Taken For A Debt: A Mafia Romance (The Taken Duet 1)

How had they kept this from me? I guess I always figured they didn’t care about me, so aside from keeping up with their research so I could exploit them for bragging purposes, I didn’t go out of my way to care about them that much, either.

“Anyway,” O’Hare continued, “as well as being a common criminal, your mother doesn’t pay her debts.” There was actually a slight shift in his tone to let me know which of these he cared more about. “And I loaned money to her under very generous terms, so at a bare minimum I’d expect her to be no more than a few months late on repaying me. She’s really betrayed the trust I put in her when I gave her that money.”

“Trust me, we have so much money,” I interrupted. “Whatever they owe you, they definitely have it. There must be some misunderstanding…”

“It’s five hundred thousand dollars,” said O’Hare, “plus one hundred thousand more in interest, thirty thousand in late fees, and there was no misunderstanding, Julia. Your parents wanted to send a message to me by not paying their debt. They didn’t believe I had the power to cross them. Why would you think someone with half a million dollars on hand at short notice to pay a knee-breaker would just roll over and accept not seeing any return on their investment?” He let go of my hand to shrug. “I don’t get it, but I know a power play when I see one.”

Six hundred and thirty thousand dollars… that was almost as much as we’d paid for our house. They could probably have moved to another house for less money and trouble if they’d hated the tourism idea so much. But the least unbelievable part of this whole story was the idea that they wouldn’t have the money to pay O’Hare back, one way or another. So I really didn’t understand how I could have ended up in this situation.

O’Hare crooked one elbow so his shirt sleeve slid up, and looked at a watch on his arm—a very expensive watch. Even if he hadn’t told me I would have realised he was a very expensive man in general, half a million dollars for two smashed kneecaps just a tiny part of it, and it made me nervous to have him so close to me, making casual physical contact without seeming personally affected at all. Maybe this is just my ego going crazy, but I’m used to men being affected when they’re close to me. I’m just that pretty, and I know how to use what I’ve got. But I’m also smart enough to not take on a challenge I know I can’t handle. Unfortunately, this one chose me.

“It’s getting early,” O’Hare said. “Time to get you to the base of operations for this thing.”

“No. Wait!” O’Hare looked down at my hand. I’d grabbed his sleeve without thinking, grasping for a bit of human compassion like I actually trusted it existed. I had no choice but to continue now I’d started, though. “There’s no need to take me. I’ll get you that money. I can call my parents right now—maybe I don’t know exactly what they’re doing all the time, but I know how to get in contact. They’ll answer my calls.” I hoped that was true. “I can tell them you need your money back, I’m sure they’ll agree right away under the circumstances. Maybe even a bit of extra interest thrown into the deal for your trouble.”

My hand fell away from him just as instinctively as it had claimed him. I could tell I wasn’t going to like the response even before he started speaking.

“Oh, Julia, you’re used to getting what you want with just a quiver of your lips and a shine of tears in the eyes, aren’t you?” He drew the index finger of the hand wearing the watch down the line of my jaw: the first time he had touched me with no apparent practical purpose to it. It caused a shiver to run right through my body, reminding me just how vulnerable I was to him at that moment in my thin pyjamas

, the lines of my body there to be seen, absolutely nothing on me that could be used as a weapon or means of escape. “I hope we can train that out of you.”

That word train made me shudder again, not entirely out of fear, either. It figured I would succumb to Stockholm stupidly early. There was something a little bit wrong with me, even I couldn’t deny it. I was totally twisted. But if my parents were who he said they were, was it so surprising?

“I’m a big girl, O’Hare,” I told this man who had made my head spin with just one caress. “Just be honest about what you intend to do to me, so I have a chance to come to terms with it and we can move this along as quickly as possible.” Maybe he wouldn’t have noticed my voice started shaking at the end of that, if I was lucky.

“First of all I’m going to take you somewhere you can catch up on your sleep,” said O’Hare. “We’ll contact your parents tomorrow, once it’s appropriate for their current time zone. We’ll go from there.”

He wasn’t going to tell me anything he didn’t need to, obviously. Well, at least I’d tried.

One thing I was sure of as he guided me smilingly back to the van: there was going to be a further penalty to my parents for their lateness in paying this debt, and it was going to have something to do with me.

Chapter Three

I came awake at a pair of fingers sliding down my spine.

For several seconds I could make no sense of where I was. It came to me gradually: they’d taken me out to a caravan park they wouldn’t let me see the name of, and though it was well out of regular hours and we looked suspicious as all fuck, we were ushered in through a rather overgrown back road and given a cabin in a row rather distant from the other cabins. Devin O’Hare had directed me to the main bedroom, and even though I was wired with terror I was also so exhausted I must have closed my eyes as soon as I slipped between the covers of the dusty-smelling bed. I had a vague memory of the light fading as O’Hare closed the door on his departure…

Now there was someone in the room, sitting on the edge of the bed, and somehow I knew those fingers were not O’Hare’s.

When I turned my head, I didn’t recognise the man staring down at me. I tried rolling my eyes one way and then the other, as if that was going to make any difference. When this man had last showed up at my bed, he was masked.

His fingers pressed down on my cheek, turning my gaze away. “Relax, princess. Everything’s going to be fine.”

I pushed him away as I sat up, pulling my covers around me as some minimal protection. I didn’t need time to figure out what this guy wanted. “Forget it. Back off.”

His condescending sneer had rage and fear rising in me in equal measures. “Come on, nobody’s going to believe a girl like you is a virgin.”

“You can not believe it all you like.” It wasn’t like I was some completely pure girl who had never known a man’s touch—there were actually a lot of things you could do without needing to go all the way. I’d just always felt like sex in its most traditional sense was too risky a prospect. There were so many ways in which the female partner could end up in trouble at the end of it, all her choices taken away from her. “Some of us still have some standards.”

That just made him grin wider. “I can help you drop those standards in a way that will even feel like you’re raising them.”

“No. Get the fuck out of my room.”

Instead, he grabbed the cover I was holding in front of me and yanked it down, his eyes lighting up at me in my thin silky pyjama top with no bra in a couple-kilometre radius probably. My heart was beating so fast it was making me dizzy. I was going to fight him the instant he presumed to lay his hand on me again, but I didn’t actually like my chances of winning. The best I could hope for was to give him some lasting injuries that would make him think twice the next time he wanted to mess with someone who didn’t want it.

My fingers shot out as his closed around my arm, poking him solidly in one eye. He yelled and reeled back, one flailing hand smacking me in the side of the head so I fell back on the bed with my skull throbbing—

“What is this?”