Chapter Four #2
There were no high-earning jobs for an eighteen-year-old with no formal schooling, so he’d turned to the criminal underworld instead.
He’d managed to get an in with a Russian gang who’d needed someone with hacking skills and no morals.
The work was exciting and, best of all, well-paid, and so he’d taken the job without a second thought.
That had led to more jobs, more excitement, more money.
He hadn’t cared what the job was about. He hadn’t cared that what he was doing was illegal.
All that mattered was earning money so that he could get back to Zoe.
But then the gang had started to feel like family to him.
They’d treated him as if he were one of their own, and that had given him power.
That had given him status. He’d loved the feeling of being the one in control, and he’d pursued it relentlessly.
He forgot about Zoe. He became one of them, dealing out violence when necessary, destroying lives without a single shred of regret, everything good in him consumed by the adrenaline rush of power. He had become a monster.
But then, ten years later, his road-to-Damascus moment happened.
Some contacts in Athens that he’d had search for his father finally sent him their findings, and it had pinged in his inbox one morning after a bender on Niklaus’s yacht.
He’d lain there in bed with a hangover of monstrous proportions, two women sleeping beside him, reading the file on his phone, conscious of how every single forgotten dream he’d had as a little boy, of his father being a hero and coming to rescue him, had never been going to happen.
His father was nothing but a brutal thug who’d ended up in prison after murdering someone in a street fight. That was when Archimedes had sat up and looked around him, at the evidence of his own excess, thought about the last ten years of his life, and he’d realised something.
He was just the same. He might not be in prison, he might have more money than he knew what to do with, but he was the same brutal thug his father was.
Joining the Russians was supposed to have made him rich and powerful. He was supposed to be someone, and yet all he’d become was a monster. And even worse than that, he was in a darker, more violent family than he had been at Banks’s house. Nothing had changed.
Archimedes had left Banks so he could be in control of his own life, and yet here he was, in the darkness again, in control of nothing, a slave to his own appetites and desires.
That couldn’t continue. He wouldn’t allow it.
He wasn’t going to be his father, and he wasn’t going to be another Banks.
He was going to be different, and this time he would control his appetites. They would never again control him.
So he’d left the gang, used his money to start Ares, and this time he stayed on the right side of the law.
Sex had been one of the things he’d indulged in shamelessly in the past, but now he was much more careful when it came to managing his physical desires. He allowed himself a night with a woman once a week, but that woman would never be Zoe, he’d already decided that.
You shouldn’t use sex against her then.
No, he shouldn’t. Given that she’d blushed at the mildest of innuendos, she probably wasn’t as experienced as he was, which made it unfair of him to use those tactics on her.
Strange to think that he actually cared about fairness or otherwise, because normally he didn’t.
Zoe had always been the one with a strong sense of fairness and justice, not him.
In fact, normally, he didn’t care much about anything at all except his company, still less someone else’s feelings.
Then again, she wasn’t merely ‘someone else’. She was Zoe. His foster sister.
The thought made a thread of irritation wrap around him, and he said, without thinking about it, ‘I’m going to have Celeste visit me tonight.’
She frowned. ‘Celeste?’
‘A lover of mine. It is my wedding night, after all, and it’s not a wedding night without sex.’
Zoe blinked as if she didn’t understand what he was saying. ‘You mean you’re going to fly in a lover of yours on our wedding night so you can have sex?’
‘Yes. I didn’t think you’d object.’ He found himself studying her, though what he was looking for he didn’t quite know. ‘Unless you do?’
Her gaze flickered, and she looked back down at the bed again. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Fly in your lover. Hell, fly in three or four, I don’t care.’
Did she, though? Did she care? More to the point, did he?
Normally, he wouldn’t even have mentioned flying a lover in, he would have just done it and if people didn’t like it, they could go to hell.
Yet, far from not caring what she thought, he was irritated still further at her apparent acceptance.
You used to care what she thought.
Yes, but that had been a long time ago, when he’d been a kid. And that kid was gone, crushed in the web of excess and violence that had ensnared him after he’d left Banks.
