I try to steady my voice as I speak to his back, the skyline behind him. “Why are you doing this? At your last party you brought up Ash.” My throat tightens around his name. “You wielded him like a weapon.”
Alistair rises with a predatory gleam in his eyes, and I fight the urge to step back. Polished wood clicks under his shoes as he circles the counter that had been between us. Staying quiet, he refills his glass, pours a second, and then leans back against the counter.
“I told you,” he says at last, slow and deliberate. “I care about my employees.”
“I was going to tell you I wanted out that night. You couldn’t have known that, and you still brought him up. I want to know why.”
“No doubt you’ve concocted an elaborate story,” he says, and even five steps away, his presence feels suffocating. “Artists and their overactive imaginations. Indulge me.”
“You enjoy having power over people.”
“A revelation,” he purrs. “A tech executive likes leverage.”
“More like a sadist with enough resources to turn anyone into a piece in your game.”
“You want out?” Alistair lifts both glasses and steps closer, eyes still hungry. “There’s the door. Why did you even come?”
He takes another step, and I can smell his citrus cologne above the wine. Three more and we’ll be touching.
“You’ve been to my house several times now,” he muses, taking another slow step.
My hands start to tremble.
“I don’t think you really want to leave.” One more step, and he extends the second glass, the gesture a flimsy excuse to erase the distance between us. “I think if I said there was a game you could play, where anything was possible, you’d want in.”
“You really believe that?”
He gives an exaggerated shrug that sloshes wine in both glasses.
“That’s how you rationalize it,” I say. “Preying on vulnerable, desperate people, telling yourself they like it. They’re pretending, Alistair. They’re using you. They don’t care about you. They want your money. Your parties.”
“People use each other,” he says, and the pride in his voice makes my stomach turn. “It’s the nature of every relationship—use and be used, then move on. No debts. No illusions. That’s freedom.”
Like my father used my mother.
Alistair’s logic is so familiar. It’s how I’ve lived my whole life. But when I run it past Ash in my head, it falls apart.
“It may be what you think,” I say, remembering Ash’s words, “but that doesn’t make it true.”
Alistair’s eyes widen, dark with lust and possession. He grabs my waist, and the stem of one wine glass digs into my lower back. His cologne stings my nose.
“Use me,” he growls. “Get your boyfriend that promotion. Get whatever your heart desires.”
My gut lurches at how simple he makes it sound: use and be used.
It’s not what I want anymore.
Somewhere between Philbrook and this goddamned penthouse, Ash stopped being an obligation and turned into someone I don’twantto walk away from. Loving him may hand him the power to wreck me, but I want it anyway.
If I let Alistair turn that into a currency, I’ll poison whatever we could be and prove Alistair right. I’d prove my father right too, and I’d rather lose the money, the studio, all of it, than do that.
I tilt my chin toward Alistair’s mouth and lean closer. His heart beats in his throat, his excitement hard against my leg.
“Is that what you want?” I ask, stopping an inch from his lips, feeling his breath on my face.
His pulse throbs where his hand grips me, mouth parting expectantly.
“There’s just one problem,” I whisper. “Your kind of freedom is lonely as hell. I’d rather find people I love and give them everything.”
