The hell with the waffles.
I slammed the bowl down on the counter harder than I’d wanted to as Dante flicked his finger back and forth. Behind me, Dante chuckled. His other hand released what fabric it was holding, only so he could cup my breast above my nightdress.
Pinned against his chest, I was helpless as one hand worked at my clit, the other at my nipple, twisting and massaging, while he sucked at the spot where my cheek and my neck met.
I could feel his cock poking into the small of my back, but the way his arms were clamped around me, I couldn’t reach back and take it in my hands. I couldn’t even reach out and grab hold of the counter to try to steady myself.
All I could do was clutch at his strong arms, twisting the fabric of his shirt between my fists as his fingers worked me closer and closer to the edge of an orgasm. Pants and moans left my mouth, but every time I felt like I was going to come, Dante would change what he was doing.
“Let me cum, Dante,” I begged. “Please.”
Dante stopped sucking at my neck and nipped at my ear. “Kiss me and show me how much you need this.”
I didn’t need telling twice. I turned my head, twisting my arm to hold him place as I practically forced my tongue into his mouth. Desperation took over as I kissed him, trying to dominate his mouth as I needed him to do my body.
Dante got the message. He forced his tongue into my mouth, taking over it as his fingers finally gave my body the release it was screaming for.
My legs buckled, but instead of keeping me upright, Dante allowed me to slither to the floor.
Gasping for breath, my eyes locked onto the erection straining at his pants.
Dante unzipped his jeans, pulling his cock free. He ran his hand over the head and down the shaft. “Take it,” he instructed me, leaning lazily back against the kitchen island, supporting himself with his elbows.
Doing exactly as he instructed, I inched forward on my knees, only to wince in pain.
My knees were still tender.
In an instant, Dante was pulling me to my feet, despite my protests. “Holly, baby, if you want pain, I will happily experiment with you, but that is not the way to do it.”
I didn’t have time to consider what Dante was telling me as moved back from the island so that he could place my hands onto it.
Stepping behind me, he pushed my nightdress up to my mid back and then pulled my panties down, the damp fabric sliding down my legs. I stepped out of them, just as Dante pushed my legs apart.
There was a brief moment’s pause as Dante pulled on a condom. The anticipation was enough to end a shiver down my spine and I curled my fingers around the edge of the marble worktop.
I could feel his head of cock as he slid it up and down me before finally brought it to my entrance. He inched the head in and then held it there. “So wet for me.”
“Dante,” I whined, before I could stop myself. Tease.
His hands grabbed my ass. With no other warning, he pushed his full length in.
Bracing myself, I gasped as his cock filled me, my body’s initial resistance ignored until I could feel the fabric of his clothing between me and the rest of his skin. “How does that feel?”
“Heaven,” I gasped.
My muscles clenched around him, trying to keep the incredibly satisfying feeling of him filling me in place.
“Not yet,” Dante muttered. He squeezed my ass and then he started thrusting into me. There was no buildup or warning. Out of nowhere he went from zero to one hundred. It felt incredible.
My knuckles turned white as I held onto the worktop. I could feel another orgasm building. “Oh god,” I cried. “Oh god, don’t stop.”
Dante didn’t stop. Somehow, he went deeper, forcing my body to take every inch of long cock.
His phone beeped. Manager Kim was here. “Don’t stop,” I told him again. “Don’t you dare fucking stop!”
“Not likely,” he agreed. Thrusting harder. The action made my arm wobble and we fell forward against the island. The action sent him deep into me. Any pain was wiped away as the orgasm rippled through me, and still Dante didn’t stop.
I didn’t even need to cling on as, pinned up between two hard surfaces, my body squeezing around him, Dante continued to thrust into me.
Finally, crying out my name and a lot of Chinese words, Dante stilled. Pulling me back up against him, he wrapped his arms around me, holding me tightly. “Don’t forget me when I’m gone.”
“Even if you were going for a decade, I wouldn’t forget you,” I promised him. “Why are you so clingy?”
He squeezed me, resting his chin against the side of my head. “Because you got hurt yesterday and because I’m not going to be here for a week, and because I love you.” Dante pressed a kiss against my temple before easing his cock out of me. “Right. I should go clean up. Manager Kim is waiting.” He kissed me. “I love you. Don’t miss me too much.”
With his cock still hanging out of his pants, he walked out of the kitchen.
Nineteen
After cleaning up myself, I returned to the kitchen and eyed the waffle batter up. If I made a bit more, there would be five more hungry mouths which would demolish the waffles when they woke up.
I was just pouring the existing batch into a jug so I could make some more when Tae appeared. “Dante’s gone then?”
“About twenty minutes ago.”
“We need to talk.”
“You sound very serious for this early in the morning.” I half turned to look at him. Seeing the expression on his face, I set my whisk down. “You look very serious for this early in the morning. What’s wrong?”
Instead of answering, Tae took my hand and gently pulled me to the door to the garage. Both concerned and confused, I followed as he led me across the underground garage to the small studio. Inside, he locked the door behind us, and then led us into the actual recording booth.
“In case it wasn’t evident by the expression on my face, you’ve got me worried, Tae. What’s wrong?”
