Jay nearly shuddered when he pushed her gently back.
“I thought—when she showed us the paper, I thought it would be the photographs.”
The gentleness vanished from his face like evaporating mist. “Yeah, I think we’re going to have to talk to your mother about that. I had a PI looking into her. The same one I used for you. He’s thorough, and he told me she’s seeing someone.”
The same one he’d used for her. He said it so casually, so shamelessly.
“Who is she seeing?”
“I don’t know. But she’s not smart enough to come up with anything this elaborate on her own, which probably means that whoever she’s with lit a fire under her ass.”
“You want to confront her,” Jay said, reading his expression.
“Do you not want me to?”
“No.” Jay realized that could be taken for denial and shook her head. “She made her choice a long time ago. The weekend she let me think she was dead so she could hook up with your dad—that was the day she made it clear that she would never choose me. If she is behind this—” Jay steeled her shoulders “—if she sent me those pictures, I willneverforgive her.”
“Don’t worry. She knows she won’t get her money if we think we have nothing left to lose.”
“Was that why you did it?” Her voice was quiet. “When you blackmailed me?”
Nicholas studied his tinted office windows with his wintry eyes, folding his arms. “I thought you didn’t love me anymore. And I wanted you . . . so badly. I didn’t want you to leave.”
“I never understood what made you want to hurt me.”
“I thought if I made you stay, I could force you to love me back. But the more I took from you, the emptier I felt—and the more you shoved me away.” He laughed bitterly, shaking his head at the blinds. “I really was a waste.”
“You were a cruel and vicious boy who got everything he wanted. Someone was going to have to say no to you eventually.” She leaned back on the edge of his desk, crossing one foot over the other. “I hate that you made it be me.”
“I’m not a nice man, Jay. But I love you. And I want to do for you what neither of our parents did for us. Protect you, take care of you.” He stalked closer, making her suck in her breath. “And now that I know that you love me back, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
“I know,” she said, a little anxiously. “You’ve told me. I believe you.”
“No.” He bent slightly, so they were face to face. “Not just in the office. Anyone who has ever kept you up at night, I can destroy.” She gripped the desk tighter as something too dark to be arousal blazed through her veins. “Do you want to get back at your mother? Your friends? You’ve only seen me at the very best of my very worst. I can show you what I’m capable of when I’m not holding back—and I will win.”
Jay had a piercing realization of what the serpent must have sounded like while cajoling Eve into tasting the apple; it must have tasted like the sweet violence he was promising her now.
She turned her face away, conscious of the closed door and the buzzing silence and the slight kiss of arousal on her innerthighs. Even in this steel and drywall bubble, they were not beyond judgement.
“I don’t want to hurt her,” she said uncertainly, still turned away.
“You don’t need to hurt her to make her hurt.”
She thought of all the times her mother had made her feel worthless. She might not have raised a hand to her, but her words had been like the slow death of a thousand cuts. And she had swallowed down all those insults like bitter medicine, thinking that her mother had surely known best.
And then she left me alone. She hurt me on purpose because it made her feel bigger when I was small. She treated me like I was nothing. And then she sold me—like I was nothing.
She looked up at the man her mother had sold her to. He looked back at her, and she saw that radiant chill in his eyes thaw by just a few degrees, like a teasing glimpse of sun in a storm.
Then he bent to her ear and whispered, “Let Daddy take care of it.”
“Okay,” Jay said, sounding only a little shaky.
Chapter Eighteen
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When she was young, she used to have the same recurring dream. She was looking for her father and he was singing to her, and she knew with the logic of dreams that he would only come back to her if she could remember the lyrics. Shehadto remember the lyrics.
