"Did my mum talk you into this?" Aaron asked. He'd been away from the family, and who knew what his mother might have whispered to his wife?
"No, she didn't," Natalia replied, her tone earnest. "I just wanted to know how to use it. You know I've been planning on learning this properly."
Aaron wasn't entirely sure she was telling him the whole truth, but he softened, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Get some rest when you're done."
"I will," she promised.
He leaned down and kissed the top of her head, turning to head upstairs. Yet,
Natalia watched him go, a sudden, heavy pang of longing pulling at her chest. She had expected him to kiss her lips—she could sense the shift in the air, the way he hesitated. As if reading her thoughts, Aaron suddenly paused and turned back. Her heart raced as he walked back toward her, his dark eyes locked onto hers.
Her heart raced as she watched him walk back toward her, every instinct telling her what was coming. Aaron closed the distance, his hand sliding to cup the nape of her neck as he bent down and captured her soft, plum lips.
It was a passionate, breathtaking collision. Aaron reveled in the taste of her mouth and the gentle slide of her tongue, losing himself in the heat of the minute-long kiss. When he finally pulled back to look into her eyes, she was breathless, and a triumphant smile touched his lips because he knew she loved it.
"Don't exhaust yourself. Good night," he murmured.
She smiled up at him, her cheeks flushed with heat and the lingering thrill of his kiss. "Good night."
With a brief nod of acknowledgment, he left. As his footsteps faded upstairs, Natalia stared after him, her mind instantly swarming with thoughts of following him upstairs and dragging him into their bed for sex. No, she told herself, shaking her head to clear the intoxicating fog of her husband's affection. Don't get distracted. She was determined. She would master this computer system efficiently, no matter how long it took tonight.
Upstairs, Aaron's thoughts were equally troubled as he walked down the dimly lit hallway. With Natalia working late on this new computer, was she going to start coming to bed hours after him? The selfish part of him felt intensely frustrated, preemptively mourning the potential loss of their late-night sex. But beneath that frustration was a simmering, protective instinct. Had his mother said something to make Natalia feel inadequate? He respected his mother, yes, but he wouldn't tolerate anyone making his wife uncomfortable in her own home. If his mother was pushing Natalia to the point of exhaustion, he simply wouldn't accept it. Natalia was his family, his priority, and he loved her far too much to let anyone bully her. Shaking the dark thoughts away, he pushed open the heavy oak door to check on their sleeping kids.
Miles away, wrapped in the quiet, impenetrable isolation of immense wealth, Jordin Marson sat comfortably at the head of his sprawling dining table. At twenty-eight, Jordin was a strikingly handsome man. His sharp, flawless features were framed by perfectly neat eyebrows and dark, piercing eyes that missed absolutely nothing. His lips, medium-shaped and set in a perpetual line of arrogant confidence, parted as he took a slow sip of ice water. Jordin was the picture of elite confidence.
His sprawling estate was a towering testament to his status. Beyond the grand dining room lay an endless labyrinth of luxury: vast resting lounges, expansive living rooms, multiple private studies, a two-story library, manicured botanical gardens, and a subterranean parking garage filled with imported cars. His mind wasn't on his wealth or his property. It was entirely fixated on the woman serving him.
Elsa, a beautiful woman in her early twenties, Elsa had finally succumbed to his money, a transaction that deeply satisfied the dark, predatory edge in Jordin's chest. She was naturally pretty, radiating a genuine, raw innocence that made his hunger for her feel entirely insatiable. His house keeper in her forties quietly placed a steaming plate of food before him, leaving the room.
Elsa had ultimately succumbed to his financial offers, a reality Jordin found intensely satisfying as he took a fork from the table. There was a genuine, raw innocence to her that only heightened his hunger.
He knew she was completely inexperienced before he took her—he had known with absolute, undeniable certainty that she was a virgin the moment he tried sleeping with her, feeling how breathtakingly tight and unyielding she had been beneath him and he knew she wasn't a sluty woman.
A dark, knowing smirk touched Jordin's lips. He loved the contradiction in her. She was sleeping with him purely for the money he provided, yet she couldn't fake the raw, involuntary way her body responded to him. He vividly remembered the morning after, coming out of the bathroom to find her on the bed covering her face with her hands, trembling with guilt, shame, and acute embarrassment. She felt like a sinner, and it drove him wild.
He wanted to consume her completely, to break down every remaining wall of her hesitant resistance until she was addicted to the raw hunger of his touch. Even now, during their deepest intimacy, he could see it in her wide brown eyes—a silent, desperate internal plea telling herself she shouldn't be doing this, right before she would subconsciously squeeze her eyes shut, utterly overwhelmed by the memory of his body moving inside her. She didn't want the sex to stop, even when her conscience screamed at her to pull away. And the fact that she was doing it for the money only sweetened the control he held over her.
Knowing she felt guilty only made him want to consume her more, ensuring she remained hopelessly addicted to the very thing she thought she shouldn't want.
It excited him to his core, knowing he could make her crave a man she felt she shouldn't desire.
As he finished his meal with a single fork, his thoughts shifted effortlessly to his empire.
Failure simply did not exist in Jordin Marson's vocabulary, absolute, flawless success was his baseline. Having inherited his father's immense empire years ago, Jordin wasn't just another businessman pushing paper—he was the brilliant second architect, carrying his family's legacy to unprecedented heights. As the visionary CEO and Founder of Marson Nexus, he owned the colossal peer-to-peer network that moved billions of dollars in creator campaigns every single year, monopolizing the global digital market with ruthless precision.
He never missed a beat, never suffered a market dip, and never lost control. While others scrambled to keep up with the digital age, Jordin didn't just chase trends—he built the invincible, multi-billion-dollar engine that dictated them to the entire world.