Clara was right.He was a predator.I was prey.Whatever softness I thought I’d glimpsed was just another weapon in his extensive arsenal, designed to confuse me, to make me lower my guard.
This was a transaction.Nothing more, nothing less.
I would sell him my body for twelve months.I would collect my payments.I would save my hotel and preserve my family’s legacy.I would learn what it meant to be with a man, and I would learn it from someone whose cruelty would make it easy to walk away when the contract expired.
I would emerge from this richer.Stronger.Free of the virginity that had hung around my neck like a millstone for years.
I would not fall for him.
I would not wonder about the loneliness I thought I’d glimpsed behind his dark eyes, or the way his hands had seemed to gentle when I was too drunk to notice, or whether any part of him was capable of actual tenderness.
I would use him.Guard my heart.Walk away whole.
The car pulled up to the hotel’s main entrance, and I stepped out into the sharp January air.The Hughes stood before me, five stories of elegant stone and gleaming windows, the only home I’d ever known.
Tonight, I would go back to his manor.Tomorrow night, and the night after, and every night for the next year.
But I would survive this.I was a Hughes.We didn’t break.
Even if some small, traitorous part of me was already counting the hours until I saw him again.
11
RAPHAEL
Tonight would be different.
No whisky.No soft words.No carrying her to bed like some lovesick fool while she murmured about loneliness and burrowed into my neck like she belonged there.
I stood at my study window, watching the last light drain from the sky, and told myself the lies I needed to hear.She was a pawn.A means to an end.Last night had been an aberration, a moment of weakness I wouldn’t repeat.
The wolf growled in disagreement.
She trusted us.She fell asleep in our arms.That means something.
It meant nothing.It meant she’d had too much whisky and not enough sense.It meant I’d let my guard down for one evening and nearly ruined months of careful planning.
I thought about her words.The ones she wouldn’t remember.You’re just lonely.As if she could see through decades of carefully constructed defenses to the hollow thing underneath.As if loneliness was something a man like me was capable of feeling.
I’d burned that capacity out of myself years ago.Or so I’d believed.
The report on my desk offered no answers about the dead corgi.My men had traced the delivery to a courier service paid in cash.No security footage.No witnesses.Whoever had done this knew the hotel’s security infrastructure intimately.Knew the blind spots.Knew how to move unseen.
Someone threatening what’s ours,the wolf growled.Find them.Kill them.
I would find them.But for now, I had other matters to attend to.
The clock on the mantle showed seven-thirty.She would arrive in half an hour.Parsons had collected her from the hotel at seven, and the drive took exactly twenty-eight minutes.I’d timed it myself, sitting in the back of the town car with a stopwatch in hand like a man possessed.
Because that’s what I was.Possessed.By her scent, her defiance, the way she’d looked at me last night like she could see straight through to my bones.
I poured myself a glass of water.Drank it slowly.Watched the minutes crawl past like wounded animals dragging themselves toward death.
When headlights swept across the drive and the car door opened, my chest tightened.Anticipation.Nothing more.
I made myself wait.Let Alice answer the door.Let the soft murmur of voices drift up from the entrance hall.Let her wonder where I was, what I was doing, what I had planned for her tonight.
When ten minutes had passed, I descended the stairs.
