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

by Tiffany Sala

  When had they been planning to tell me the truth?

  I kept shifting my feet, somewhat beyond my control, and eventually I leaned forward so I could grab the ankle strap of one of the shoes and started fidgeting with it.

  As I finally released the buckle and began to wiggle my foot back and forth to get it out, the car filled with a noise I didn’t immediately recognise as Devin’s voice. “Do not take your shoes off. I know you were raised better than the majority of young women in this town who act like they’re still sixteen and could be forgiven for behaving like their entire life is one constant barn dance in which they may take their shoes off at will.”

  I’d gotten something closer to what I recognised as actual emotion from him by trying to remove my shoes than by any of my previous plays. It actually scared me. “Are you afraid the foot fetish you’ve spent so much of your fortune in therapy for is going to go rogue if I take my shoes off?”

  Devin’s grunt sounded mostly repulsed. Again, more of a reaction than I’d gotten from almost anything else so far.

  I knew the guy was dangerous when he was wearing absolutely no emotion at all, and that should be enough reason for me to avoid getting him visibly fired up. But the itch to do just that was growing inside me, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to control it if I stuck around Devin much longer. Seriously speaking I didn’t think the Stockholm was supposed to set in this soon, and not when I had reasonable confidence of being able to get away from him. Not that Stockholm was supposed to cover behaving in a way that the kidnapper would reasonably have considered fighting against him.

  This was apparently the effect once I got used to having to tangle with a man like him at all, and it seemed like bad news for me that was coming from myself this time—but that was a state of affairs I was far more used to than everything else that was happening right now.

  Devin spoke up himself as we made it to the outskirts of the city. “I’m feeling even better about the choice of shoes now.”

  I couldn’t help responding. “What, because if you can just keep me from taking them off, they’ll keep me from being able to run away from you as well?”

  “Exactly,” said Devin with clear satisfaction.

  Right then, something in me cracked. I had a feeling it was partially due to stress and lack of sleep, and I didn’t care: I decided I was going to tell someone at this restaurant that Devin had taken me against my will. I wasn’t going to go to the point of pressing charges or anything—I had a feeling Devin was known to the police anyway and I wouldn’t get far if I tried. But calling some low-level cops on him, embarrassing him in a crowd, was exactly what he deserved.

  A little spike of fear tried to tell me this was a terrible idea, dragging other people into our situation. It was bound to raise his ire beyond even attempting to take off my shoes. But what was he going to do to me, anyway? Even for someone like him, I was bound to become a massive inconvenience dead, and it seemed like Devin’s complicated ethics would keep him from hurting me without offering a warning first. So why the hell not… well, raise some hell?

  Chapter Six

  I couldn’t even manage to get out of Devin’s car in those stupid heels, not without potentially exposing myself to the wider audience of the area in which we had parked. Devin had to step in front of me and draw me out holding onto both of my hands. Then I took one step and teetered until he tucked my arm around his and led me off like a walking doll. I felt ridiculous, and seeing other suited men, sometimes also maneuvering women, glancing at us as we drew close to the entrance and trying to meet Devin’s eye with their knowing smirks made me feel horrendously conspicuous.

  I actually fell over in the elevator on the way up to the restaurant. There was one elderly woman riding up with us, who clutched her handbag closer to her chest and squinted down at me with this look of I know you’re drunk right now.

  I would have let her know I was currently kidnapped so the disapproval could be redirected to where it rightfully belonged, but a woman like that seemed liable to blame me for being kidnapped in the first place. So I clawed myself back to my feet with Devin’s help, and stayed close to him when we walked out onto a high floor of the building, leaving behind the head-shaking old bitch.

  It took about ten steps down the hallway we’d entered into for me to realise there was probably no restaurant here, just the many numbered doors of a hotel floor.

  “Um… Devin?” I could barely look at him. There was a danger in this situation I somehow hadn’t felt when we were in the cabin, with plenty of space around. Locked in a hotel room with him, there would be only one exit he could easily keep me away from, no chance of, say, smashing a window this far up unless I was determined to end it all. Perhaps he’d decided on the drive here that the only way to deal with me was to give me a taste of what I would receive if I agreed to be his wife. And would anyone care if they heard faint screaming coming from a hotel room?

  Suddenly nothing would have made me happier than to see that judgemental bitch from the elevator again.

  Devin suddenly stopped in the middle of the hallway, took a step back, and gripped my chin between a thumb and forefinger to turn my face up to his. His expression revealed a disgust even greater than any he’d shown until now. “Julia, I am not planning to drag you into my room here and rape you. Jesus. I need to pick up a new shirt before we go to dinner. This is a relatively relaxed establishment, and if I take my jacket off during the meal I’m going to throw everyone into a panic.”

  He held up his other arm so his jacket sleeve slipped down to expose his shirt sleeve. The one stained with the blood of the guy who had gotten on his bad side by trying to assault me… and here I was assuming he was going to do the same.

  This was the new most incensed I’d seen Devin, but he thrust it down fast and offered me his arm again. “Let’s hurry. Our reservation is for ten minutes from now.”

