Page 30 of The Recluse’s Obsession

“What did he do, Jared?” she prompts softly.

“A gross fucking error of judgment, that’s what he did.”

That soft hand finds my jaw again. “Please,” she urges.

I shouldn’t do this…shouldn’t let her in. But my princess hasn’t got a single manipulative bone in her body. And if she cares for me…

But for one minute three days ago, you consideredbuyingher from her father.

What strain of asshole does that make you?

I suck in a breath, push that thought away. “Everyone I let in has let me down. It’s happened far too many times to believe that people change.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t share that belief but…go on. What did he do to you?”

I can’t look into her face when I expose my past gullibility and vulnerabilities, so I slide off her and reverse our positions.

“I was always good with numbers even as a kid. The kid who could solve a Rubik’s Cube in forty-one seconds. I started a company with a couple of friends when I was a freshman in college. Even without much experience, I knew it was a sound business venture. We were pretty wealthy but my friends’ folks weren’t. They begged and borrowed to invest in the business. My father wanted me to concentrate on my education, so he offered to manage it for me.” My jaw throbs with the pressure of my gritted teeth. “He took unnecessary risks and ran it into the ground within eighteen months. My friends’ folks lost all their money. Dad didn’t care. Said they knew the risks and absolved himself of all blame.”

“But you didn’t.”

I shake my head. “It wasn’t right. I needed to make things right, so I started another company. That did pretty well too.”

“And let me guess, your dad wanted in on that too?”

I nod. “I was a lot more…forgiving back then. Mom left him and remarried after his own business had hit the skids. I felt sorry for him, so I made him a board member of my new company. I also brought in a couple of my college friends’ dads on the board, hoping it’d go some way to making up for the first business going bust.”

“Did it?”

I laugh, and even in the dark I hear the bitterness drenching it. “What do you think, princess?”

“I think you knocked it out of the park a second time,” she replies, her faith in me jerking the breath from my lungs.Christ, this sweet girl.

I tilt her face up and drop a wet kiss on her, just so her sweet taste can wash away some of the acid churning in my gut.

I revel in the way she squirms against me when I lift my head. “Hmm. We broke some serious records in the first two years.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened was my dad tried to take it from me. He got together with the other guys I’d brought in and voted me off the board.” I stop and take a few breaths, because the memory still has too much power over me. “When I tried to fight it, they contrived to have me committed.”

She jerks against me. “What?”

“I can a little…manic when I’m engrossed in work. They used that to say I was unstable. I spent three weeks in a psych facility upstate before I managed to convince the doctors that I wasn’t crazy.”

“Oh, my God! I’m so sorry, Jared.”

Her soft sympathy eases some of the fury inside me but I know it’ll never be completely eradicated. “I had to make my father pay.”

She hesitates for a long time before she responds. “W-what happened to him?”

I smile in the dark and I know it’s not a pretty smile. “I said I was good with numbers, didn’t I? It wasn’t difficult to get the IRS to take a deeper look at some of the company’s financial activity Dad was in charge of. He and his cohorts were found guilty of serious fraud. Dad’s serving fifteen years in prison.”

She gasps, then goes silent.

That silence eats at me until I can’t keep quiet anymore. “I couldn’t let it go. You get that, don’t you, princess? No one takes what’s mine without consequence.”

She needs to know the kind of man I am. Needs to know why I guard what’s mine with violent ferocity.

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