“I need to talk to you, and short of leaving the house, there’s nowhere else that’s completely soundproof.”
That didn’t reassure me. If anything, it had my heart pounding faster. “What’s wrong?” I asked for a third time, emphasizing my words.
“It was what Dante said last night.”
My mind went blank. A lot had been said last night.
“About paying Kyun’s father off,” Tae helpfully supplied. “He said that giving Ha Jeonggu money to pay of his debt wouldn’t be enough and we’d need to give him more to pay him off.” Tae shook his head. “Holly, that’s not going to work. Especially not if he has that video of you.”
In the back of my mind, I’d come to the same conclusion. I was going to go to the legal team and speak to Byun Yongdae. I trusted him.
Outside of Inhye, he was the only other person who knew the ins and outs of all the relationships at Atlantis—including my own.
While I didn’t expect to change Korea and their views when it came to idols dating, I didn’t want any of the artists or actors at Atlantis to feel like they had to stay single or run the risk of losing their contract with the company.
Yongdae and I had slowly been working through each contract and changing them where required to take out the dating ban that Sejin had written in.
If I could trust Yongdae with that, I knew I could tell him about the situation with Kyun’s father in complete confidence. Maybe there was a legal road we could go down to resolve this…
“I have something on him,” Tae told me.
That was not what I was expecting him to say. “Huh?”
“Something nobody knows but me and him.”
The intensity in Tae’s eyes scared me. “What?”
Tae shook his head. “It will work. I know it will. But I need you to promise me that you will never let a word of this get back to Kyun. When we see Ha Jeonggu, our endgame is to get him to leave Korea.”
“Leave Korea?” I spl
uttered. “He has a life here.”
“No, he has a gambling debt here. Kyun has no other family other than his father. No grandparents, no uncles. The only thing tying Jeonggu to Korea is Kyun, and Kyun just cut that rope. While he’s still here, he’s going to be a constant threat.”
I scratched at the back of my head, not sure how I felt about that. My own mother had been driven out of the country and she’d hidden in America to bring me up. My mother did have family back then.
Tae closed the distance between us, his hands resting on my shoulders as he looked down at me. “Holly, it’s crap. I know it’s crap. But Jeonggu has already come back into his life once. Once he knows we will pay, he will try it again in the future.”
“Even with the thing you have on him?”
Turning his head, Tae closed his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“Can’t you tell me what it is?” I asked.
Tae shook his head. “Not now…”
“If you can’t tell me, I’m not sure this is a good idea. I was going to speak to Byun Yongdae and see if he can find a legal way to get him out of our lives.”
Locking his eyes on me, Tae shook his head. “We both know if we try to do this legally, it’s going to all come out in the news.”
“Tae,” I said, slowly. “Is what you’re wanting to do legal?”
“Trust me, Holly.”
I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “No,” I said, firmly. “You can’t even tell me that what you want to do is legal. That doesn’t get blind faith when illegal things usually end up with people in prison. If you want me to go along with this, you need to spill this secret.”
Biting his lip, Tae let go of me, walking over to the other side of the small room where he stared out through the window at the mixing desk on the other side. “I bought Kyun.”
Korean was my second language, but I was no near enough fluent in it.
But I must have misunderstood him. “What?”
Tae turned and looked at me, shame burning on his cheeks. “I bought Kyun.”
“How do you buy a person? That’s… slavery.”
Giving me a pointed look, Tae let out a long breath. “After a while of living with us, we got bits and pieces about what Kyun’s homelife had been like. My mom decided enough was enough and went to ask Ha Jeonggu to let her take care of Kyun. When she came back, she said it was done, but Kyun had been there and he’d said something about his father not knowing what she was talking about.”
Tae moved over to the microphone and ran his hand over the filter.
“It didn’t feel like that was the end of it to me, so I went back to Ha Jeonggu’s apartment and spoke to him myself. He must have been sober because he knew who Kyun was. Only when I told him he was now living with us, he told me he wasn’t going to let that happen. He told me everything had a price.”
“Including his own son?” Inside, my stomach was churning.
“Including his own son.” Tae sneered. “I asked his price and he said a hundred thousand won.”
That was barely eight dollars.
“I went and I emptied my savings account and gave him every last won I owned. It was only about one hundred and fifty thousand, saved up from New Years and birthday presents, but I gave it all of him and got him to sign the back of a soju label as a receipt. I still have it.”
Chewing at the inside of my lip, I stared at Tae in disbelief, completely conflicted about how I felt.
Kyun had been a kid when that had happened, and Tae had joined Atlantis when he was still in high school, so he’d been a kid too. There was no doubt in my mind that Tae had done what he had with the best of intentions.
He’d wanted to save his best friend—his younger brother—and he probably had.
But Tae had also been carrying this around with him for a decade?
Despite not liking Ha Jeonggu and wanting him to get out of Kyun’s life as quickly as I could kick him out, the idea of exiling him to another country didn’t sit right with me.
