DEFY (The Billionaire's Rules, Book 8) (2 page)

“People fall in love sometimes,” he said.
 
“It happens.
 
Did you think that I lived in a bubble
before I met you?”

Ivy smirked.
 
“No.
 
But I didn’t know that you had another
‘student’ like me.
 
A
student
that you
disciplined in the same way as me.
 
That you loved.
 
That you
wanted to marry.”

“You’re the one I married,” he said.
 
“Not Jillian.
 
Not anyone else.
 
You.”

“But if she’d lived, it would have been
her,” Ivy said.

Cullen’s hands clenched.
 
“But she didn’t live.
 
She died.
 
So everything worked out for you, didn’t
it?”

Ivy felt sick.
 
“That’s not what I meant and you know
it.”

Ivy shook her head as she thought about
it.
 
How could she ever have
believed that he was falling for her, that he felt something real for her?
 
He’d done this exact same thing
before.
 
He’d gotten involved with a
woman that was forbidden by the nature of his work, and then he’d taken control
of her life.
 

And he’d wanted to marry her, too.
 
Everything was exactly the same.

The only difference was that Ivy wasn’t
sick.
 

At least, not yet.
 

If
I stay with him, I might go insane.
 
Because everything Cullen touches becomes chaotic and destructive and
unsustainable.
 
He can’t let go of
control and so he crushes the life out of anyone who he gets close to.

“Listen to me,” Cullen said, coming
towards her, his voice softening.
 
“I promise you that I’ve left Jillian in the past. I’m here with you,
Ivy, and there’s no one else I’d rather have as my wife.”

“I can’t do this, Cullen.”
 
She looked at the ground, trying to make
sure she was thinking straight.
 
“I just
can’t do this.”

“It’s already done,” he replied.
 
“We’re married.”

She looked up.
 
“We can get a divorce—or an
annulment.
 
We haven’t even been
married forty-eight hours.”

Cullen looked as if she’d slapped
him.
 
“You’re serious.”

“I need to go,” she said.
 
Ivy walked past him and into the
bedroom, where she quickly packed her bag.
 
Her chest felt tight and there was a distinct lump in her throat.

“Ivy,” he said, from the doorway.

She didn’t look up at him—couldn’t
bear to see the pain in his eyes.
 
Ivy knew that he was sad, and she understood that she’d partly caused
his sadness.

But she simply couldn’t go on with this
charade any longer.
 
Cullen was
using her, whether he knew it or not.

And she wouldn’t allow herself to be
used, not even by the man she was falling in love with.

Her bag was packed and she started to
leave.
 
Cullen was standing out in
the living quarters, his hands in his pockets.
 
He looked beautiful, like a Greek god
come to life.
 
It was difficult not
to melt and fall into his strong arms, especially when there was nothing more she
wanted then to pretend she hadn’t discovered the truth.

But she had discovered the truth, and
there was no going back.

Instead, she kept walking.

“You don’t need to leave,” he said
softly.

She slowed for one moment and looked at
him.
 
“We both know that I do,” she
told him.

He nodded at her and spoke softly.
 
“If that’s how you feel, I won’t stand
in your way, Ivy Spellman.”

Something about the way he said her name
in full nearly broke her, and she started moving more quickly, before he could
see the tears coming to her eyes.

She burst out the door of the hotel room
and ran as fast she could, hauling her bags, and then she was crying, and she
didn’t care who saw.

***

Ivy managed to get to the airport and
book a flight home from Vegas fairly easily.
 
She had to wait a few hours, but luckily
they had frequent trips between the two cities.

On the way back, she stared at the two
rings on her finger.
 
In her haste
to leave, she’d forgotten to give them back, and now she found that she didn’t
want to stop wearing them.

Just
a little while longer
,
Ivy told herself
.
 
I can wear these rings, and pretend that
Cullen and I are still a couple, and that we’re in love.

The depth of her own sadness caught her
by surprise.
 
She stared out the
window at the clouds as they flew high over the ground below.
 
In doing so, Ivy recalled the plane ride
with Cullen that had taken place just a short time ago, and a mix of emotions
flooded her.

Was it all so
fake
?
 

Had anything been real?

Maybe some of it was real.
 
But even if he truly cared about her,
the way he kept secrets made it impossible to ever trust him completely.

He’d practically been married to the
woman who’d passed away, and he’d had a similar contract with her, as well as a
similar sexual arrangement.

Ivy couldn’t stomach that idea.

But
why
?
She asked herself.
 
Why
is it so bad that he has sexual proclivities, interests or whatever you want to
call it…
.

You
wouldn’t expect him to only have ever had sex with you.

Why
is it unforgivable that he spanked some other woman?

Ivy didn’t know what made it feel so
wrong.
 
Perhaps, she thought, it was
as simple as not having been told.

And besides, the balance of power was
just wrong.
 
Cullen held all the
cards and he insisted that it could only be that way.
 
