Page 26 of Owned

A shiver swept through me. I hadn’t said stop and I hadn’t let go, because I…couldn’t. A part of me had been desperate to keep touching him, keep pushing him, keep fighting him too. God, throwing what he’d been doing to me back in his face had been…exhilarating. Watching how his eyes had flared and his mouth had hardened, and I’d braced myself, my heart racing with the anticipation of what he might do. But he hadn’t done…anything.

You’re disappointed.

I wasn’t. Him letting me go had been a good thing, a very good thing. Indulging my current physical obsession with him was wrong. Everything about it was wrong, even if he hadn’t been my ex-stepfather. Even if he hadn’t been twenty years older than me and about a thousand times more powerful.

Men were bad news in general and he in particular was the worst news of all, and the best thing now was to pretend that this little interlude had never happened.

After all, you wouldn’t want to end up just like your mother, would you?

I shoved that thought away as the door opened again and a woman came in, breaking the whirling of my frantic brain. As she disappeared into a stall, I pushed myself away from the basin, took yet another deep breath, and looked at myself in the mirror.

I was still flushed and the thought of having to go out and face Atlas again knowing what had happened between us, was almost impossible.

But I wasn’t a coward, so I took a deep breath and pulled myself together, walking out of the bathroom and heading back to Charlotte’s table. And I couldn’t deny the relief that washed through me when I saw that Atlas wasn’t there.

“What happened to Mr Blackwood?” I asked as I sat down.

“He had to leave on some urgent business.” Charlotte gazed at me shrewdly and I hoped like hell that the flush in my cheeks wasn’t as red as I feared it still was. “You need to be careful with him,” she went on. “He’s more dangerous than you think. They all are.”

Having had a taste of just how dangerous Atlas Blackwood was back in that bathroom, I couldn’t disagree. Though I wasn’t going to tell her that.

“Who are ‘they’?” I asked, keeping my tone as disingenuous as I could.

“Mr Blackwood and his friends Mr Cross and Mr Fox.” Charlotte’s green eyes glittered, a strange note in her voice that I couldn’t place.

I’d heard of Cross International and Fox Tech, of course, who hadn’t? But I’d had no idea that Atlas was friends with the CEOs of both of those companies.

I lifted a brow. “Dangerous in what way?”

“Difficult men,” Charlotte said and I had the impression that there was more to the word ‘difficult’, but she didn’t explain. “Atlas in particular, you need to watch,” she went on. “That easy-going charm is just a facade. He’s just like his father, a predator.”

A shiver whispered over my skin, her words mirroring what I’d thought in that bathroom, when the mask had dropped and I’d seen the beast behind his eyes.

“His father?” I echoed, my mouth dry.

“Charles Blackwood. Used to be head of Blackwood Bank before it collapsed. He liked young girls.” The distaste in Charlotte’s voice was obvious. “I don’t think Atlas inherited his proclivities but you never know.”

I picked up my water glass and took a sip, keeping my movements measured and hopefully hiding my shock, and the punch of disappointment that followed it.

That’s all you were to him. Just another young girl…

Good, I told the voice in my head. Because if that was the reason he’d pressed himself against me in the bathroom, then I’d make sure to avoid him completely. He could find himself another young woman to screw. It wasn’t about me. None of it was about me.

“Good thing I won’t be having anything more to do with him then,” I said. “And speaking of, you have my agreement to the marriage and the baby thing, but I want some of the money up front.” I didn’t need it, not with the fifty grand she’d already paid me, but I wanted to show her that I wasn’t a doormat. Maybe it was in reaction to the thing inside me that kept thinking about being Atlas’s slave, but I refused to acknowledge that.

I wasn’t a doormat and I wouldn’t let myself be treated like one, not by anyone.

Charlotte let me haggle over the money for a bit, then she informed me that her lawyers would be drawing up a formal surrogacy agreement as well as one detailing the marriage to Atlas, and that would be sent to me as soon as it was done.

Then, as we were finishing up the dessert, though I’d lost my appetite for food, she said, “Rowan, dear, I know your mother doesn’t want anything to do with me, and she made her views plain before she left. I’m not going to push myself on her, but I would very much like to have a relationship with you. You’re my granddaughter, after all, and I’d like to put the past where it belongs, behind us.”

I stared at her across the table, white hair and green eyes, looking nothing like me at all. And I thought about my mother, fragile and needy, and wondered what this woman had done to her to make her that way. She might have wanted a relationship with me, but did I want a relationship with her?

“I don’t know,” I said bluntly. “I’m going to have to think about it.”

She didn’t seem to find this surprising. “Fair enough. But know that you also have a cousin, about the same age as you. My Juliana’s daughter.”

Juliana. Mom’s sister and my aunt. The one who’d died years before.

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