Roxy POV
The intimidating echo of the door closing shut echoed like a thunderclap through the quiet foyer, locking out the rest of the world and leaving me entirely alone with a man who wanted to see me break.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
For the past week, we had been surrounded by the constant noise of the campus—the whispers in the hallways, the flashing phone cameras in the quad, and the suffocating glares from Chloe Owen and her wealthy friends.
We had spent hours playing our parts, holding hands, and pretending to be a couple for the athletic board.
But the second that deadbolt clicked into place inside Jaxon’s massive penthouse apartment, the public play-acting stopped.
The mask didn’t just slip, it shattered.
“Take your shoes off,” Jaxon ordered smoothly, not even turning around to look at me as he tossed his keys onto a sleek, black marble console table.
“The rug in the living room costs more than your entire tuition, Tutor. I don’t need your mud tracking all over it.”
My jaw clenched so hard a sharp pain shot up into my temples.
The boiling hostility that I had been forcing down all morning finally rushed to the surface, hot and angry.
I kicked my scuffed canvas sneakers off, letting them hit the baseboard with an aggressive smack.
“Don’t worry, Montgomery,” I said, my voice dripping with biting sarcasm as I pulled my canvas backpack farther up onto my shoulder.
“I wouldn’t want to contaminate your precious little palace. Can we skip the rich-boy monologue and actually get to work? I don’t want to spend a single second longer in this place than I have to.”
Jaxon finally turned around, his stormy grey eyes narrowing as he took me in.
He didn’t answer.
He just gave me a long, cold look before turning on his heel and walking into the main living space.
I followed him, my bare feet sinking into a plush, cream-colored rug that felt ridiculously soft.
The apartment was massive, a luxurious, cold maze of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, industrial steel beams, and dark leather furniture.
The entire city skyline stretched out beyond the glass, a glittering display of wealth that felt alien to me.
Jaxon threw himself down onto a wide, dark leather sofa, sprawling his long legs out over the table in front of him.
“Sit,” he muttered, gesturing vaguely to the opposite side of the room.
“No,” I said, setting my backpack down on the edge of the sleek glass coffee table with a loud thud.
I slammed the book down right next to his feet, the sound echoing off the high ceilings.
“Open the book, Jaxon. We are already three weeks behind the syllabus because you decided to play games in the ice rink. Open it to page forty-two.”
Jaxon didn’t move.
He just stared at the textbook as if it were a pile of garbage, his face twisting into a look of stubbornness.
“I don’t think so.”
“Excuse me?” I stepped closer, my hands planting firmly on my hips as my temper flared.
“We have a contract. I do the public girlfriend performance, and you sit down, shut up, and let me teach you this material so I can get my hourly verification sheets signed. That is the deal.”
“The deal is that I pay you to make the athletic board happy,” Jaxon retorted, his gravelly voice rising as he suddenly stood up from the couch.
He began pacing the room like a caged animal, his long strides radiating a tense, restless energy that filled the entire space.
“I didn’t say I was going to let you lecture me like a child, Brooks. I don’t care about supply and demand curves. I don’t care about market equilibrium.”
“Well, you should,” I yelled back, my voice shaking with frustration as I followed him with my eyes.
“Because if you fail the midterms next week, your father pulls the entire hockey team’s funding block, and you get kicked off the ice. Isn’t that what you were whining about?”
Jaxon stopped dead in his tracks.
He turned to face me, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek.
The mention of his father always seemed to flip a dark, volatile switch inside his chest.
Without a single word of warning, he reached down to the hem of his black Kingston Academy t-shirt.
With one fluid motion, he ripped the shirt over his head and threw it carelessly onto the floor.
My breath hitched in my throat, the words dying instantly on my tongue.
Exposed in the soft light of the apartment was a heavily muscled, powerful torso.
His chest and shoulders were broad, carved from years of brutal, high-intensity training on the ice.
But what made my heart stop wasn’t the symmetry of his physique, it was the damage.
Several smaller, fading cuts and dark marks lined his collarbone, matching the dark, chaotic energy that always seemed to surround him.
“You think I’m scared of him?” Jaxon demanded, his chest heaving as he stared at me, unbothered by his own bare skin.
“You think I care about his money?”
I forced my eyes away from his bare chest, desperately trying to focus on the open pages of the macroeconomics textbook on the table.
I gripped the edges of the book, my fingers digging into the paper so hard the pages began to wrinkle.
But it was entirely useless.
My heart rate spiked, racing wildly inside of me that had nothing to do with anger.
The closeness of him—the intense, radiating heat coming off his bare skin and the clean scent of his soap—was overwhelming.
The air in the penthouse suddenly felt entirely too thin to breathe.
My hands began to tremble, and I hated myself for it.
I hated how much space he took up in the room, and I hated how weak my body felt whenever he got too close.
“I don’t care about your family drama, Jaxon,” I whispered, my voice sounding incredibly small in the quiet room as I kept my eyes glued to the printed text.
“Just… put your shirt back on and look at the book. Please.”
A low, dangerous chuckle broke the silence.
I didn’t even have time to look up before the shadow fell over me.
Jaxon closed the distance between us in a single, silent stride, his movements too fast for me to react.
He stepped directly into my personal space, crowding me out.
Before I could take a step back, his large, calloused hands slammed down onto the top of the dark leather sofa behind me, trapping my body entirely between his powerful arms.
I was pinned.
My back pressed hard against the firm leather cushions, and my breath caught in my chest.
Jaxon leaned down, his bare, muscled chest hovering mere inches from my face.
I could feel the burning heat of his skin radiating against my sweater, and the dark, stormy grey of his eyes locked onto mine with a focus.
The lazy, mocking amusement was gone, replaced by a suffocating tension that made the entire universe shrink down to the space between our lips.
“Make me, Tutor,” Jaxon whispered, his gravelly voice dropping into a low, wicked purr that sent vibration down my spine.