Yes, Sejin had been exiled to China, but it had happened with the family knowing about it. Well, maybe Woojin hadn’t told Seungjin…
But because my mom had been forced out of Korea, pregnant and alone, I’d had my doubts if that was the right thing to do. Kyun had said he never wanted to see his father again, but it felt like we were doing something behind his back.
But if Ha Jeonggu could sell his fucking flesh and blood…
I was shaking.
There was so much rage flowing through my system that my body was trembling.
“You’re right. Kyun can’t know about that.” I moved over to Tae and enveloped him in a hug. “And I’m so sorry you’ve had to carry that knowledge by yourself. No more. I’ll take it to the grave, but you’re not alone with this anymore.”
Tae shuddered in my arms. “I would do it again.”
“Had I been in the same situation, I probably would have done it too,” I told him. I stepped back, reaching up to brush Tae’s hair out of his eyes. “Let’s do this later today. I don’t want this lingering around for much longer. Let’s get him out of Kyun’s life once and for all.”
We waited until after breakfast. Kyun was taking the doctor’s orders seriously, and he was spending the day in front of the television with the others to keep him company. Tae and I announced we were going to speak to Ha Jeonggu but left shortly after Jun offered to be our ‘muscle’.
Making sure I had let Inhye know I was going to be uncontactable for the next hour despite the huge amount of work waiting for me, we drove over to Gimpo. We’d made a detour to a bank so that I could make a withdrawal and then I had sent a message to Ha Jeonggu to ask him to meet.
He’d responded almost instantly with an address which had led us to a quiet parking lot near a subway stop. While it wasn’t raining, the temperature seemed to have dropped another ten degrees, and despite the thick coat I was wearing, the wind was having fun with my stocking covered legs.
Ignoring it, Tae and I walked over to Ha Jeonggu. He had arrived in his taxi and was leaning against it. He pushed off as he came close, his eyes narrowing at us. “You have my money?”
I pulled a small messenger bag off my shoulder. “There’s triple what your debt totals in there.”
Jeonggu snatched the bag off me and opened it, peering it. He looked up at me and sneered. “You think that’s enough for me to not release that video? The media would pay more than that. You’ve not even paid me in the right currency.”
“No,” I told him with a nonchalant shrug. “That’s your debt paid off and a goodwill gesture for you leave the country. You’ll find that the extra money is in US dollars. There’s also a first-class ticket to California in there. The flight leaves tomorrow morning.”
“You are asking me to leave Korea?” Jeonggu asked in disbelief.
“She is, but I won’t,” Tae told him.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Tae folded his arms. “I see you don’t remember me. I’m the kid you sold your son to.”
Ha Jeonggu paled. “That didn’t happen.”
“I heard that alcohol can do some shit to your memory, so I brought a copy of the receipt you gave me.” Tae pulled a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket and held it up. “And if you don’t leave Korea, and stay out of Kyun’s life forever, I’m going with this to the police.”
“They won’t do shit,” Jeonggu scoffed. “That was a joke between two people.”
“Not according to my lawyers,” I told him. “According to them, it’s a binding agreement, especially as money switched hands. That’s child trafficking.”
“No. Because if I go down, I will take you down with me,” he said pointing at Tae. “You paid that money.”
“Hyuntae was a child at the time. It doesn’t count. You were the adult. The responsibility is all on you.”
“I don’t know about you,” Tae said, glancing in my direction. “But America is sounding like a lot more pleasurable alternative
to prison to me.” He turned to Jeonggu. “Or are you set on staying in Korea?”
“I’ll release the video!”
Shifting my weight, I tapped my heeled shoe against the ground. “Go ahead. We’ve got contingency plans in place, including making sure the whole world knows that video was fake, and considering you’ll have lost all credibility after we also tell the world you sold your son, no one will believe you.”
“There’s nearly a hundred thousand dollars in that envelope. That’s more than enough to start a new life, and more than fair.” Jeonggu glowered at the pair of us, but Tae shrugged. “Or prison.”
“Just walk away,” I said, calmly. “Walk away and delete Kyun’s number. Or don’t,” I shrugged. “He’s getting a new number anyway.”
With his hand clutched tightly around the strap of the bag, Jeonggu wrenched open the door of his taxi and got in, slamming it closed behind him. Tae and I remained where we were, watching as he drove away.
It was only when I couldn’t see his car anymore that I let out a long sigh. “Do you think it worked?”
“We’ll find out tomorrow if he checks into the flight.”
“Let’s get out of here and tell Kyun it’s done,” I said as my teeth started chattering.
“I’ll drive,” Tae told me, leading me around to the other side of the car.
I was grateful. Despite it being morning, I was exhausted.
Even though I had so much work to do, I called Inhye and told her I was staying home. I’d do some work there, but for today, I wanted to be as close to my guys as I could be.
Party
Ha Jeonggu, miraculously, checked onto the flight. Even though there had been a clear departure time, I was refreshing the ticket details on my iPad from the moment I had walked into the office.
As soon as I’d seen the confirmation, I’d called Tae. As far as Kyun was concerned, we’d gone home after speaking to Ha Jeonggu and told him he would never need to see him again.
Wicked Souls: A Limited Edition Reverse Harem Romance Collection Page 123
