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

“I watch other shows,” I muttered.

O’Hare took his hand off me to examine his fingernails, which were just as sleek as the rest of his outfit. Hadn’t even chipped them doing… whatever he’d been up to earlier, and they were longer than mine. I guess he was way past being a nail-biter though. “I don’t mean to denigrate you for my own purposes, Julia, although I suppose it doesn’t hurt me if that’s the outcome. I’m telling you this for your own good, because nobody else will tell you once I send you back home. You’ll get to sit in your bedroom for the next ten or twenty years, pick up a new generation of reruns, then eventually your parents will die—might be sooner than you’d think with the business they’re in—and you might expect to inherit the house and get to sit around for another fifty years, but what’s more likely is you’ll find out about your dear parents’ other, more patient creditors.”

I shivered. This creep who’d had me snatched from my bed knew how to make a persuasive argument, at least.

“So here’s the new offer. As you’ve aptly identified, this is not an attempted love match on my part. When it comes down to it, I don’t care if you marry me or not… but I think you have the potential to be a satisfactory partner, despite your own reservations, and this seems like an arrangement that could give both of us some things that we want.”

Satisfactory was not a word I was used to hearing in relation to me. I would accept that he was slightly more on my level than the usual boys I targeted, but the difference between us couldn’t be that great. Having him talk about me like that felt like a challenge… and that seemed like a dangerous situation.

“Go back home and tell your parents you’ve agreed to marry me,” said O’Hare—Devin, if he insisted. “Tell me what sort of engagement ring you’d like and you’ll have it within twenty-four hours. Go through the motions of setting up for the wedding, organise any style of ceremony you like, I’m not bothered about the expense at all. If you decide to go through with it, great, we’ll work with that. But all I ask is that you play along at least until the night before the wedding. If you get to whatever dreadful hen’s party you organise and you decide that’s enough, fine. You can run back home to your parents… and I’m even willing to throw in some money for your trouble.”

“How much money?” I asked, which was probably about the worst question I could have had, but I couldn’t help myself.

“How does ten million sound?”

“I… is that in yen?”

He smirked. “Local currency, of course. Is there something wrong with that figure?”

“Don’t you start acting cute.” I had to stop myself from shaking my finger at him because I knew that would amuse him even more. “That’s more than my parents owe you… like, a lot more.”

“Julia.” He—Devin—shook his head. “If I had to worry about the m

oney, I wouldn’t have made that loan to your parents in the first place. That was throwing bad money after bad debtors. But taking risks like that sometimes keeps life interesting, and it’s only fools like your dear mother and father who think that money is the only thing that matters in this world. I don’t need that money, I haven’t missed it. But the fact that they have so little respect for me, now that has been burning inside of me since a week after they missed that payment deadline with no word given. To snatch their daughter from them in the face of that arrogance, to put them permanently in their place… that is more than worth fairly compensating the woman who helps me to get it done.”

His big eyes had come alight as he spoke. It was frightening, but also fascinating. “It doesn’t matter to me if you actually intend to become my wife, although I am quite sincerely offering you everything. The mere preparations for the wedding will be fixed in the minds of everyone who knows you or me such that even if you slink off home and are a dutiful daughter for the rest of your days, it is all anyone will think about.”

Something about this didn’t add up in my head. “Really? They’re not going to be thinking about how your wife-to-be scammed all sorts of expensive shit out of you and then ran back home laughing to the family that scammed several hundred thousand dollars out of you?”

“A good question.” Devin shifted a little closer. “It would have to be seen as me being the one to send you packing. Maybe a discovered infidelity, maybe the entire engagement was a ruse to avenge myself even further. We can confirm the details later. All I need to know right now is whether you’re willing to go ahead with the plan.”

At some point my kidnapping had become a musical number or two short of a full-scale production. “I… how long have you been coming up with this plan?”

“Just while we’ve been sitting here,” said Devin. He met my eyes and seemed to bristle a little. He could probably tell I didn’t believe him. “You have to be agile in this business, Julia. There was this one time, I went to this scumbag’s house to collect on a debt, but I was just the first guy who decided to take care of that business that day… and the one who showed up after me was packing.”

He was seriously trying to impress me with a war story after keeping me up half the night being kidnapped.

“That other guy was only seeking half the money I was there for too, a complete clown. But of course he was ready to go postal, and the only thing that could have made the situation worse was if he realised I was a threat to him getting what he wanted, so quick as a flash I dumped my suit jacket behind a chair in the debtor’s lounge and put my hands behind my back like this, head down like this, made like a butler…”

He had actually gotten off the bed to show me. I put my hand up and said, “Stop!” and maybe it was just him getting back into his butler character, but he shut his mouth right away. “I am not listening to any more of this while I’m still here in my pyjamas. You need to get out and let me get dressed, and then we can talk some more.”

Devin took a step towards the door, then turned back. That character had clearly worn off already. “If you are at all inclined to support my plan, it might be a useful information-gathering exercise for me to stay and—”

“No!” The horrifying thing was, I might have considered agreeing if there was anything in that suggestion that seemed even a little lascivious. But this was clearly just another angle of him trying to strike this deal. In some twisted part of his mind he was there thinking if he stayed and stared dispassionately at me getting my clothes off, and I was kind of okay with that, it would further his agenda. “You need to get out.”

He frowned at me. “What, no please?”

There was just the slightest hint, in his voice, of— Well, I’d actually managed to forget, in some way, that he was essentially a criminal who could do all sorts of terrible things to me if he wanted. I didn’t think he wanted to, but it seemed like he was capable of a lot if he felt he wasn’t being sufficiently respected. He seemed a little amused by my unwillingness to fall over in a sobbing heap at his feet, but he was clearly not motivated to be nice to me for the sake of getting back his money… so if I didn’t want to end up disappeared in the bush somewhere out here, or maybe with a new cabin built over my remains, I had better be balanced in my attitude.

“Please, Devin. I just want to feel a bit normal again. Surely that’s a courtesy you can offer to someone you’re trying to get to marry you.”

Devin nodded and resumed his course to the door. “Entirely acceptable. I will give you thirty minutes before I return.”

I let out a big breath once the door shut behind him. I hadn’t realised just how tense I was getting in his presence. I had to shut my eyes and take a few meditative breaths, shake my arms and hands out, before I could even coordinate them enough to open the case he’d given me.

Once I did, I could feel my eyes bulging. These were ultra-designer brands, and he hadn’t bothered taking any of the tags off so I now knew the prices of all the items were in the three-to-four-digits range, but what else should I have expected from a man who was willing to pay me ten million to not even go through with marrying him?

Of course, ten million was not the smallest part of what Devin O’Hare was worth, according to his own claims. I couldn’t go judging such an offer by my own standards or I might end up actually selling myself short.