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

  I turned my head to find him already swivelled around, watching me. I couldn’t decide if it was a good idea to tell him, but I found the words spilling out anyway. “Actually it’s… not the first time I’ve gotten myself kidnapped.”

  O’Hare’s beautifully-sculpted eyebrows went right up. Wasn’t exquisite personal grooming a mafia-type thing? Along with not being too bothered if you had another man’s dick blood smeared over your designer shirts apparently. “Now that is an unexpected response. You know you can’t just leave a man hanging at that.”

  It wasn’t something I’d thought about in detail for a long time. There were too many flickers of memory I didn’t like to have come up: my screams, how effectively he’d been able to hold me in place… the way I’d had to beg him, even if that was part of my strategy. I never wanted to have to feel that way again, and that was why I wasn’t going to do it again with O’Hare.

  But he didn’t need to hear all the thoughts that went through my head. He would have to be content with the story I was willing to give him.

  “I used to have a taste for seeing how much I could get a boy going without giving him anything in return… well, turns out the answer is ‘a lot’. This one boy… he decided he needed a lot more than I was offering.”

  O’Hare’s smile suddenly made me realise just how it must have been for poor Steven when I was bringing all the weight of my charms down on him. I was far too much for him, I’d always known it, but that was the point. I’d just never realised how it felt from his perspective… until I found myself at the mercy of a man who was far too much for me. “Now, Julia… you should know better than to tease young men. They’re not equipped for it the way you women are.”

  Even though I’d been having somewhat similar thoughts myself, I bristled. “I can’t say I’m impressed with your sexism.”

  “What you’re not impressed with is the fact that I see right through you,” O’Hare said. I wrapped my arms around myself like he’d said he could see right through my clothes. “You’re used to being taken completely seriously, butter wouldn’t melt in this cute little bitch’s mouth, right? Well I’m not one of your little school friends, Miss Julia Mahoney. I can see exactly what you are, and I don’t care… but I’m not going to lie to you because you’re pretty. The fact is, I see a woman in front of me with nerves of steel, and from my perspective that’s not something to sugarcoat. That’s something you need to learn how to take advantage of… before someone else does.”

  I felt shaky again. “Why do I have a feeling you’re trying to tell me it’s already too late for that.”

  “This is exactly what I’m talking about, Julia. Game recognises game. I knew it when you didn’t make the mistake of trying to escape before morning.”

  “Running away from a potential killer and definite smasher of kneecaps in the night, having no idea where I am and no shoes and a feeling the people who run this park are in on your scams? Yeah, would have been a real strategic move.”

  I tensed when O’Hare stood and walked around the edge of the bed to sit down alongside me. He was so close he was almost sitting on my hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to move away. Was that because I didn’t want him to think I was afraid? Game recognises game. I’d always thought of myself as having reasonable game, but having my prowess validated by a man who didn’t hesitate to hurt others was not exactly what I’d always wanted.

  When he took my nearest hand and pulled it into his lap, I felt my face growing hot.

  “Do you want to know what my plan is, Julia?” he asked.

  “No, but I do want to get home so I don’t get too behind on my favourite shows, and if this is the way I’ve got to do it…”

  “Very good. Well, I’m tired of your parents’ antics. They’ve received enough chances and now they need to be put in their place. Of course I have the power to compel them to pay back the money they owe me, but people who have no respect for the money of others have no care for the lessons taught through it. They’ll be back to their old ways before the money’s had time to find its way out of their account.” O’Hare rolled my knuckles between thumb and forefinger. “No… it’s time to try something more radical. Julia, I’m going to forgive the entirety of that debt. Let them keep the money.”

  I knew my eyes were pretty wide as I stared into his. O’Hare’s deceptively innocent-looking eyes returned my gaze without any emotion I could name. “But… you…”

  “Sometimes, Julia, you can bring a man down harder by giving him what he thinks he wants. Then, with your other hand, you reach in and take what he really can’t stand to lose.”

  I hated that I thought O’Hare’s smile was so pretty, because it definitely meant trouble for me.

  “The Mahoneys can have their kneecapping money, plus interest, plus late fees. I’m going to marry their daughter instead.”

  Chapter Four

  Devin O’Hare made me a cup of herbal tea from the cabin supplies, and I was pretty sure he added a splash of something that wasn’t provided in the tea tray, but it was failing to calm me down.

  I thought I’d accepted the situation I was in, but this was much worse than the worst I had prepared for. As a kidnappee, I could be frightened, hurt, mutilated… even murdered, but once it got to that point I wasn’t going to care very much, and anyway O’Hare didn’t terribly interested in inflicting extreme harm on a whim.

  Marriage was a life sentence.

  Around the middle of the day, O’Hare came in with a little suitcase and a smaller, transparent plastic bag filled with toiletries: a small toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, a shower cap and a few other boxed items I didn’t want to think about the use of.

  I pushed them across the bed. “Do you get special care packages made up for the girls whose lives you plan to completely ruin?”

  “It’s standard hotel equipment, Julia, don’t be dramatic.” He thrust the items back against my leg. “I actually haven’t kidnapped any other women before—don’t go degrading yourself either by acting like you’re not a grown adult. And if you’re referring to the idea of marrying me when you talk about your life being completely ruined like you really are still twelve years old, well, I was hoping you’d agree to it wholeheartedly.”

