Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
E ven as her stomach iced over, Jasmine gave Roth a plastic smile to cover the shame that snaked through her belly. “I guess that makes us even.”
His eyes narrowed to slits. “Did Maximus tell you I cheated on you?”
She wasn’t aware that she’d moved, only that she was on her feet, her body reacting to her flight instinct quicker than her mind. She took two strides before Roth grabbed hold of her.
“You wrote in your series that my character, Rex, cheated. Why?”
“Let me go.”
“What the fuck did I just tell you?” he growled as he put his hands on her shoulders. “No more running. We’re laying it all out.”
“Oh, is it confession time? Okay, Roth, why don’t you tell the class what my dad blackmailed you about? Inquiring minds want to know!” she announced with rabid good cheer before she dropped the act. “You demand answers from me but have no intention of answering my questions. I don’t harass you about your secrets. Have I asked you what you do for a living? How you became a billionaire in just over a decade despite my dad’s exhaustive efforts to humble you? How you ‘proved’ yourself to my dad’s associates? Why your mother called you a monster and wanted you institutionalized?”
She met his flinty gaze with fiery defiance. “Why did you really marry me? An alliance with my family can’t be the only reason you arranged the wedding and all this publicity. Nothing with you is that straightforward and simple. There are layers upon layers of ulterior motives. Is there an asset I inherited that you’re after? Someone within my family’s network that you’re targeting?”
His expression didn’t alter during her damning rant. He leaned in, a predator with a one-track mind. “Stop deflecting and answer. I told you in Colorado, I didn’t cheat on you. Why do you think I did?”
His words stabbed dead center in an old, festering wound, but she didn’t flinch. “Want me to list all the reasons?”
His eyes glinted. “Yes.”
“How about the fact we lived apart for two years in separate countries? What man sees his wife four to six times a year, and stays abstinent when he doesn’t even have to sneak around? You obviously didn’t want me dropping by—I had to force you to give me this address to send you a birthday present! You never wore a ring and apparently never bothered to tell anyone you were married, since the concierge thought I was some cheap hooker bothering a client! You even had flowers on the table as if...”
She wrenched herself away from him, unable to take his hands on her. Surprisingly, Roth let her go, but she felt his eyes tracking her as she paced, feverishly running her fingers through her hair, which was now fully dry.
“That’s your proof that I was unfaithful—a floral arrangement, staff not knowing your name, and not visiting you because I was working like a dog in a different country?”
She pivoted smartly to face him. “My suspicions about your fidelity weren’t why I walked away. They just tipped the scales in a direction I was already leaning. But you confirmed my suspicions when you admitted you got a vasectomy.”
“What about it?”
His tone wasn’t defensive, merely curious, as if they were discussing the weather. Fiery worms funneled through Jasmine’s heart like a rotted apple.
“What faithful married man gets a vasectomy?” she jeered. “Aside from the fact you rarely visited, I was on birth control, so you wouldn’t have had to worry on that front. It stands to reason you did it for someone else. Or multiple someones... You could’ve screwed around to your heart’s content without any repercussions, and I’d have been none the wiser.”
“Is that it?”
His dispassionate tone snapped her tenuous hold on her temper. “Fuck you!”
Even as the familiar curse burst out of her, she castigated herself for allowing him to elicit such a strong reaction. Why couldn’t she be a stone-cold bitch during these confrontations? Why couldn’t she laugh about the past? Why did she care about something that happened five years ago? She felt like a train careening down a mountainside with no brakes: there was a curve up ahead, and if she didn’t get herself under control, she was going to derail.
“You say you didn’t leave me for your inheritance, and you didn’t run back to your father for money or security, so why did you?”
She gave him an incredulous look, which he met with grim resolve.
“I need to know why.”
“You already know!”
“I had my suspicions, which you debunked. I’m not fucking guessing anymore. Spell it out for me.”
“So you can judge if my reasons were good enough? I don’t have to justify my actions. You certainly don’t,” she spat.
She paced in a zigzag pattern, too agitated to walk a straight line. She didn’t owe him an explanation, but her mind was already supplying her with all the reasons she’d ended their marriage. And with the opening he gave her, she couldn’t help herself.
“I ignored my father’s warnings about you, but coming here made me realize how little I knew about you and the life you led. I had no idea you’d invested in this building or how prosperous you’d become. You wanted me in Philadelphia, far from the success you’d accumulated. When I trespassed into your territory, you made my position in your life crystal clear. I wasn’t a wife or a partner who was entitled to know what was going on. I was relegated to a plaything, a sex toy you could entertain yourself with when it was convenient for you. ‘I’ll visit when I want you,’” she quoted and tried not to react as her insides shriveled. “I was just a body you visited a couple of times a year. The way you looked at me, like I was the last person you wanted to see, when I’d come all that way...” Her lower back ached as the invisible load on her shoulders grew a little heavier. “It’s not something I’m likely to forget. I’d never seen that side of you—didn’t even know it existed. You were always affectionate, but that night, you couldn’t bring yourself to touch me, much less be near me, even though we hadn’t seen each other in three months.” She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, even as her insides curdled and she felt the cold slap of shame. “I realized when you see me, you see my father. We’re one and the same to you.”
