16. Gideon
GIDEON
She started pulling away three days ago.
I notice it in the small things first—the way Cassie stops lingering after meetings, the professional distance she suddenly places between us when no one else is watching, the careful avoidance of my eyes across conference tables.
She still shows up, still performs her duties with the same sharp competence that makes her indispensable, but something has shuttered behind those hazel eyes.
And it’s driving me insane.
I tell myself to let her come to me. I tell myself that pushing will only make her retreat further, that control means patience, that two years burned through suppressing this obsession and another few days shouldn't matter.
But I have never been good at waiting when it comes to her.
Now she stands in my private penthouse suite—the one I claimed on the far end of the resort specifically so we'd have somewhere away from watching eyes—and I can feel her slipping through my fingers like sand.
"You've been avoiding me," I say quietly.
Cassie's shoulders tense where she stands near the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Caribbean Sea stretching dark and endless behind her. She doesn't turn around. "I've been working."
"Don't lie to me."
The words spill out rougher than intended, edged with something raw and undisguised. Cassie finally turns, and the exhaustion on her face makes my chest tighten.
"I'm not trying to lie," she says softly. "I'm trying to protect you."
I cross the room before I realize I've moved, stopping inches from her. Close enough to count her eyelashes. Close enough to feel the heat radiating from her skin. Close enough to notice the slight tremor in her lower lip that she is trying so desperately to hide.
"From what?" I demand.
Cassie's throat moves as she swallows. "Nolan."
The name lands like ice water down my spine. I go very still—the kind of predatory stillness that makes executives stammer and board members reconsider their life choices.
"What did he do?"
"Nolan knows about us. Or suspects. He…" Cassie's voice cracks, and she looks away, dark curls slipping across her cheek.
"He confronted me. Warned me to stop looking into the acquisition files.
Said the board would destroy both of us if I kept digging, and that you'd choose the company over me when it came down to it. "
I see red.
Not the controlled, calculated fury I wield like a weapon in boardrooms. This is something hotter. Something older. Something that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the violent, primal need to destroy anyone who dares threaten what is mine.
"I'll have him removed by morning," I say, already reaching for my phone.
"No."
The word stops me cold. Cassie steps forward, her hand closing around my wrist, and the warmth of her touch sends conflicting signals through my system—soothe and rage tangled together.
"Don't," she says quietly. "Don't do the thing where you try to fix this by intimidating everyone in sight. That's exactly what he wants—you reacting, looking unstable, giving him something to use against you."
"I don't care what he uses against me."
"I do." Cassie's grip tightens. "I care because I've spent two years watching you build something impossible, and I won't be the reason it crumbles."
My eyes stay on her. At the stubborn set of her jaw. At the fear she is trying so hard to mask with determination. At the woman who has somehow become more important to me than any empire I've ever built.
"You think I'd let anyone take you from me?" My voice finds its way out rough, nearly broken. "You think I'd choose any of this—any of them—over you?"
"Gideon—"
"Two years." I grab her waist, pulling her flush against me, and she gasps. "Two years I've been going insane watching you walk through my office, watching you smile at everyone except me, watching you treat me like I was just another problem to manage. Do you have any idea what that did to me?"
"Then stop treating me like I'm made of glass!
" Cassie pushes against my chest, but she doesn't step back.
"You keep trying to protect me by controlling everything—assigning security, cutting me out of meetings, deciding what I can and can't handle.
That's not love, Gideon. That's just another form of ownership. "
The accusation hits exactly where she aims it.
My jaw flexes. "I'm trying to keep you alive."
"I'm trying to keep us alive!" Cassie's voice breaks entirely this time, and I see the tears she's been holding back spill down her cheeks.
"I can't be something you control. I can't be another asset you manage.
If we do this—if we're really going to do this—I need you to trust me. Not protect me. Trust me."
The silence stretches between us, heavy and electric.
And then something shifts in my chest—something I've been holding together with sheer force of will for longer than I care to remember.
The control I've cultivated like armor. The distance I've maintained like doctrine.