  I was still hesitant as Devin led me into a room and locked the door behind us, but I thought it was mostly because there was a certain novelty to being invited into a space that was actually occupied by a man like that, as opposed to some place he’d hired for the purpose of housing his captive. I peered around from my position pressed up against the door leading out, trying to spot anything interesting on show, but the room from there looked clean as if Devin had just moved in.

  Housekeeping, of course. “So where do you really live?” I asked him. “You needn’t be afraid I’m going to send someone around to kidnap you if you tell me.”

  I didn’t get the laugh out of him I’d been hoping for. “This is where I live right now. I haven’t bought a house of my own yet, I like being able to choose what my address is on any given day. I get good rates in the hotels around here and several people who offer me the use of their holiday rentals during quiet seasons, too.”

  He cocked his head at me and added, “Of course, if we were to marry I would buy a house for you. Can’t expect a wife to pack up every other week and move to a new place.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I was trying to get at,” I muttered, though now he’d said it I couldn’t shake the thought of it out of my head. He would just go out and buy a house for me… would he allow me to decorate as well? I didn’t know if the prospect excited or disturbed me.

  Devin ducked around the corner and came back with a white shirt on a hanger, its lines so neat he must have ironed it before he left to organise my kidnapping. But he’d been in fresh clothes when I got up that morning and somehow I doubted he’d left me alone with the hired help overnight, which meant… did he have all his shirts ironed and ready to go at a moment’s notice? Was that a service the hotel could provide? The more I learned about this man, the deeper down the mysteries seemed to go.

  Devin shrugged his jacket off, and the next thing I knew my hands were coming up to catch it as it flew in my direction. He even managed to throw clothes elegantly. “I’m not your clothes horse, you know,” I said, holding the jacket up with one hand an
d smoothing it with the other. Devin tilted his head sideways at me like he couldn’t work out what I was even objecting to, and then moved his hands to his collar. He loosened his tie in a movement that was pretty smooth compared to all the trouble my dad always had doing the same thing, and once it was hanging out of the way he started undoing buttons.

  I raised the jacket up so it was covering my mouth and cheeks, trying to look casual about it. He was doing a much more elegant job of casually revealing the sort of body I hadn’t even seen before in movies. He was a mix of contradictions: broad but slender, his skin looking both rugged and velvety, his lines soft but also defined. And his fingers were beautiful—I hadn’t noticed it before though I’d been watching him driving for a few hours and even yelled at him over his damn hands, but watching them work to take his clothes off was definitely getting the message across. His fingers looked better alongside one another than I thought fingers were even supposed to look, his nails neat and shiny.

  It was lucky for me that my hands were already occupied in holding up his jacket, or I might have made some embarrassing concession to my sudden desire to get closer to the action.

  And what did it matter if he knew? He probably did know that women fell over themselves the instant he took his clothes off. And the whole point of our encounter was that he intended to convince me to marry him… or to play along with intending to marry him, which was more or less the same thing these days, at least physically. On some level, he was making an offer of intimacy. Surely he’d be actually happy to hear that I wanted to be intimate with him, considering how offended he got about any notions of sexual assault.

  Well maybe it wouldn’t matter to him, but it definitely mattered to me. I didn’t want to end up overwhelmed by sexual feelings for a man, it was much more comfortable when it worked in the other direction. I just didn’t know if I had any way to escape it.

  Devin slid the shirt off, folded it so the bloody sleeve was quickly tucked out of sight, and set it down on a shelf nearby before turning to the fresh shirt he’d laid out on the table. He seemed to slump, just a little, and inhaled hard as the shirt folded over his back. It was like he was breathing in that freshly laundered brilliance.

  “Maybe you should have sealed the deal with me before you let slip you’re actually sexually attracted to your clothes,” I suggested.

  Devin turned to me so I got a front row seat to the ressembling of his tie: like every other step of this process, perfectly executed. A pair of hands like that would be able to do all sorts of things for a lover…

  But something about his expression cooled that thought down fast and hard. My face had gone hot under his gaze, and not for the reasons I would have expected.

  “Sex isn’t everything, Julia,” Devin said. “It isn’t even most things. Mostly, it’s the least convenient way of scratching an itch we all have and we all can do something about without needing to go there.”

  Well that just drew my eyes straight back to his moving fingers. I imagined him touching himself in preference to a woman, for convenience… and somehow, I doubted he would be going about it in a clinical and practical way.

  I hadn’t realised that sort of imagining could turn me on before, because I’d never tried to imagine that. But the fires were definitely being stoked down below, so to speak. I shuffled in my ridiculous heels, my feet aching with the sudden strain being placed on them, and then I actually tipped sideways and only managed to catch myself on the nearby wall.

  The shock of briefly falling shook some sense back into my head. Maybe Devin was telling me more than he intended to here. A man denying an interest in sex was either lying… or there was more going on than he was willing to admit. Perhaps there was some trauma in his past, or perhaps he just had his own reasons for thinking sex could be a danger to him. The hazards were not the same for women as for men, but a man sleeping with a woman still had to run the risk of causing a pregnancy with her he would then have little power to control… and even if he did everything he could to prevent that, there was still the need to trust his partner with some matters. Devin seemed to be making a show of extending a certain degree of trust to me, but I wasn’t fooled. I doubted he ever truly trusted anyone. I knew what that felt like when it was coming across too, because my parents had never trusted me either. I’d learned well from them.

