I turned and walked off.
He chased me.
“Elara,” he hissed, grabbing my arm. “Stop. We can… we can figure this out.”
“We already have,” I said. “We’ll get a divorce.”
“No.” He ran a hand through his hair, frantic. “Listen. The timing is bad. My parents—our parents—they’re negotiating a big deal next week. We don’t need bad press. We need to look solid. Married. Stable.”
A humorless laugh slipped out of me.
“Stable? You left the night we got married and haven’t spoken a word to me in three years.”
“You know what I mean,” he snapped. “Business stable. Reputation stable.”
He lowered his voice. “We can stay married. On paper. For them. For the company. Personally? You’ll stay out of my private life, and I’ll stay out of yours.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “You don’t touch my world. I won’t touch yours.”
“Your world?” His jaw clenched. “What is your world? Another man?”
I smiled—slow, and cruel. But I said nothing.
His nostrils flared.
“Get rid of him. He’ll be a distraction. If you need sex, you should come to me,” he insisted. “Not to… some… whoever.”
I laughed in his face.
Chapter 3
Julian
Three days without her. Three days since she saw me as a boy she could discard. Three days since she walked out of our apartment with my cum still drying on her thighs and her perfume clinging to my skin.
In those three days, I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t eaten. I’d tried to work, but everything blurred—numbers, contracts, meetings—all of it dissolving into the shape of her mouth saying,Goodbye, Julian.
So I drank. If I closed my eyes, I could see her. If I opened them, I could still see her. So I drank more.
Now I was sprawled across the velvet couch in my office, an untouched glass of water on the table beside me and four empty bottles of whiskey on the floor like evidence of a crime scene. The room spun slowly, like it was trying to tip me out of it.
The door clicked open. My assistant, Quinn—whom Elara thought was just a friend—stepped inside. He paused when he saw me, his jaw tightening, but not enough to show he was judging me.
“Sir,” he said carefully. “I brought the file you requested.”
I rubbed my face with shaking hands. “Yeah. Just—put it there.”
Quinn placed a thick black folder on the low table. I just stared at it. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do this. Three years ago, whenshe told me she had a husband and told me to keep it casual, I’d looked her up—just the basics. I needed to know she wasn’t scamming me. I needed to know I wasn’t fucking someone dangerous.
I’d seen her wedding photo. Her husband’s name. Her adoptive parents’ names.
Then I shut the file and told myself no. No digging. No obsession. No falling in love with a woman who didn’t want to belong to me.
But I’d already fallen. Even before she twisted my nipple between her fingers and called mebabywith that cruel, sweet smile, I was hers. I just let her believe her own fiction—that I was a recent graduate, dazzled by an older woman, a toy for her to use to soothe the loneliness. She thought she was slumming it. She thought she was playing with a boy.
She had no idea who was really playing with whom.
I had controlled myself. My urge to own her. I’d taken her "no’s"—me, who had never been denied a fucking thing in his life. I forced myself to play along with her rules, her boundaries, her delusions. I broke myself for her, let her carve out pieces of me every time she left my bed without looking back. And she thought that made me harmless. Safe. Small.