  “To marry you? Just to make some sort of stupid point to my parents? Are you out of your mind?” I grabbed the toiletries package and was midway through lobbing it at his stupid head when he became a blur in front of my eyes. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the bed, the case awkwardly pressing against my legs, and Devin O’Hare had my arms up above my head again like the night before, this time pinned down by the pressure of one hand over my two wrists.

  My chest was rising and falling in overdrive, and he seemed hardly to have broken a sweat. I could see his other hand planted right next to my head, the blood on his sleeve—evidence of how he’d protected me earlier. Yes, he could make me do whatever he wanted… but the idea that he wanted me to choose it was kind of… those feelings I shouldn’t be having were definitely coming back now.

  I moved my eyes up his body to stare him directly in the face. If I went ahead with this then it would probably mean he’d be in this position for reasons other than stopping me from breaking his nose…

  No! Why was I starting to think like this? The man didn’t look even slightly interested in fucking me for goodness sake, even though I was basically gift-wrapped in front of him. He’d already told me it wasn’t about wanting me, so how stupid did I want to be? This was just his strategy for getting me to go along with this bullshit: get me scared with the kidnapping, feed me a few weak lines about my being pretty and interesting, and win all my parents’ money in the long term—or at least half, depending on just how long he thought I was going to be fooled. Probably he had other women he was actually interested in physically who he would laugh at me with when he left me at home to take on the town with them.

  “Are you done turning this around in twenty different directions in your head?”
said O’Hare.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I—”

  “Well, if you ever raise anything against me like that in a tantrum again, I promise I will have my own hand raised to meet you, never mind your being a woman.”

  “Who ever asked you to hold back on account of that, you arsehole—” I tried to squirm free and he grabbed my legs with his other hand, dragging them sideways across the bed so he could sit on them, pinning me thoroughly.

  “There have to be some standards in this world, Julia. We have to draw lines in the sand, even if they’re absurd lines. For men like me, that usually involves a heightened level of respect where women are concerned. Are you going to behave now, or do I have to continue restraining you?”

  “I won’t hit you with anything unless you really ask for it,” I muttered. O’Hare made a noise that might have been a laugh, and let go of me.

  I sat up, shaking out my wrists. “Thank you,” O’Hare said.

  I shot him a withering look. “For…?”

  “For being as good as your word. I haven’t been merely trying to butter you up for the sake of achieving a strategic victory over your parents, Julia. I think most men would be delighted to have a woman like you agree to marry them. You are courageous and adaptable, and even that smart mouth of yours could be amusing under the right circumstances.”

  “But this isn’t about liking me,” I countered. The weasel, he’d said most men. He wanted me to believe he was delighted when he couldn’t even bring himself to lie about it.

  O’Hare looked me up and down as if I’d said something that made him think I would attack again. “I already like you quite a lot, Julia. There’s no need for you to be evasive: what you really mean here is it’s not about loving you.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said.

  “Does that matter to you: being loved?”

  “To get married to someone… I think it does, actually,” I admitted. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to trust a man who isn’t a bit out of his mind where I’m concerned, because that’s just where men need to be at to not forget about you completely when you’re not in the room.”

  Devin hummed a few notes in surprisingly good pitch. “I admit I’m surprised to hear you wanting another man to be a bit out of his mind for you, after what you’ve just told me.”

  I curled my lip at him. “The truth is I don’t have any desire to get married at all. I prefer to be left to my own devices, to have relations with men if and when I choose.”

  “Hm.” O’Hare’s study became more thoughtful, and somehow it started to feel as if the world was closing in around us, the setting turning intimate. I realised with a little shock that he probably had the power to negotiate me into agreeing to this, just as he said, “Perhaps I should be making a slightly different offer.”

  “Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.”

  As he kept looking me up, then down, I realised that sort of attention was about as effective as if he’d been really touching me. “You must forgive my ignorance, Julia. For me… well, marriage is a necessity. Not in that I must do it to receive some benefit, but that I cannot imagine getting into my old age and having no life partner by my side. A permanent partner to me is what will balance me, reaffirm and remind me of my humanity when I am required to do very dark things, give my life the significance it would otherwise lack.”

  The way he talked, it was like someone was forcing him to be some violent kneecap-smashing criminal. “Well you’ve kidnapped the wrong girl, O’Hare. Even if I wanted to, I could never do those things for you. There’s nothing soft or supportive about me.”

  I stiffened into silence when he reached over and put his hand on my bare knee. “Please, Julia, it’s Devin. I don’t need to have women giving me this last-name attitude like they’re on the opposite side to me in a business deal. You at least are not, thank God for that.”

  “Oh, there’s that sexism jumping out again.”

  “I’d like to ask you, Julia, where you think your life is going if you’re not planning on getting married? You mentioned being ‘left to your own devices’… what are those, exactly? The television, your smartphone?”

  “You’ve been stalking me,” I accused, even though that sort of proved his point.

  “This is aside from the present negotiation, Julia. What is your future going to hold? You didn’t bother to finish school, and it doesn’t seem like you’ve been invited into the Mahoney business. That’s quite common with many young women in your position, actually. The family sees them as a jewel, not a human, and they are given no opportunities they don’t reach for themselves. Certainly they’re not wanted to dirty their hands with whatever the adults are getting up to.”

  “I thought you were very serious about me being an adult.”

  “It’s what your parents think, not me. But I suspect you’ve bought into it more than you’ll admit. You’re, what… twenty-three?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two, and your life consists of Sex and the City reruns and scrolling through celebrity social media updates, because you don’t have any real friends of your own to keep up with.”

  “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.”