  Maybe I was the woman Devin didn’t know he needed, who would actually be able to help him shed some light on why he behaved in a particular way.

  More likely: I needed to get away from Devin before I talked myself into one of a number of courses of action that wouldn’t be good for me.

  I didn’t realise Devin was trying to get me to give his jacket back until he removed it carefully from my fingers. “Distracted, and after how intent your study of me was before.”

  “Yeah well, maybe I saw enough.” I turned my face aside as he pulled the jacket back on to avoid revealing my response to him, but when he took my arm to link it back into his, I had to look up, and the sight of him perfectly organised again and with a fresh, fragrant shirt drew a little inhalation out of me as if I hadn’t tried so hard to suppress my natural response.

  “Are you hungry yet?” Devin asked. I’d refused anything other than water on the way there, genuinely too disoriented to feel like eating but also determined to be stubborn in whatever ways were left to me, and I was starting to feel like I could have taken a bite out of the print depicting a fruit bowl that was hanging above the desk in Devin’s room. But now… well, there was a different sort of hunger building in me that was taking my mind off the needs of my stomach again.

  And Devin didn’t need to know anything about that. If I was lucky, I could disrupt this evening before it got me into any sort of trouble.

  “Reservation for O’Hare,” Devin told the man at the little desk near where we came out in the elevator. He nodded, then checked his computer, then started nodding at us in a more manic way. One could only imagine what sort of note was left there about this particular customer, but at least the desk guy was primed to help.

  “And by the way,” I spoke up before he could reply, “Mr. O’Hare kidnapped me from my bed last night, and instead of taking me home he’s insisted I come out with him to dinner. And wear these shoes.”

  The guy peered over the edge of the desk at the foot I was wiggling illustratively, but I wasn’t sure that he could see enough to really understand. “Um, very nice ma’am, I’ll just show the two of you to your table.”

  “I…” Devin stepped away immediately to follow him so I was left completely alone at the desk and had to stagger after the two of them until I was back in earshot. “Um, did you not hear what I just said? I’ve been kidnapped, I need you to call the police for me.”

  The guy’s laugh was nervous. “Now, we are well-known here for our seafood experiences, serving locally-caught produce…”

  He was too scared to go against Devin… no, that didn’t make sense, because he seemed perfectly relaxed telling Devin about the new cheese menu they’d just launched. He was too scared to talk to me.

  I’d had this sort of interaction with men before too, though usually I’d been engineering it. He thought I was joking, and he didn’t understand the joke.

  It was because I was too calm about the whole situation, wasn’t it? I didn’t fit the bill of a woman who looked kidnapped. Was I going to have to turn into a blubbering mess just to get someone to take me seriously? Because that sounded incredibly embarrassing and I didn’t want to do it.

  “Look, I can take care of it myself if you can just give me access to—”

  “Julia.” I didn’t like it one bit, but Devin’s voice shut me up right away. He sounded like a father snapping his child into line. “We’ll just take a moment to consult the menu,” he said as we stopped in front of an empty table by the window, “and then I’d like to order some wine.”

  He turned on me fast as the server happily excused himself. “What do you think you’re doing, Julia?
”

  “It’s called standing up for myself. I’m sorry you probably haven’t encountered it a lot before.”

  “You’re just causing trouble for yourself, Julia. Sit down.”

  My feet were really starting to hurt, so I obeyed with excessive grace, and I even met Devin’s gaze as he sat across the table from me.

  “I’d like to have a nice evening, Julia, and then I’m going to allow you to get in contact with your parents so we can set this in motion, so if you can refrain from these juvenile plays for attention it’s actually going to get you what you want faster.”

  “I don’t think you know what I want right now,” I snapped, which caused his eyes to widen the way they seemed to just before he asked a question I didn’t like.

  The sommelier arrived at that moment, which saved me from finding out what he had in mind.

  “I’ve been kidnapped,” I told her, “by this man here, and I need access to a phone.”

  She pursed her lips at me, and then looked to Devin. Like he was my fucking father. Was this what women got once they had a husband? It wasn’t selling me on that idea at all.

  “Julia,” said Devin, “I know you’re angry with me right now, but I don’t think it’s right to keep dragging the staff here into this little joke of yours.”

  The sommelier made a satisfied little noise, aha I can safely ignore this now, and held out the wines list for our perusal.

  I’d never felt more awkward about the games I’d played with that poor kid Steven. This was exactly how he must have felt: like it wasn’t entirely his fault, but nobody saw what was right in front of their faces anyway.

  After Devin had selected a rather ostentatious-sounding red for us to drink and we were left alone again for a moment, he focused on me again with that look I’d been so uncomfortable about before.

  “What happened to that boy, anyway?” I frowned at him. “The one who kidnapped you.”