“Then you stabbed him in the back.”
“I bought him out for much more than thirty pieces of silver, little girl. Perhaps what really hurts is the fact that you were betrayed by your father, not by me. He put you in this position knowing you would fail.”
She gritted her teeth, doing her best to shake off his words. To not allow them to take hold. All of this reached down deep. To old wounds. To the way she’d felt she couldn’t measure up to Apollo, the son her father had always wanted. To her own fears of being eternally inadequate. And he knew it.
She would not let him win so easily. “He trusted you. When you offered to help he didn’t imagine you dismantling everything.”
Apollo lifted one broad shoulder. “He made a mistake in trusting me.”
“Clearly. You would betray not only the man who set you on the path to success, but your own mother.”
“She’s fine. Your father is hardly financially ruined. She continues to enjoy her status as his wife. And again, Elle, need I remind you your father sold Matte, and some of his other holdings, to me of his own free will.”
“You had him in a position where he couldn’t say no.”
Apollo took another step toward her. He was so close now that she could see his eyes weren’t completely black. She could see a faint ring of gold that faded to copper, then to deep brown. Could see the dark stubble beginning to grow in at his jawline.
Could smell the scent of his aftershave and skin.
“Interesting you put it like that. If dire financial straits take away choice you could argue my mother had little choice in marrying your father in the first place.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Elle said. “She wanted to.”
“Did she?”
“Of course.”
“A cleaning lady offered the chance to live in luxury after years barely making it in the US? After years of homeless poverty in Greece?”
“That isn’t... It has nothing to do with this.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe the point is that you can always say no, Elle.” He leaned in. “Always.”
She could barely breathe, her head swimming, her entire body on high alert. She was almost certain she had no blood in her veins, not anymore. It was molten lava now, heating her from her core.
She remembered so clearly feeling this way every time he brushed past her in the halls of the family estate. Every time she caught sight of him at the pool—his lean, muscular body so fascinating to the girl she’d been.
Only once had they ever come so close to each other. Only one other time had she ever thought he might feel the same forbidden desire that she’d felt from the moment she’d set eyes on him.
Apollo is going to be your new stepbrother.
Everything in her had rebelled at that, immediately. Because she had seen him and wanted him in a way she knew would be wrong once their parents were married. So she had distanced him. She had been...well, sometimes she’d been terrible. But it had been for her own survival.
It was even worse now. He was still her stepbrother. But now, any affection she’d ever felt for him had been twisted by his betrayal. She should have stopped obsessing about him a long time ago.
But she hadn’t. She couldn’t. She was a slave to this, to him. Always.
She hated it. She hated him.
And she had spent nine years resisting him. Embracing the anger, the annoyance and everything else she could possibly use as a barrier between her desire for him and her actions.
Giving in would be a failure. In terms of her self-control. In terms of her relationship with her father. What would he think if he knew she wanted Apollo? What sort of scandal would erupt if the media knew she was helplessly attracted to her stepbrother?
So she had denied it. Pushed it down deep. But she had been aware of it every time she saw him. Every glance. Every accidental brush of his hand against hers. Every time she went to bed at night, hot and aching for something she knew only he could give her.
But he had bought out her father’s company. He was gunning for Matte. Her father had installed her as CEO to keep some connection to the company—just as Apollo had said. And she’d failed spectacularly.
She could feel everything slipping out of her grasp. The company. Her control. Everything.
And she’d never tasted him. Never had him. This man who was destroying her whole life. Who commanded her fantasies and called out the deepest, darkest desire from deep inside of her.
For what? For appearances. To triumph.
There would be no triumph here. She was losing. Utterly. Epically.
Why not have this? Why not have him?
It was all going to burn to the ground. She might as well go up in flames with it.
She could see his pulse throbbing at the base of his throat. If only she had a pen in her hand. It would be so easy from this position to stab him clean through with it. But she didn’t.
So instead, she reached up and grabbed hold of the knot in his tie, and wrenched it free.
APOLLO SAVAS DIDN’T entertain daydreams. He was a man of practicality and action. When he wanted something, he didn’t sit around fantasizing about it, he took it.
That was the only reason he knew that it was no hallucination that Elle St. James, his stepsister and mortal enemy, was currently stripping his clothes off, her eyes bright, glittering with rage and desire.
He had resisted her, this, for years. Resisted her. Out of deference to the man he considered a father. Out of respect for all he’d been given.
But all of it had proven to be false, had proven to be a lie. And still he had roped Elle off. Had kept her separate—in many ways—from his plans for revenge.
And David St. James had known he would. Because whether she knew it or not, he had always protected Elle. She had always mattered.
But things had changed. And now she was tugging at his tie. And he was tired of restraint.
He reached out and wrapped his fingers around her wrist, holding her hands still. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, his voice a growl.
She looked up at him, her green eyes round, those soft, sassy pink lips shaped into a perfect O. “I...” Color flooded her face.
“If you were thinking you were going to take my shirt off, either stop now and walk out that door, or keep going and understand that I will have you flat on your back and screaming my name in a very different way before you can protest.”
Her color deepened, her eyes growing even wider. He thought she would run. Because Elle was a good girl, by the standards of her father. Though, she was stone-cold, aloof and fancied herself far above him.
It had made him want to destroy that facade from the first. He hadn’t. Because he knew that she was innocent. Knew that she was nothing more than a cosseted rich girl who would be completely out of her depth with a man like him. A man who had grown up on the streets in Athens, who had learned the hard truths about life early on. About loss. About the true nature of people.
He had known that if he ever touched her it would violate the trust he had built with her father.
But if she was going to touch him now, if she was going to remove that barrier that had always loomed between them, then he wasn’t going to put a stop to it.
Apollo Savas was a man who took what he wanted.