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I didn’t want to spend this time talking about Ashleigh. “You certainly seem to think it of me.”
He leaned in a little closer. If I didn’t know better I’d think he was intending to kiss me, but I realised he was aiming for a much closer connection. He was studying me… trying to work out if he could trust me?
Finally he sighed, and he slung an arm around my waist that made me flinch—but then he just started to stroll me around his room, which was actually big enough that you could get some decent exercise in. “I’m going to tell you a story, Aileen, because you seem to have this cute way of not really understanding your own power. I’m going to tell you a story of Jennifer Ehrlich.”
“Matt’s mother?”
Axel turned his face away and tried to make it look casual, but he couldn’t hide his shudder. “Jennifer Ehrlich,” he continued, “once Jennifer Bennett, before that Jennifer Eastley.”
“Your…” I couldn’t say it, but he turned to me, tucked under his arm, and squeezed me tighter as he nodded.
“You’ve never met her, but everyone who does agrees she’s got the real trifecta: beauty, brains, balls.”
“So you take after her,” I said before thinking really hard about the implications. He broke away from me to look me up and down again, but he didn’t look entirely pleased.
“Stop sidetracking the story. She was more like you.”
“Because we’re both women? And you were doing such a good job until now of not being that kind of guy.”
His fingertip brushed across my lips silenced me. “It’s only funny when you go in on someone else. The comparison is fair. She was sharp, sharper than me, although I guess I was a lot younger when she was still around. My dad probably married her mostly because she was hot and she made him feel good about himself, but she got in on the business side of his life. They became partners.”
I was at least smart enough to see where this was going, and I didn’t want it to go there for some reason. “I’m guessing it wasn’t the most successful partnership ever, based on how defensive you are with me.”
“She got deep into a project Dad was working on that was supposed to be our big money-maker. Going to secure our future and all that. And then… she just walked. Straight into the arms of Matt’s fucking father, and then the two of them picked up where Dad had left off and made bucketloads. We had to fight her just to give us enough to get started again. At least Matt and his mother got their money without having to argue.”
At some point, I had decided I wasn’t going to let myself get caught up in relating to Axel’s situation. I wasn’t going to be able to keep that commitment to myself. “I’m really sorry, that’s just a terrible thing for anyone to do to their family.” My mind was racing through all the pieces I could now put into place. This had to be why Axel was so rough on Matt these days. Like he’d said before, Matt never did anything… but he’d benefited from that big project long before Axel. That was bound to be hard to forget.
And—I’d always assumed this dumb conflict over Dad’s patent was just about the patent. Everyone always acted like it was too absurd to be really about that and I’d figured they must just be under-informed about just how deranged Axel could get… but maybe it had really been about me all along. He’d seen a woman rising on the horizon as a threat to his own project, and maybe he couldn’t help trying to neutralise her.
I was back at that thing I’d decided earlier I didn’t want to tell him, with a different opinion now. “The funny thing is, that stupid patent may have been what ended my parents’ marriage. My mother left my dad before I was old enough to remember, and now that I’ve gotten to talk to her as an adult, I feel like it could have been a bit different if he hadn’t been so engrossed in these things that were essentially useless. Like she really needed help, and my dad couldn’t give it to her so she just snapped.”
I was trying not to visibly grimace, but I didn’t think it would ever be easy to think about what must have been going on at that time in my life. I didn’t really remember what it had been like to be totally in the care of my dad post-split, but it seemed like it must have changed me—and maybe not all in good ways. Dad had said once or twice he didn’t even know where either of us would be right now if not for some of his girlfriends at the time, who I suspected had showered love on his kid in an attempt to win him… until they realised there wasn’t so much of a prize there after all.
Axel’s stare made me a little uneasy. “So you know what it’s like for it all to turn to shit.”
“I don’t remember it all turning to shit, in my case. But I understand how it can happen… to anyone, at any time.”
Now I’d opened my heart just a crack, there was a whole lot more I was understanding. Axel’s house, occupied by just him and his dad, reminded me of how our house always got when Dad was between girlfriends. Clean enough, pleasant enough most of the time… but lacking in certain feminine touches. In her tenure, Marcia had focused on teaching me a few little tricks. Laying down a decorative tablecloth
between meals. Offering guests a beverage instead of simply dragging them off to my room.
Axel scowled at me. I realised I might have been smiling at him more than made sense, in the context of this conversation. “What I don’t get is why you’re so much softer. More open. You’ve never seemed to have any real defence against me.”
When had his hands ended up on me again? “I suppose I don’t,” I admitted, and then I didn’t say something else that was undoubtedly the truth: that he didn’t have any defence against me, either. “It’s not like that with other people, though. For some reason I let down my walls where you were concerned right from the start.”
“For some reason.” His hands were on my hips, but sliding around behind. Definitely an arse complex with this one. “And you have no idea what that reason might be.”
He was supporting my waist from behind as he pressed me backwards, then I felt his hand slip away as I sank into his bed. His mouth came down over the top of mine, his long fingers caressing the back of my neck and making me squirm. He was untying the flimsy strap that was the only thing keeping me decent… and I wanted this. How could I want him when he’d tried so hard to destroy me?
My mind raced ahead. No, I didn’t want everything that might be coming here. I wasn’t ready.
The only thing to do was renegotiate… and if Axel still thought he was getting everything he wanted, even better.
I tried not to get hopelessly distracted by his lips on my cheekbone, the brush of stubble. “Maybe… I think I’ve been a bad girl, Axel, I might need that spanking after all.”
I trailed off into a squeak. He had flipped me onto my stomach so quickly I had to scrabble to get my face into a breathable position. One hand was planted in the middle of my bare back, the other pushing up my skirt like he’d already rehearsed this in his head.
“You like…” I gasped, and squirmed some more, a little unnecessarily, because feeling his hand slip as he yanked down my underwear was a bit of a thrill, “you like to make your punishments count, don’t you?”