He’d never be that kid again, and now he’d walked himself into a trap. How extremely annoying. He really had to fly Celeste in now, because if he didn’t, Zoe would no doubt wonder why, and perhaps make connections he didn’t want her to make.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘She’ll probably come in quite late.’
‘That’s fine,’ Zoe said. ‘And, speaking of lovers, I’m assuming you’ll be fine with me shipping in whichever guy I want to sleep with, too.’
A curious emotion went through him then, something strong and angry and quite unfamiliar. He’d never been a possessive man—to be possessive, you had to care about something—but there was no doubting the possessiveness in him now.
It shouldn’t matter if she wanted to ship in a lover. He shouldn’t care. He had no feelings about her either way, except maybe a vague physical attraction and maybe a ghost of that old protectiveness he’d once felt years ago. That was all.
‘Perfectly fine,’ he managed to force out in as casual a tone as he could muster. ‘We could all have dinner together.’
Zoe pulled a face. ‘Absolutely not.’
No, definitely not.
‘Well,’ he said, since if he was spouting this kind of nonsense, then he needed to leave. ‘I will see you down at dinner in an hour.’
Then he left before she could reply.
* * *
Zoe didn’t watch him go. She stared down at the gowns on the bed and struggled to hold onto her temper.
The gall of him. First insisting on her wearing a gown to dinner, and then inviting a lover to bed on their wedding night?
It shouldn’t have made her so furious, especially when their marriage was on paper only, and anyway, what did she care how many lovers he had?
Yet she still found she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. Perhaps it was merely that it was surprisingly tasteless of him to suggest it. It had to be that. It certainly wasn’t because she was jealous, because why would she be? Just as she wasn’t jealous of these gowns lying on the bed.
To be jealous, you had to care and she didn’t care about him, not any more. He could fly in a whole group of women for naked swimming in the pool she’d spotted as they’d landed on the island, she didn’t give a shit.
You do care, come on.
She pulled a face and picked up one of the gowns, the silver one he’d suggested.
It was silver net with a black silk underdress and it was quite pretty, if she was honest about it.
But he’d said he thought it would look lovely on her, and so she couldn’t wear it.
A pity, because it was the most modest of the lot.
She didn’t wear sexy dresses. She didn’t wear dresses, full stop, or sexy clothes of any description.
It was jeans and T-shirts all the way for her.
But he’d insisted on this stupid dressing up rule, and while she could have turned up in her usual gear, part of her didn’t want to.
Mainly because that was what he was likely expecting her to do, she was sure.
Surprising him, perhaps even shocking him, would be far more satisfying.
Well, then. You know what to do, don’t you?
Zoe picked up the black dress. It was slinky and formfitting, but the red was…eye-catching. She picked that one up and surveyed it. It had a slit in the skirt that went almost up to her hip, the tiniest straps she’d ever seen and a deep cowl neck that was as indecent as the thigh slit.
He would definitely not expect her to wear that one, which meant she absolutely had to wear that one.
Nothing to do with the heat in his eyes that you saw up in the plane.
Zoe shoved that thought out of her head. It was dangerous in ways she couldn’t quite pinpoint and she didn’t want to be thinking about it. She wanted to shock him, that was all, and the red dress would definitely shock him.
Carefully, she laid the dress back down onto the bed before having a cursory poke around the room, annoyed to find that she liked it. It really was pretty with the whitewashed walls and the gauzy curtains around the bed.
She didn’t have anything much to unpack, so she went straight into the bathroom for a shower, and was irritated to find that she liked the bathroom, too. The walls were tiled in bright handcrafted tiles and there was a huge stone bath she decided she’d definitely use at some point.
In the meantime, the big walk-in shower sufficed.
Both the temperature and pressure were perfect, and she could have stood under the water all night.
Especially since there were hand-milled goat’s milk soaps in it that smelled absolutely delicious—notes of ambergris, cedar and, if she wasn’t much mistaken, jasmine—and complementary body lotions too.