Prologue
STEFAN
I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of Anja’s heavy breathing, the now-familiar distressed moans escaping from her lips. Another nightmare.
“Anja,” I whispered, reaching for her shoulder. I tucked her lithe, naked body into mine, curling around her protectively from behind.
She gasped for air and turned to face me in the bed. I could see her fearful expression in the glow of the streetlight coming from outside, her eyelids fluttering rapidly as she glanced around my room and struggled to get her bearings.
“Shh. It’s me,” I said.
Her hands reached up to frame the strong lines of my jaw. “Stefan.” Her exotic Romanian accent never failed to send a shock of lust through me, even at times like this.
“You’re safe,” I soothed her, kissing each palm. “You’re with me. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
“I know,” she said, but I could still feel her heart pounding as her chest pressed against mine.
I had no idea what the nightmares were about; Anja refused to give me any details.
She said there were certain things about her history that I was better off not knowing.
I respected this need for privacy, but I also fucking hated it.
Whoever had hurt her, I’d give anything to hunt them down.
To make sure nobody else ever touched my girl again.
But now she was climbing on top of me, her lips hungrily seeking mine.
That long black hair falling like a sheet of silk against my chest, my fingers instinctively reaching for the soft curves of her breasts.
We’d fucked for hours earlier, before falling exhausted into bed, but our bodies were like magnets and I was hard and ready for another round as she straddled me.
“You sure you want to go again?” I teased, nudging my cock against her. “Pretty sure if I make you scream as loud as you did earlier, you’re not gonna have a voice tomorrow.”
“Who needs one?” She leaned back, spreading her thighs, and looked down at me with a smirk. “I don’t have the kind of job where it pays to have a voice.”
Despite her smile, the words had an edge that sent a chill through me. I pulled her mouth down onto mine, wishing my lips could make her pain go away. As we kissed I rolled us over, pinning her to the bed. She reached for my cock.
“Wait. We need to talk first,” I said. My adrenaline was pumping at the thought of telling her my plan, but it was now or never.
She pouted. “Talk is boring.”
I laughed. “I hope what I have to say won’t bore you.”
I’d met Anja Borjan in the fall, at a fashion show in Paris where the models had been painted in gold leaf.
Even still, Anja had glowed like no one else on that runway.
Her eyes, the bluish-green color of an ocean during a storm, had locked onto mine as she’d pouted her sultry way down the catwalk.
I knew in that moment: I had to have her.
I soon found out she was one of the up-and-coming new talents recruited by my father for his agency, KZ Modeling, and had quickly become a favorite among his clients. All of his clients.
But as the son of KZM’s owner, I was used to getting what I wanted.
Within a week she had been in my bed, and in the months since, she’d barely gone more than a few nights at a time without returning—even if she sometimes texted me after 2 am so I could sneak down to the lobby of our luxury apartment building and let her in.
And to my surprise, I’d become addicted to her.
I hadn’t grown tired of Anja as I had with other women.
And I didn’t think I ever would. Something about her anchored me, made me see a future where we were happy together.
It didn’t matter that I was seventeen and she was in her twenties, or that her career was on fire and mine hadn’t even begun yet, or that she was so much more worldly than I was (despite my money and my travels and my experiences with women). We just…fit.
My mother had died when I was six, and my father was a lifelong workaholic.
Anja had immediately nodded with understanding when I told her how I’d had to grow up fast. My younger siblings and I had been brought up by a series of nannies but they’d always seemed to take little interest in me, probably because I was such a strong-willed, independent child. In many ways, I’d raised myself.
I’d been sleeping with the models from KZM since I was thirteen.
As far as I was concerned, it was the best way to gain maturity and life experience, to learn about pleasure and beauty.
The talent my father employed were experts in both, and I made it a point to seek out their expertise.
Especially in the bedroom. Anyone who didn’t return my interest, though few and far between, was politely passed over in favor of someone who was more attracted to what I had to offer.
With my father so focused on running the business, there was no one around to dissuade my particular form of sexual education. It had always been fun. And easy.