The fear I've never admitted to anyone, not even myself, that loving someone means giving them the power to destroy you.
"I don't know how," I admit.
The words escape me barely above a whisper. Raw. Unpolished. Nothing like the billionaire CEO who commands boardrooms and makes grown men weep.
Cassie's expression softens. "How to what?"
"Trust like that." My hands tremble against her waist—actually tremble, and I can't remember the last time my body has betrayed me this way.
"My father trusted the wrong people. Cost our family everything.
I spent fifteen years making sure no one would ever have that power over me again, and then you—" I break off, swallowing hard.
"You walked in with your smile and your arguments and the way you actually see me, and I didn't stand a chance. "
"Gid…"
"I don't know how to love someone correctly.
" The admission scrapes out of me like broken glass.
"I know how to protect. How to provide. How to destroy anyone who threatens what's mine.
But love?" I shake my head slowly. "I'm going to fail at this.
Probably repeatedly. But I'm asking you to let me try anyway. "
Cassie is crying in earnest now, but she is smiling too—that brilliant, disarming smile that has undone me from the very first day.
"That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me," she whispers. "In a deeply unsettling way."
I let out a breath that is almost a laugh. "Is that a yes?"
Instead of answering, Cassie rises onto her toes and kisses me.
Not the desperate, hungry kisses we've shared before—the ones stolen in shadows and driven by months of pent-up frustration.
This is slower. Softer. Her lips move against mine with a tenderness that makes my chest ache, her fingers threading through my hair, her body molding against me like she's finally stopped fighting and chosen to stay.
I groan into her mouth and lift her.
Cassie's legs wrap around my waist automatically, her skirt riding up, and I carry her across the suite toward the massive bed without breaking the kiss.
She tastes like salt from her tears and something sweeter underneath—something that is entirely her, entirely addictive, entirely impossible to live without.
I drop her onto the mattress.
Not gently. Not carefully. The way a man drops something he's spent years craving—with intent, with ownership, with the unspoken promise that I have no intention of letting go.
Cassie bounces against the silk sheets, laughing breathlessly, and the sound nearly undies me completely.
I pull my shirt over my head and watch her watch me.
Her eyes trace down my chest, over my shoulders, lingering on the scars and tension I usually keep hidden beneath armor of bespoke suits.
There is no judgment in her gaze—only want.
Only heat. Only the terrifying vulnerability with the air of someone who already given me her heart and is waiting to see what I'll do with it.
"Your turn," I say roughly.
Cassie's fingers move to the buttons of her blouse, but she is shaking too hard to manage them.
I crawl onto the bed, bat her hands away, and undress her myself—slowly, deliberately, savoring every inch of warm brown skin revealed.
Her bra follows. Then her skirt. Then the delicate lace underwear that makes something primal flicker behind my ribs.
"You're stunning," I say, because it was true and because she deserves to hear it and because I've spent two years keeping every honest thought locked behind my teeth. "You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and I'm going to spend my remaining existence making sure you know it."
I don't touch her immediately.
I just look.
I let my hands travel slowly over every inch of exposed skin like I'm trying to commit her to memory—her waist, the curve of her hips, the soft rise of her breasts under my palms.
Cassie shivers beneath the attention.
“You have any idea how hard it was sitting across from you in meetings?” I murmur, brushing my mouth over her collarbone. “Pretending I wasn't thinking about this?”
Her breathing turns uneven.
My mouth trails lower, kissing the center of her chest, then lower still. I feel her stomach tighten beneath my lips when I reach the waistband of her underwear.
“Gideon,” she whispers.
I look up at her through my lashes while sliding the lace painfully slowly down her legs.
The sight of her completely wrecks me.
“Beautiful,” I say again, because no other word exists.
Then I spread her thighs and kiss the inside of one knee.
And another.
Taking my time.
Making her squirm.
“Please,” she breathes.
I smirk against her skin. “You were just lecturing me about control five minutes ago.”
“I'm serious.”
“So am I.”
I flatten my hands against her thighs and pull her closer to the edge of the bed.
Cassie pulls me down on top of her.