She couldn’t afford that.
She’d made friends at her new job, and she loved them. But in the grand fabric of her life, there was one thread woven all the way through.
Him.
This was a very dangerous high-wire act she was doing. Trying to get him to be frustrated enough to let her have her freedom, trying to get him to understand she was too old to be treated like a child.
Then there was the matter of her father’s company.
It was being taken care of by a Board of Trustees. Because, yet again, it was another thing that technically belonged to her but could not be hers until she was twenty-five. Or married.
She thought of her friends at the hotel she worked at. Of all the things that she could do for them. If she owned an entire hotel chain, she could give Mariana the hotel to manage. God knew she was better than the frosty manager where they worked. She had ideas. Energy.
And the idea of something belonging to her... That excited her.
The foundation would always belong to her father. But she didn’t hate her father, even if she was newly going over some of her resentment.
What she needed was to get her own life.
What she needed was to not be in love with Apollo.
And that brought her right back to the moment.
His burning gaze made her feel as if the flames there had reached out and licked over her skin. Though the fire now was much more apparently anger.
“I think working at this hotel is not good for you. Your friends there are a bad influence on you.”
Then her rage matched his own. How dare he?
“You can’t tell me where to work, Apollo.”
“I am your guardian,” he said.
“And I’m an adult. Not a child. But you have failed to notice this.”
“The stipulations of the guardianship indicate that your father would not have considered you a full adult until you were twenty-five.”
She had kept her emotions locked down for so long. Kept herself in check. And for what? He would never look at her and see why she had done it. He would never understand how much she had loved him. In that way, he was the same as her father. The sharp hook of emotion that curled around her gut at that thought left her gasping.
Was this how it would always be? Her loving men who didn’t have the time of day for her? Was she such a cliché that her daddy issues were manifesting like this? She was just so overwhelmed. By shame. By anger. At herself. At Apollo.
“My father wouldn’t know,” she said, the words wrenched from deep within her. “He didn’t spend any time with me. At sixteen, I did a competent job managing my own life because I had to. Because my parents were ever off on adventures. They got themselves killed in a canoeing accident, for God’s sake. It isn’t that there’s... There’s nothing wrong with going off and having adventures, but they did it instead of caring for me. That things became more heavy-handed after their deaths just seemed all a bit wrong to me.
“You’re not in charge of me,” she said. “Not really. I might not have access to my trust fund, but I have a job. I have friends. I don’t need you intervening in my life.”
“Sadly for you, agape, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do. Because should I decide to withdraw my support from you, your trust is locked for a further five years.”
“What?”
“That is the way of it. If I decide that your behavior is immature and unwarranted, I can hold your money up for five years.”
“And what if I marry?”
“If you marry, then your husband is...”
“My guardian?” she spat. “You can’t be serious.”
Yes, her whole life was supposed to be this. Authoritative men telling her what to do, building her little gilded cages. Never, ever loving her the way she wanted them to.
“I am your guardian, exactly. And yes, I am serious. But do not take your rage out on me. I did not create the stipulations of the agreement.”
“You’re threatening to enforce them.”
“For your own good. Your father entrusted you to me. I have done an excellent job with you.”
“You have done nothing,” she said. “You have laid down a series of arcane rules and regulations, and I followed them because I was nothing more than a doe-eyed child where you were concerned for years and years. But I am not that girl anymore. I am a woman. You cannot tell me what to do.”
“I can and I will. Go to bed. Go to your work shift tomorrow and give them your notice. Then come straight home afterward.”
“I won’t.” And that was when she decided she would make him unreasonable. She would make him prove himself a liar because he wouldn’t do it. Shortly. He wouldn’t push it, so he was her guardian until she was thirty. Not even Apollo would go that far. There was no point to it. But then, she couldn’t understand why he was being so unreasonable now.
“I will do what I think is best,” she said.
“You know nothing of the world,” he said. “That is why your father put me in charge. He was very aware that he had raised a little princess who knew nothing beyond the walls of your gilded cage, and he would no longer be here to protect you. He put me in charge because I know what’s beyond the gold and glitter, agape. And you do not.”
He knew it was a cage. He just didn’t care. His use of the word she’d just thought herself made her even angrier. It was difficult for her to hang on to what the goal was right now, not when she just felt...rage. At all the years of being so lonely, so unseen, so unloved.
“He put you in charge because he was a misogynist. If he had a son, he would never have done that.”
“You’re a daughter. The world is not a kind place for women. Surely you know that.”
“He might have had some confidence that I was smart enough to avoid—”
“Regardless of gender, avoiding victimization is not a matter of being smart. Believe me. I know.”
There was something in his eyes then, something different even than the heat that had been there a moment before. It was a weakness. And it stopped her short.
She had never seen anything half so human in him before. But much like the heat before, it was gone before she could truly grapple with what it meant.
There was no point arguing with him anyway. Apollo was a man who understood action. Not words. She would show him that he could not bend her to his will.
And then part of her wondered...
Wondered if the heat that she had seen in his eyes would make him bend. Would make him withdraw.
He wasn’t immune to her body.
Even if he had hidden it quickly. Even if it had only been momentary.
She was going to have to ponder that. What it meant, and how she could use it.
The idea made her heart start beating faster again. It was a risk. For all the reasons she’d thought of already, it was a risk. It could push him away forever. But it could also be the thing that made him realize that now he needed to distance her—just for a time.
Or maybe...
Maybe he would give in.
For one moment she let herself imagine that. His lips, his hands, his body.
She had never tried manipulating anyone ever in her whole life. But the idea that she might be able to make him want her like she’d wanted him...it sent a shock wave through her system.
Get a hold of yourself.
One thing was certain, she couldn’t control Apollo. But she could control herself.
She wouldn’t be told what to do.
So, she turned on her heel in his office, and when her back was to him and she was near the door, she stopped. “You’re not my dad.”
Then she swept out of the study.
