Chapter 5

"We survived the board but I will sleep on the cold hardwood floor before I let you touch me again Gideon," Maren declared the moment the heavy mahogany door clicked shut behind them. The oppressive weight of the public performance vanished leaving a suffocating tension in the massive master bedroom. She clutched the sleeping infant tighter against her chest while backing away from the towering billionaire.

Gideon stood near the entrance and unbuttoned his suit jacket with a deliberate grace that made her breath catch in her throat. He felt the residual heat of their forced embrace still burning into his skin but he masked his biological reaction behind a wall of pure ice. "You flatter yourself if you think I brought you here to satisfy my physical desires Maren," Gideon replied with a dark mocking tone.

Maren watched him discard his jacket and felt a spike of genuine panic pierce her exhausted mind. She refused to submit to his arrogant commands after surviving a day of absolute psychological terror in the family court. "I agreed to be your legal wife on paper to save my nephew but I never agreed to surrender my personal autonomy to a tyrant," Maren countered with fierce desperation.

Gideon walked past her trembling form and approached the massive king size bed dominating the center of the opulent room. "We will share this mattress because the household staff is on the payroll of the estate executors and they will check the sheets every morning," Gideon stated while stripping his tie away. "I built this empire from the ground up and I will not lose my inheritance because you are afraid of sharing a blanket."

He paused and let his piercing gray eyes lock onto her defiant face with an intensity that could melt solid steel. He recognized the profound trauma hiding behind her brave facade and felt an unexpected urge to shield her from further harm. Gideon despised feeling protective over a woman he viewed as a corporate asset but his instincts were overriding his logic.

"I am not afraid of you Gideon," Maren lied while her trembling hands betrayed the brave words she spoke into the silence. "I am just smart enough to know that billionaires like you consume people and spit them out when the contract expires. You want me to play the devoted wife for the cameras but in this room we are nothing more than enemies with a mutual goal."

Gideon felt a muscle feather in his jaw as he absorbed her blunt assessment of their twisted dynamic. He turned toward the bed and began pulling the plush decorative pillows from the expensive silk sheets with aggressive force. "You demand boundaries so I will give you an impenetrable fortress Maren," Gideon mocked while stacking the heavy cushions.

He arranged the pillows in a rigid line down the exact center of the mattress to divide the space in perfect halves. "Stay on your side of the barrier and I will stay on mine until the inheritance clears the final audit next month. If you cross this line during the night I will assume you changed your mind about our arrangement."

Maren stared at the absurd pillow wall and felt a bizarre mixture of profound relief and bubbling anger twist her stomach. She knew he was mocking her fragile sense of control but she was too exhausted to wage another war against him. She placed the sleeping baby into the ornate wooden crib near the window and changed into a pair of plain cotton pajamas.

The silence in the room became absolute as they both climbed into opposite sides of the massive bed and turned off the lamps. Maren laid stiff in the darkness while listening to the slow rhythmic breathing of the dangerous man sleeping just inches away from her. Exhaustion eventually dragged her conscious mind down into a deep and terrifying abyss of shattered memories.

Gideon laid back against the headboard and stared at the dark ceiling while his mind raced with calculated strategies and violent revenge plans. He told himself Maren was nothing more than a convenient pawn required to execute the downfall of the opposition. Yet the lingering scent of her lavender soap invaded his senses and caused a dangerous distraction he could ill afford right now.

He had spent his entire life mastering his emotions to become a ruthless machine in the corporate world. Gideon never allowed anyone to breach his defenses or witness the feral protective instincts he kept buried deep inside his soul. But hearing her soft uneven breathing from the other side of the pillow barrier made his chest tighten with an unfamiliar possessive ache.

Maren curled into a tight ball on the edge of the mattress and pulled the heavy blanket up to her chin. She stared at the faint moonlight spilling across the floor and wondered how her life had devolved into this surreal nightmare. She was sharing a room with a titan who possessed enough power to destroy cities and he was using that power to protect her.

She closed her eyes and let the sheer exhaustion of the brutal day finally overtake her racing thoughts. Maren surrendered to the sleep she desperately needed to survive the coming battles in family court. However the moment her conscious mind faded the repressed horrors of her past clawed their way to the surface.

Flames consumed her dream vision as the twisted metal wreckage of her sister's fatal car crash replayed behind her closed eyelids. She heard Desmond's cruel laughter echoing through the smoke while she screamed a name that nobody could ever answer. Maren thrashed against the silk sheets while absolute terror paralyzed her vocal cords and suffocated her lungs.

She felt the phantom heat of the explosion blistering her skin while she clawed at the wreckage trying to save her sister. The nightmare twisted into a darker reality where Desmond stood over the wreckage holding the infant in his arms with a victorious sneer. Maren sobbed in her sleep as the profound guilt of surviving the tragedy crushed her spirit into dust.

A violent shiver ripped through her spine and jolted her awake in the pitch black room. Maren gasped for air while cold sweat clung to her forehead and her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She reached out in the darkness to find comfort but her fingers brushed against empty space on her side of the bed.

She bolted upright in a blind panic thinking Desmond had somehow breached the secure penthouse to steal the infant away. Her wild gaze scanned the room until she noticed a tall imposing silhouette standing near the window in total silence. Gideon stood positioned over the wooden crib like a lethal guardian carved from solid shadow.

He was not sleeping and he was not looking at the infant resting in the cradle. Gideon had his piercing gray eyes locked onto Maren in the dark watching her tremble with a terrifying unreadable expression. The air in the room thickened with a primal dangerous energy that left Maren completely breathless and trapped under his intense stare.