He scowled. “That’s bullshit.”
“Is it? If I were some other man’s daughter, you would have confided in me. Instead, you blamed me for my father’s actions.” She fixed him with a level look. “Just like now. That’s why I’m here, right? To pay for his sins because he made your life hell?”
She saw that hit home when Roth’s hand balled into a fist.
“You’re here because I finish what I start. I was blackmailed into letting you go. You were blackmailed back into the position you deserted without my consent. We’re even. If my only goal was to punish you, I wouldn’t have allowed you to spend time with the Davies and Johnny and Aleixo. We wouldn’t even be talking right now and if you really were a sex object, you’d be on your knees, and I’d be coming down your throat instead of listening to this crap.”
A stifling blanket of silence fell. Jasmine’s skin buzzed as his fingers went to the button of his slacks.
“Don’t.” Her voice shook. “If you don’t see me as a whore, you won’t...”
For a long minute, his hand remained in place. She could see him battling his need to subjugate her and rid himself of his temper in the way he normally did. The veins on the back of his hand rippled as he gripped his zipper. When his hand finally fell to his side, she felt a flash of victory, which vanished when he spoke.
“I never saw you as a whore until I read your books as Thalia Crane.”
She went numb.
“It never crossed my mind you would cheat on me until your father told me you had a replacement. I resigned myself to seeing the announcement in the paper or hearing from a business associate that my wife was now someone else’s. When nothing happened, I assumed Maximus had been yanking my chain. And if he was lying about that, then maybe the other things he said were lies as well.”
Her heartbeat matched that of a ticking clock she wasn’t sure was a figment of her imagination or hidden somewhere in the room.
“With book one being nearly autobiographical, I had to assume what came after was more fact than fiction as well. The reality of what you did was worse than I ever imagined. Did you go home with that biker the same day you filed for divorce, like the character in the book?”
“I considered myself a free woman the moment you left me here to go to your meeting,” she said in a tone that belied the guilt and defiance warring for supremacy within her. “I decided to divorce you before I reached the lobby. Filing was just a formality.”
“Legally, you were still my wife.”
“A technicality.”
“No, a legally binding reality,” he countered. “You thought you had the final say in our marriage?”
“After you broke your promise to me, yes.”
It took him a moment to understand what she was referring to. Jasmine wasn’t surprised when he dismissed her charge with a sweep of his hand. The one condition she’d made him promise to uphold before she agreed to marry him, he broke that night. She could still hear the distant echo of her tearful, earnest voice saying, “I don’t want you to regret this.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“A few careless words canceled out two years of marriage?” he said derisively. “Your family has said and done countless unforgivable things, but you don’t hold it against them. You forgive them again and again and are willing to sacrifice everything to keep that relationship going. Why am I not given the same grace for the one time I?—”
“Because you meant more to me than they ever did!” Her throat ached from the scream that came from the depths of her soul. “You...” She whirled away, hands scrubbing her face as she tried to get a hold of her rioting emotions. “You were everything to me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere, with someone. I would have done anything for you— did do anything for you,” she amended, feeling her knees buckle from the staggering weight of the disillusioned sorrow she still carried. “I was conditioned to accept that kind of treatment from them. I never thought I’d receive the same from you. After being treated like an outsider all my life, someone to be tolerated, I wasn’t going to beg to be respected when I’d done nothing wrong but love you the best way I knew how. And yes, all it took was one time and a few careless words. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to shatter someone’s world.”
She was trembling. This conversation was making her feel as if she were tearing off pieces of her skin, while Roth watched with an unruffled poise that made her want to attack him with a machete. He stood motionless in the middle of the room while she paced like a confined feral cat. He’d initiated this conversation knowing it would rip her to shreds while he looked on, as unaffected as he had been when he got her out of bed. Nothing rocked him. He was playing judge, weighing her explanations as if he weren’t as riddled with sins as she was. He was so calculating, so much like her father... Jasmine wanted to throw in the towel and lock herself in one of the bedrooms, but since Roth was in the habit of finishing things, she’d follow suit and finish this talk once and for all.
