POV Jaxson
Obsession is just love with better attention to detail.
I sit in Richard's leather chair, the one he never let me touch when he was alive, holding a photograph that could ruin me if anyone found it. Harper at the Met Gala fundraiser two years ago, wearing a backless black gown that stops just above the curve of her ass. The photographer caught her mid-turn, looking over her shoulder at someone off-camera, and all that pale skin glows under the chandeliers like she's made of moonlight and my worst decisions.
My thumb traces the line of her spine through the glossy paper. I imagine pressing my mouth to that exposed vertebra, feeling her shiver, then traveling lower to where the fabric finally begins. Lower still, past silk, past everything she hides from the world.
The fantasy unspools with practiced ease because I've had seven years to perfect it—seven years of watching from shadows, of wanting what I engineered myself out of having the moment I pressed her against that wall at eighteen and let rage speak instead of truth.
The physical response is immediate and inconvenient—blood rushing south while I sit in my dead stepfather's chair, getting hard over a woman who despises my existence. The irony isn't lost on me.
I slide the photograph back into its folder, burying it beneath three hundred others. The whiskey decanter on Richard's desk catches moonlight as I pour myself something strong enough to drown this particular demon.
It doesn't work. It never does.
I move to the window, letting the cool glass press against my forehead while I wait for my body to remember that wanting Harper is a problem without a solution. She hates me. She's always hated me.
Oliver was the first one I had to remove.
The British sculptor with his tortured artist routine showed up six months after Harper arrived in London. I remember the exact moment I decided he needed to disappear—watching through the window of that Notting Hill café as his fingers tangled in her hair while she laughed at something he said. The rage that flooded through me could have leveled buildings.
Three phone calls. That's all it took.
His boss owed me a favor from a real estate deal in Milan, and suddenly Oliver had a career opportunity in Sydney that he couldn't refuse. I watched Harper's face when he told her he was leaving, and I told myself I was saving her from a man who would have bored her eventually.
Thomas came six months later. The investment banker who took her to dinner three times before I arranged for two men to greet him outside his apartment. Nothing permanent—a black eye, a cracked rib, enough violence to make him paranoid.
He stopped returning her calls after that, convinced London wasn't safe for someone with his net worth. Harper never knew why another promising connection simply evaporated.
Professor Morrison required more finesse. The Royal College instructor looked at her during critiques like she was something to consume rather than teach, and the anonymous tip I sent to the administration about his inappropriate interest in female students landed just where I wanted it to land.
He was gone before the semester ended. Harper's career flourished under a mentor who actually deserved her talent, and she never suspected that her guardian angel wore horns.
I was protecting her, I told myself with each intervention.
I'm still protecting her, I tell myself now, even as the evidence of my obsession sits in folders throughout this house.
But Preston Whitmore remains untouched.
I've watched him too—catalogued his country club conquests with the same attention I gave Harper's suitors. Jennifer Walsh after her Pilates sessions, the bartender with the sleeve tattoos, the wife of his tennis partner, at least four other women whose names he probably forgets before he's finished buttoning his pants.
Preston needs Harper for his social image. The Sloan name, the estate connections, the respectability she provides for a man whose family money came from sources that don't bear scrutiny. He's not in love with her. He's in love with what she represents—a shortcut to the kind of old-money legitimacy his family has always craved.
I haven't removed him because watching her fake happiness with this mediocre man is its own exquisite punishment. She doesn't love him either. I see it in the mechanical way she accepts his kisses, the rigid posture when he touches her in public, the way her eyes go distant during conversations about their future. Preston is a placeholder, a prop in the performance of the life Richard wanted for her.
I could tell her about the cheating. I have photographs, hotel receipts, text messages obtained through methods I won't examine too closely. But she wouldn't believe me—the stepbrother she's spent years hating, suddenly appearing with evidence that her perfect boyfriend is a fraud.
She'd think I fabricated everything to drive them apart. She'd hate me more, if that's even possible. So I let Preston stay.
The creak of the study door pulls me from my thoughts.
Harper materializes in the doorway wearing sleep shorts that showcase legs I've memorized from photographs and a tank top thin enough to reveal the outline of everything beneath. Moonlight catches her silhouette as she moves toward Richard's desk, completely unaware of my presence in the shadows by the window.
My blood turns to liquid fire watching her sink into the chair I just vacated, her fingers tracing the armrests where my hands rested moments ago. She's been lying awake too. She came here hoping to find something—or someone.
What if she feels as disturbed as I do?
The thought burns through my brain, dangerous and desperate. What if seven years of longing haven't been entirely one-sided? What if her hatred masks something that matches the hunger I've been carrying?
I step forward, letting the shadows release me, and her gasp is gratifying.
She says something—words that register as background noise while I study the features I've never seen this close. The delicate arch of her eyebrows drawing together in anger. The flush spreading across her cheekbones. The way her lower lip trembles.
I respond to her outrage with observations designed to provoke, but my attention stays fixed on cataloguing every micro-expression, every involuntary reaction, every tell that confirms what I suspect.
Then she throws water at my chest.
The liquid traces paths down my torso that should evaporate on contact. That's how hot I feel with her eyes locked on mine, her breath coming fast, her body trembling with emotions.
I cage her against the desk because I know she will try to run away, and of course she stumbles backward into the desk. The impact sends the folder tumbling—the one I should have locked away, the one containing seven years of evidence that I'm exactly the monster she's always believed me to be.
Photographs explode across the hardwood.
For one suspended moment, fear claws through my chest. She's going to see everything. She's going to understand the depth of my obsession, the scope of my interference, the truth I've hidden behind cruelty and distance.
Then I watch her hands shake as she picks up an image, and the fear transforms into something that feels like relief.
"You stalked me?" Her voice trembles with rage and violation and terror.
I step over the scattered photographs, closing the distance between us. No more hiding. No more shadows. If she's going to hate me, she might as well hate me for the right reasons.