He wouldn’t allow anyone else to have
any power in a relationship.

But the more Ivy argued with herself, and
the longer she played with the wedding band and engagement ring, staring at her
finger, not wanting to let go—the more she began to have doubts.

I
hope I didn’t get it wrong
,
she thought.

Please
tell me I didn’t just make the biggest mistake of my life and walk away from a
man who truly loves me.

***

After returning from Las Vegas, Ivy
returned home and slept.
 
She slept
for almost fourteen straight hours.
 
And then she finally got up, put herself together, and prepared to face
her demons once more.

***

It was strange walking back into the
office again for the first time.

No, strange wasn’t quite the right word
for it.
 

Terrifying.
 
Sad.
 
Bizarre.
 
Anxiety provoking.

She’d been back and forth about returning
to work at Biomatrix Pharma, but in the end, she couldn’t justify quitting.

He
can fire me if he likes.
 
But I’m
not going to quit.
 
I need the money
and I haven’t done anything wrong.

So there she was, early in the morning,
sitting at her little cubicle as if nothing had even happened, as if she hadn’t
been whisked away to Las Vegas by the CEO of the company and married in a
super-secret ceremony.

Even now, the rings he’d given her were
buried in her purse in a small plastic bag, and she was planning on returning
them to Cullen Sharpe as soon as she found the opportunity.

There would likely be another very
awkward, distressing conversation to be had.

Of course, she’d expected that maybe he
would have tried to call her or text her—perhaps even send an email.

Cullen hadn’t done any of those things,
and when Ivy got to work and opened her email inbox, she saw no new emails from
him.
 

Her heart sank.
 
 

What
did you expect?
 
You walked out on
him.
 
Why would he contact you?

But somehow, for a reason she couldn’t
put her finger on, Ivy didn’t want to believe that Cullen was already over
their relationship.
 

If he was over it then the entire affair
really had been a sham, and that meant her feelings had all been for nothing.

She shook her head and started working at
her computer, trying desperately to forget all the drama.
 
But every time someone came into the
cube farm, she perked up, thinking it might be him.

After a little while of halfhearted work,
Ivy stood up and stretched.
 
All she
could hear was the steady click-clack of fingers on keyboards and the
occasional murmured conversation between cubicles.

Walking down the aisle, she came to
Lucas’s cubicle, and saw that it was conspicuously empty and cleared of any
signs that he’d ever worked there.

That was a relief, at least.
 
Maybe Lucas and his friends at the
bureau would leave her alone now.

At that moment, Ivy looked up and saw someone
coming into the cube farm.
 
It was
him…it was Cullen.

Her breath caught in her chest and time
seemed to stand still.

Cullen Sharpe was walking into the room.
 
He was wearing a dark suit, as per
usual, but somehow today he looked particularly handsome.
 
His jet-black hair was so elegant,
sweeping across his forehead, and those blue eyes seemed to shine like lasers
as they glanced across the room.

She expected his gaze to land on
her—to lock on her as he always had in the past.

From the first day they’d met, he’d
always honed in on her with that predatory intensity that made her heart skip
beats.

Only for the first time ever, that didn’t
happen.
 
He had to have seen her,
but it was as if she was invisible.
 
His glance simply passed over her, saw through her, and then moved on.

He walked over to one of the other temps
and had a quick exchange that she couldn’t quite make out.
 
His lips twitched into an easy smile,
and then he nodded, chuckled and turned around.

When he turned his back to her, it felt
like a personal rejection that Ivy hadn’t anticipated.

Her stomach clenched, and her chest
ached.
 

Cullen Sharpe didn’t care.
 
It had all been a convenient lie, hadn’t
it?
 
And now he’d moved on,
forgotten she even existed.

They would get an annulment and it would
be as if nothing had ever happened between them.
 
She would be quickly edited out of the
story, and Cullen Sharpe would continue on, rising to
ever
greater
heights, loving new women, disciplining other submissives.

Ivy bit her lower lip and felt her limbs
trembling as she watched him leave the room.
 

In that moment, she lost her carefully
cultivated strength, and against her wishes, she felt her legs begin to carry
her forward.

She was going to talk to him.

She needed to hear his voice, to speak to
him, to know that she still existed in his world.

What
will you talk to him about when you catch up to him?

Her pace slowed temporarily as her
uncertainty grew.
 

And then it hit her.

I’ll
tell him I need to give him back his rings.
 

Confidently, she began walking faster
once more, needing to catch up to him before he disappeared again.

But when she rounded the corner and
spotted him next, her heart sank yet again.

Cullen was outside Emma Marks’s office,
chatting with her.
 
Ivy could tell
from his body language and demeanor that he was extremely relaxed.
 

She heard Emma’s tittering, obnoxious
laughter.
 
And then, to make matters
worse, Emma appeared in her office doorway, and now they were speaking face to
face.