that. He preferred the street to that. Starvation and cold and everything else that came with it.
He had run from that life. From all that it represented. He would not become a part of it.
He followed them into the house and as soon as they rounded the first corner, he separated from them and headed up the stairs. No one stopped him. Because he looked like he belonged. A right he’d earned, if only recently.
This was his world now. He was no longer someone who could be stepped on by the rich and powerful.
He was the rich and powerful. He went where he liked, he did what he liked.
“I have something to give the bride,” he said to a passing servant. “Where might I find her?”
“Miss Rachel is in her suite. Down the hall and just to your left,” the woman answered without blinking.
Because he looked the part. He spoke with confidence. And as a result, no one questioned whether or not he belonged.
He nodded once and continued on down where the woman had indicated.
He hadn’t been going to come. But he was glad he had.
* * *
She’d never prayed so hard for her period to come in all her life. She’d never prayed for it to come. She’d taken it for granted. The cramps, the teariness. It had started when she was fifteen and it had gone on, regularly, for all the time since. Just a little signifier that it was the middle of the month. Nothing more.
Well, not right now.
Now the absence of it was about to send her into a panic attack. She’d been walking around her bedroom in her bra and panties for the past twenty minutes, a tampon on the nightstand, right next to an unopened pregnancy test.
Neither had been used at this point. One month since her night with Alex. One month of alternating between cursing his name and lying in a dark room just staring at the ceiling, unable to cry because tears were a release she wouldn’t allow herself. A rush of emotion, too uncontrolled for the likes of her.
And then her period hadn’t come. Even after it had passed fashionably late, she’d still been praying the floodgates might open and forth would come the crimson tide, and that the pregnancy test could remain unopened. But no such luck.
Tampon or test. She was going to be opening one of them in the next few minutes.
And it was rapidly becoming clear which.
She was already six days late. This little song and dance between her and those two items had been going on since the first morning.
She finally reached down and grabbed the pregnancy test.
And suddenly the world just sort of tipped to the side and she saw herself clearly, standing there, almost ready to marry another man while she was potentially pregnant with Alex’s baby.
And she knew there was no way she could get married today.
Her hands started shaking, her throat going dry. Oh...Jax, please forgive me.
So now she was just going to have to...tell him. Right before the wedding. But there was something she had to do first.
“Okay,” she said to the little white-and-pink box. “Let’s do this.”
Her bedroom door swung open and she whirled around, clutching the box to her breasts in an instinctive attempt at modesty. Until she realized she was advertising that she was holding a pregnancy test and whipped it behind her back, her thigh crossing over the front of her other thigh in an attempt to hide that she was in very brief panties.
Then she froze, because she realized who her intruder was. For almost a full second, she was frozen, caught by those arresting blue eyes. Again.
It was almost like all that thinking about him had just...conjured him here. But at the worst possible moment.
His hair was shorter. His body wrapped in a custom-made suit and not in those thin, faded work clothes she’d first seen him in.
How strange to think it was the other Alex that had been a disguise, while this was the real him. It hardly seemed possible.
Then suddenly, she was hit by the bright, clear smack of reality. She hated Alex. Hated him. It was her wedding day. He was here. And she was afraid she was pregnant with his baby.
“What the ever-loving hell are you doing here?” she asked.
He seemed frozen. As she’d been only a moment before.
“At least close the door,” she said, realizing that anyone who walked by was going to see her standing there in her undies.
He obeyed, stepping into the room.
“I am naked,” she hissed.
“You’re not.”
“Close enough.”
“Not anywhere near close enough.” He was looking at her. Intently. As though he was trying to gauge the opaqueness of her underwear.
“Stop that! And what are you doing here?”
“I am here for your wedding, agape.”
“Weird. I don’t think Ajax penciled his mortal enemy onto our guest list,” she said, her fingers curling tightly around the pregnancy test still hidden behind her back.
She was trapped. Standing there in lacy bridal undies, unable to do anything for fear he’d see the test.
“He might have. Did you look to see if I was listed under Enemy or Mortal?”
“I was looking in the A’s for As—”
“I won’t let you marry him,” he said, his voice turning into a feral growl.
“What?”
“You don’t know what he is.”
She lifted one shoulder, the casual gesture at odds with her internal panic. With the fact that when he’d burst through that door he’d blown through her carefully cultivated, calm façade, yet again. “I’ve known the man for more than fifteen years. I think I know who he is.”
“You’ve never even slept with him.”
“I’m gonna,” she said, edging away from him toward the bathroom, “tonight.”
He strode toward her, blue eyes like chips of ice. He put his arm around her waist and hauled her up against his chest. “You will not.”
“Yes, I will,” she said, words pouring out of her now, with no thought of control or decorum or any of the other stuff she was usually so attached to. She was lying, because before Alex had come in, she’d decided she couldn’t do it. But she wanted to...hurt him if it was possible. To cause him some kind of discomfort because he sure had caused enough for her. “I’m going to have sex with him—” a shiver of displeasure coursed through her at the thought “—tonight. I’m going to let him inside of me. I’m going to do all the dirty naked things with him that I did with you!”
And then he leaned down and kissed her. As if he had every right to do it. As if she didn’t have a wedding scheduled to happen in just four hours. As if she hadn’t told him that she hated him and never wanted to see him again.
As if there was no reality. No Ajax. No vengeance gone wrong. No angry words. As if there was nothing more than passion. Fire and heat. She wrapped an arm around his neck, the other still behind her back, and parted her lips, let him slide his tongue against hers.
She kissed him back because for some reason, when Alex touched her, she couldn’t think.
Because suddenly a month since the time they’d been apart didn’t matter. And neither did anything else. Nothing but the kiss. The heat that flooded her body, her mind, her soul.
She wrapped her other arm around his neck and hit him in the