"Stop." His voice is low and controlled and furious underneath both. "Whatever you're doing in there the books, the reading, the tucking in — stop."

"They asked me to read to them," I say evenly.

"I don't care what they asked." He takes a step toward me and I hold my ground, which seems to make it worse. "You've been here for just less than two weeks, and you're already in Dorian's room, touching his things, letting them climb all over you like you're" He stops, jaw tight. "You're not their mother. You're on a twelve-month contract."

"I'm aware of what I am," I say.

"Are you?" Something sharp enters his expression. "Because from where I'm standing it looks like a woman playing a very long game. Soften up the children, charm the staff, make yourself indispensable — and then what? You think I don't see it?"

Something cold moves through my chest, but I keep my face neutral. "You think I'm doing this to get to you."

"Aren't you?" He says it like it's obvious, like I'm naive for pretending otherwise, and the contempt in it is so clean and practiced that for one second I almost believe I deserve it. "You should wake up from that delusion. Whatever you think you're building here — it won't work, you will never have me."

He moves before I register it, closing the distance between us in one smooth step, and then his hand is at my neck, warm and deliberate, his thumb pressing lightly against my pulse like he's checking whether I'm afraid, and the answer my body gives him is humiliating.

His mouth drops to the curve of my neck and shoulder, not rough — slow, purposeful, his lips dragging against my skin like he has all the time in the world and knows exactly what he's doing with it, and I shudder despite everything I know about this man and this moment and exactly what he's trying to prove.

"This," he murmurs against my skin, his voice low and terrible and close, "is all you'll ever get from me."

*********
Sloane Carter had her work stolen, her body broken, and her heart shattered in pieces.  

Then a truck ran her off the road on a rainy night, and she woke up inside the worst romance novel she had ever read.

Wrong century, wrong country. Wrong body. Twelve-month contract marriage to a man carved from ice, three feral six-year-olds, and a dead man's secret buried so deep the whole empire is rotting from the root.

In the novel, the heroine smiles gently, loves quietly, and dies before anyone notices she was worth saving.

Sloane has bruised ribs, a stolen career, years of swallowed rage and absolutely no intention of following the original script.

The cold CEO didn't bargain for a woman who'd already survived the worst he could ever be. Neither did the man who put her in that car.

He thought killing Sloane Carter would silence her. He had no idea it would set her free.

"You are destroying everything I have built to keep this family stable," I tell her, the words raw in the quiet hallway. "You are playing with legal filings, you are running around the city in nothing, and you don't care about the consequences."


"I care about my own freedom," she says.


She steps past me carefully this time. I won't try to push her back again. I just stand there, defeated and exhausted on the stairs, watching her walk up into the dark.


The green dress clings to her as she moves up the stairs, the fabric shifting over her hips with every step. My chest feels tight, the anger burning hot and direct under my ribs. I am losing my mind. She is pulling at me, snapping the tight control I have spent years building, and I am close to exploding.


She didn't freeze, didn't apologize. When I demanded to know where she was coming from, she looked me dead in the eye and told me she was at a club. 


Chapter 33 - Chapter 33: What He Does With It