Billionaire Unmasked(44)

“What happened?”

“She dumped me when she found out I wasn’t as rich as she thought I was.”

“What?” Hope yelped furiously.

Jason shrugged. “Seriously. She dumped me. I started talking about the problems I was having with my dad’s company after we graduated and she left me for a richer man. I guess I was too risky,” he told Hope with a rueful grin.

Admittedly, it had hurt at the time, but he’d gotten over it fairly quickly. He’d been too damn busy trying to save the company to worry about the relationship. Maybe it had made him cautious and a lot more casual about relationships, but his heart hadn’t been broken.

“Nobody would break up with Jason Sutherland.” Hope snorted with disbelief. “She must have been insane.”

“Am I such a prize, Hope? You’re planning on divorcing me.” He secretly relished her indignation that some woman had actually dumped him years ago.

“We can annul the marriage. We weren’t exactly of sound mind. And this is different. We have an agreement,” she answered hesitantly. “She was really your girlfriend. She had no excuse to hurt you.”

Jason looked at the ring on her finger possessively.

She’s mine. No divorce. No annulment.

Jason’s lips twitched as he tried not to smile at her fiery, irritated expression. She was annoyed for him, pissed off for him. “It was a long time ago.” He snagged her around the waist, needing to hold her in his arms again. He settled her back in his lap. “Besides, if she hadn’t given me my walking papers, I might not be here right now.”

He would be here, and he knew it. Since she was eighteen and he was twenty-three, there had never been anyone else for him except Hope. Maybe he had been biding his time, waiting, but his post-college relationship would have ended anyway. Hope had always been there, in the back of his mind, subconsciously not allowing him to get that serious with anyone else because he could never feel the same way about another woman as he did about Hope. He was exactly where he was supposed to be right now. Finally. He could feel the rightness of it in his gut. The nightmare that Hope had gone through would haunt him forever. His conscience made him wonder whether it might not have happened if he had pursued her before she graduated from college or soon after. No way she would have been running around the world without protection if he had been in her life. And he should have been in her life.

“I don’t like to think of anyone hurting you,” Hope told him softly as she stroked her soft palm over his cheek.

“Now you know how I feel. What happened to you is killing me,” he rasped. “I can’t take it away, make it go away. I wish I could. But you don’t have anything to prove to anyone now. Especially not a dead man.”

“I know.” She tilted her head and looked at him. “I don’t want to be with you for anyone but myself. You’re the first man who’s ever made me feel alive this way.”

Mine.

God help him, but he felt exactly the same way. The problem was, he wasn’t certain how to rein things in with Hope. She made him need. Want. Desperately. So primitively and elementally that he wasn’t sure he could give her what she needed. “This won’t be easy for me,” he admitted huskily. “Sometimes I feel like I’m losing control when I’m with you. And I like to have control in the bedroom. With you, I’m almost crazy with the need to hold you down and make you submit to me. I’m obsessed with wanting you.”

Hope brushed an errant lock of hair from his forehead. “It’s not you. It’s me. My body responds to every part of you, especially the alpha, possessive way you take control of my body. It’s my mind that’s having a problem.”

“Then I’m going to need you to stay with me, body and mind, sweetheart. Don’t slip away.” His eyes roamed over her hungrily. “Respond to me and only to me. See me and only me. Feel me and only me.”

Jason saw the look of longing in her liquid emerald eyes and nearly snapped. His dick throbbed to be buried inside her heat.

She nodded and her arms wrapped around his neck. “I need you.”

It was the first time in his life he’d heard somebody say those words to him when it wasn’t associated with money. Hope wanted him, needed him.

“You have me.” He got to his feet with her in his arms, the most precious thing he’d ever had.

“What are you doing?” she asked curiously.

Jason didn’t break his stride as he carried her to the bedroom. “It’s time for lesson number one, Peaches, before I go completely insane.”