“If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit we never had a real marriage. You’re an expert at compartmentalizing and keeping me in one area of your life that doesn’t touch anything else. You held me at arm’s length, never letting me close—never letting me get to the heart of you. You never once said...” She held up her hand to stop that train of thought. It was no use going down that path. “You said I was lonely and vulnerable—the perfect target. I was a chess piece you acquired to fast-track your career. But the pawn finally realized it was just a game and walked off the board. It never occurred to me you’d fight the divorce. The only thing that makes sense is that you didn’t want to prove Dad right, or you were too stubborn to fold on an investment you didn’t get your money’s worth from. Either way, I wasn’t going to put my life on hold until you decided to release me. I had to move forward.”
“Into a life of fucking anyone who looked your way?”
Jasmine didn’t show any outward reaction, though his words whittled down what little self-worth she’d managed to stash to almost nothing. She lifted her chin and met his condemning gaze with quiet dignity. “You don’t get to judge me for the way I chose to cope.”
“Did you do it to punish me?”
She stared at him for a long moment before looking away. “No.”
She’d done it to punish herself for being too stupid to see she was in a one-sided relationship. Realizing she’d given all her firsts to a man who’d used her, she’d tossed herself into the whirlpool of life with reckless abandon. She’d gorged, the knowledge he was doing the same spurring her on. Her conquests had helped her through the grief and the confusion, while simultaneously giving her new material to write about so she didn’t get stuck on the chapter labeled “na?ve wife.” She’d learned to stand on her feet and live without her husband’s support. And she wasn’t going to apologize for it.
“Do your friends know about Thalia Crane?”
The underlying anger warned Jasmine who Roth was referring to. She shot him a cool glance over her shoulder. “You mean Matthew, Lincoln, and the others?” At his curt nod, she turned her back on him and paced toward the crowded bookshelf, wondering if he’d read every title. “No. They’d be horrified.” She paused and then let out a humorless chuckle as she drawled, “Or, if they’re as interested as you suggest, maybe they’ll want me even more once they realize how experienced I am. I wonder if any of them have a fetish for?—”
She received no warning he was on the move. When he whipped her around, she was so startled she would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed hold of her.
“Try to find out the answer to that question, and I’ll break their necks,” he said through clenched teeth.
She slammed her hands against his chest. “You’re the one who brought it up! You keep tossing my past in my face. If you didn’t want a whore for a wife, you should have conned another virgin like you did the first time!” She glared up at him with burning eyes. “You wanted to be my one and only. Well, I made sure I drowned myself in enough men to wipe your taste from?—”
He gripped her cheeks, forcing her mouth wide so she couldn’t speak. She returned his molten gaze with seething resentment.
“I never touched another woman.”
It took a moment for his words to penetrate the red haze. Her brows snapped together. When she tried to make a vehement denial, his grip tightened, causing her teeth to scrape against the delicate inner lining of her cheek.
“Before you, women were a barely tolerable nuisance. You were the first woman I saw as an individual—one with depth and light and facets I wanted to explore.”
She gripped his thick wrists with both hands to coax him to ease his brutal grip, but it tightened instead.
“I didn’t want anyone else. The way I acted when I came to Philadelphia should have told you that. I stayed faithful while we were separated.”
When she let out a low moan of pain, his hand dropped from her cheeks to her throat. He adjusted his grip, so her pulse jackhammered against his palm.
“You aren’t the injured party in this scenario. I endured years of servitude at Maximus’s hand for daring to claim you, and you walked away without a backward glance. You ran to him, begging him to set you free from the person willing to put it all on the line to have you. Baldwin and the others wanted you, but they wouldn’t act on their desires without permission from their families.”
His voice was devoid of emotion, but his eyes belonged to the devil. Unblinking, malevolent. The fact he was able to keep his expression blank while his demons raged sent a chill down Jasmine’s spine.
“I didn’t ask. I took what I wanted. I knew I wasn’t in your league—that I shouldn’t even be breathing the same air as you, much less touching you.” He fit his unforgiving frame to her quivering curves. “I knew you were used to a certain standard of living, things you took for granted being a Hennessy. I vowed I’d build myself an empire to rival your family’s in wealth and influence. And. You. Left. Me.”
“Roth,” she began, but her words were cut off abruptly as his fingers dug into her throat.
“You should thank your lucky stars your father kept you hidden from me. If I’d caught you with another man, I would have killed him, and you...” He watched her dispassionately as she gasped for air. “I’m not sure what I would have done to you. I still don’t know.”
Her hand twisted in his shirt, popping off buttons as he continued to apply steady pressure.
“I worked my ass off to build myself into a man worthy of you, and you let those filthy fucks defile what I worshipped.”
Watery hazel eyes flicked up to his face. The homicidal maniac staring back at her sent a surge of terror through Jasmine that made her claw at the back of his hand. He didn’t seem to register the blood she drew or her frantic fight as he watched with detached interest, eyes completely blank.