Page 35 of Kidnapped By the Boss

“Maybe we should wait at this point and go to celebrate our first year,” she replied. “That’ll be so romantic.”

“Our firstyear?!” I replied wide-eyed. “You want to wait to take our honeymoon for eight more months?”

“The first four have flown by,” she said. “It’ll be here before we know it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You’ve been acting really weird lately, and I thought you wanted to go on our honeymoon as badly as I did, but you’ve been procrastinating. Is something wrong? I feel like you’re finding all of these excuses on purpose. Are you trying to upset me or something?”

She recoiled a bit. “Is that a serious question? You think I’m intentionally delaying our honeymoon to hurt you. It couldn’tpossiblybe that I’m just trying to be responsible about work?”

“I’mthe boss.” I stabbed a finger at myself. “If I say that we don’t need to be worried, then we don’t. It’s not your job to make decisions about this empire, it’s your job to do as I say!”

A look of pain flashed across Katya’s face and I knew that I’d let my bad temper make me say something I didn’t mean. “Kat, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I just… I don’t understand. You got so cold out of nowhere all of a sudden.”

“Cold?” she said. “We have a damn near weekly dom and sub session.”

“I never thoughtI’dbe the one saying this, but it’s not just about that,” I said. “Sometimes I want sex just to be us…making love…” I hated the way I sounded, but it was true. “I don’t just want a sexual partner, I want a wife, that’s why we got married.”

“So I’m a bad wife?” Katya asked, and the anguish in her voice when she said it was heartbreaking.

“No, that’s not…” I took a deep breath in and tried to calm myself down before I got too frustrated that I wouldn’t be able to explain myself clearly. “I just want to make sure that we’re paying as much attention to one another as we’re paying to our son and our business.”

“So this is all because I’m not showing you enough attention?” Katya questioned.

I was speechless. It felt like, no matter what I tried, my words were getting all twisted up. “I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle.”

“If it means that much to you, we can go on our honeymoon,” she said.

I frowned. “Does it not mean that much to you?”

“Honestly, Vincent, it doesn’t. I want to spend time with you, of course, but I think that our son, and protecting our friends and family, and replacing the revenue we lost when all of our one-stop-shops were destroyed takes priority over taking a vacation right now. We’re not nine-to-fivers. We don’t just get to flit off whenever we want; we have responsibilities here. I thought that you understood that.”

“You’re lecturingmeabout the responsibilities ofmyempire?” I said. “Katya, I was doing this long before you got here, and I’ll be doing it long after you’re gone.”

“Gone?” she recoiled. “Where am I going? Should I be packing, or…?”

“I’m done having this conversation,” I threw my hands up. “I’ll talk to you again when you can quit jumping to outrageous conclusions.”

Even though it was pretty late at night, I turned around and stormed out of the bedroom, slamming the door after me. I was only getting angrier, and the more my rage rose, the more likely I was to say something I couldn’t take back. Instead of sticking around to fight more, I left the house entirely and went out to my office. It felt like I was suffering from whiplash for how quickly we’d gone from being a loving husband and wife to… whatever the hell this was. The only thing that had changed was that we’d brought Lyn onto our property.

Was she the cause of this somehow?

I made a sudden turn and went to the containment unit and made my way past the security guard to Lyn’s cell. She was laying on her cot, but wasn’t asleep—not that it would have mattered if she was—so I banged on the cell wall to get her attention.

She looked up and then immediately sat up on the edge of her bed. I opened the pass-through door and said, “Have you spoken to my wife lately?”

Crossing her legs and arms she replied, “She visits from time to time.”

I didn’t know that. “What do you talk about?”

Lyn shrugged. “Nothing in particular. She said she sees a little of herself in me. I think she feels bad.”

“You haven’t told her anything that you haven’t told me?” I said.

Lyn shook her head. “No? Like what?”

I didn’t even know how to ask the question that I needed to ask to get the answers I was looking for. Hell, I didn’t even know what answers I was looking for. I slammed the passthrough shut and then stormed out of the containment unit, nearly running smack into Devrick who was on his way in.

“Vince?” he said. “Why are you here so late?”