Jaxon POV
My knuckles were bone-white as I slammed my hands against the leather steering wheel.
The needle on the speedometer surged past eighty, ninety, a hundred miles per hour as we flew down the empty, dark stretch of the coastal highway away from the gala.
The city lights blurred past us into long streaks of harsh red and white.
I was suffocating.
Every breath felt like inhaling shattered glass.
My father’s voice was still echoing inside my skull, loud and cold, repeating every cruel, harsh word he had used to gut me on that balcony.
You are my investment.
You earned nothing.
Put your shoulders back.
I kicked the accelerator down further, taking a sharp turn so fast the tires let out a high-pitched, screaming shriek against the asphalt.
“Jaxon, slow down!” Roxy yelled, her voice trembling with terror as her hands grabbed the dashboard to steady herself.
I didn’t answer.
I couldn’t.
The gawning rage boiling in my chest was blinding me.
I shoved the gear shift forward, the engine roaring like a wounded animal as we barreled down toward the dark, industrial district near the docks.
“Jaxon, stop the car!” Roxy screamed again, her voice breaking this time.
“Stop the damn car!”
I slammed my foot on the brake pedal with sudden force.
The heavy sports car skidded hard into a dark, narrow alleyway behind an abandoned warehouse, the tires screeching loudly before coming to a jarring halt.
The engine died, leaving us plunged into pitch-black darkness, surrounded by brick walls, the hum of our ragged breathing filling the cramped space.
“Are you out of your mind?!” Roxy shouted, her head snapping toward me.
She was hyperventilating, her small chest heaving violently under the sapphire silk of her dress.
Tears were finally spilling over her dark eyelashes, cutting clear tracks through the makeup on her flushed cheeks.
“You could have killed us!” she yelled, her small fists coming down hard against my shoulder, slamming into my leather jacket.
“You could have smashed this stupid car into a wall!”
I leaned back against my headrest, staring blankly out the dark windshield.
“Just give me a minute.”
“You don’t have anything under control!” Roxy snapped, her voice rising to a desperate scream that vibrated through the entire cabin.
She unbuckled her seatbelt and turned her entire body to face me, her dark eyes blazing with a wild, uncontrollable fire.
“You drive like a maniac because you’re mad at your father! You throw temper tantrums, you pull stunts on national television, and you act like the whole world is just a game for you to play!”
“It isn’t a game to me!” I shouted back, turning my head to glare at her through the dark.
“You saw him out there! You saw what he does to me!”
“And you think you’re the only one suffocating?!” Roxy sobbed, a harsh, broken laugh ripping from her throat.
She gripped the fabric of her expensive dress, her whole frame shaking uncontrollably.
“You get to go home to a fortune, Jaxon! You get to drive a car that costs more than my family’s entire existence! You think your life is hard because your billionaire father wants you to run a company?”
“You don’t know anything about my life, Roxy,” I growled softly, my jaw clenching.
“I know that if I lose my scholarship tomorrow, my life is completely over!” she screamed, tears streaming freely down her face now, stripping away every single layer of her fierce, guarded pride.
“Do you have any idea what happens to me if Dean Cooper kicks me out of Kingston?!”
I froze, the harsh words dying in my throat as I looked at her.
“My mother is sick, Jaxon!” Roxy wept, her voice dropping into a whisper that broke my heart into a thousand pieces.
“She works sixty hours a week as a nurse with chronic pain just to keep a roof over our heads in Ashenvale! We have stacks of medical bills sitting on our kitchen counter that we can’t pay! I took this tutoring job because the university pays me a stipend that sends food to my family’s table!”
She pressed her palms against her face, her shoulders shaking as silent sobs wracked her small body.
“My grades… my scholarship… it’s the only way out,” she whispered into her hands, her voice stripped bare of all defense.
“If my scholarship gets pulled because of your fake dating stunt, my mother loses her medicine. My family gets evicted. I don’t have a billionaire safety net to catch me when I fall, Jaxon. I fall straight onto the cold, hard floor.”
The dark, selfish fog inside my head cleared instantly, replaced by a sudden, crushing weight of guilt.
I stared at her in the quiet darkness of the car.
For weeks, I had viewed Roxy Brooks as an uptight scholar—a stubborn girl who lived in the library and existed solely to give me a hard time about my grades.
I had used her as a shield against my father, a pawn to throw in his face to prove I could break his rules.
I hadn’t seen the truth.
She wasn’t unfeeling.
She wasn’t an obstacle.
She was a desperate, fierce fighter standing on the edge of a cliff, fighting with every ounce of strength in her tiny body just to keep her family from drowning.
She was fighting the exact same terrifying feeling of powerlessness that I was—she was just doing it with everything on the line.
“Roxy…” I said softly, my voice devoid of any arrogance, any anger, or any act.
She didn’t look up.
She kept her face hidden in her hands, her breath coming in painful gasps.
Slowly, I unbuckled my seatbelt.
I reached across the center console, ignoring the sting of the cut on my cheek, and brought my large, warm hand out toward her.
My bare fingers gently cupped the back of her neck, my thumb resting softly against her jaw.
Roxy stiffened at my touch, a small gasp escaping her lips, but she didn’t pull away.
She slowly lowered her hands, her dark, wet eyes looking up to meet mine in the dim glow of the alleyway streetlight.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
The words felt strange, and foreign on my tongue, but I meant every single syllable.
“I didn’t see it, Brooks. I was so busy fighting my own demons that I didn’t see what I was dragging you into.”
Roxy swallowed hard, her pulse fluttering rapidly against my thumb where it rested on her skin.
“Jaxon…”
“My father wants to destroy you because he thinks you’re my weakness,” I said, my grey eyes locking onto hers with a raw, unmasked vulnerability she had never seen from me before.
The arrogant, untouchable hockey prince was gone.
“He thinks if he threatens your scholarship, I’ll bow my head and become his puppet again.”
I tightened my grip on the back of her neck just enough to draw her an inch closer, letting her feel the steady, fierce warmth of my hand keeping her in place.
“I am not letting him touch your scholarship, Roxy,” I promised, my tone flat, and laced with an unbreakable vow.
“I don’t care if I have to pull a hundred straight all-nighters. I don’t care if I have to memorize every textbook in that library until my brain bleeds. You are going to pass me on every academic review they throw at us.”
A fresh tear slipped down her cheek, but this time, she didn’t look away.
She held my gaze, her breathing slowly evening out as the terror in her eyes gave way to something deeper, warmer, and far more dangerous.
I gently brushed the tear away with my thumb, my chest aching with an intense, electric pull that had nothing to do with fake dating and everything to do with the girl breathing against my hand.
“Tomorrow, we study,” I rasped softly, my eyes burning into hers.
“For real.”