But everything had changed with Anja. I’d found myself opening up to her. I trusted her.
What we had going on, though—it wasn’t enough for me anymore. The sneaking around, the incognito coffee dates on the other side of town, these little sexual interludes in between the various jobs she was sent on. I wanted more of her. I wanted all of her.
I was in love and I was going to marry her.
I’d even picked out a ring and everything.
Right now it was burning a hole in my bedside table—it was set with a huge, heart-shaped diamond that would sparkle on her finger.
I was ready to make her mine, to take our relationship out of the shadows and into the light.
I wanted to stop hiding and make things official. She loved me too. I was certain.
She’d said the words, yes, but it was more than that.
I could tell how she felt by the way she looked at me, the way she melted into my arms, the way she kissed me…
the way she relaxed at the sound of my voice whenever she woke from her nightmares.
She wanted this, too. Something permanent. Something safe. Something…real.
I cleared my throat, checked my nerves, and looked down into those stormy eyes.
“I’ll be graduating from high school soon,” I began, my tone serious.
Anja’s hand froze mid-grope. “I know this…”
I nodded, unable to read her neutral expression. “So. So I’ve been thinking that…that the timing is right, now, for us to start thinking about the future. What’s ahead of us—”
“You are saying you are ready to move on from this?” She was frowning now.
I couldn’t help myself; I laughed. “No! God, no. Anja, I—I love you.” I stroked her cheek, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“And I love you,” she said. She wrapped her legs around me and propped herself up on her elbows to drop kisses down my throat, along my collarbone, moving toward my chest. My cock jumped against her thigh eagerly, but I gently pushed her away. I needed to focus.
“Anja,” I said.
She looked up at me, her angelic face wearing a frown of confusion.
“You don’t want to—?” she gestured to my cock.
I did. I really did, but I took her hand in mine instead.
“I love you,” I said again, slowly, “and I want to marry you.”
Her eyes widened in shock. We’d spoken about it before, in passing—I had made my intentions clear—but for some reason this was still a surprise to her.
“But—what is wrong with what we have?” she asked. “Are you not happy?”
“I am happy,” I said. “What we have is amazing. But…I want more. Don’t you?”
“Stefan.” She laughed softly. “You can’t be serious.”
I looked into her eyes. “I am. I want to be with you. I want to marry you.”
She gently pushed me aside and wriggled out from beneath me. Before I fully realized what was happening, she was getting out of bed, pulling on her clothes.
I leapt to my feet, stopping her with a hand on her shoulder. She stilled but didn’t turn toward me. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” I asked. “I can take care of you. You wouldn’t even have to keep modeling if you didn’t want to, or you could stay focused on your career as long as you want. Either way, we’d get on a good path—together. Build a life of our own.”
Anja finally looked back at me. “You are a wonderful boy. But you know we cannot.”
That word, “boy,” stung. But I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “This can work. My trust fund has enough money to live off of for years, and once I have my MBA I can provide for us even better. If you don’t want to come with me to U Penn, maybe we can—”
“Your father would never allow me to stop working for him,” she cut me off.
I was confused. “You don’t have to stop. You can keep modeling.”
Her shoulders slumped under my touch. “I am not referring to the modeling,” she said.
Of course.
I knew that my father employed his models for more than just print work and runway shows, that some of the clients who came to him expected the women to work in the bedroom as well.
I’d always known this. As someone who was naturally curious and expected to take over KZM when I was older, I’d made it my business from a young age to learn everything about how the agency operated.
And I did. I knew where to recruit models, how to woo them, what their contracts looked like, how to entice new clients into the fold and keep the established ones.
I had no illusions; I knew exactly how our company was run.
Including all the things my father kept out of the press.
The sex work was just another part of the business.
A part that we never discussed, that was kept secret from most of the world, but a part of KZ Modeling nonetheless.
I never judged the models that supplemented their income this way. After all, I had been the grateful recipient of many of the tricks and treats they had doled out while earning additional money. They could live their lives as they saw fit.