by Tiffany Sala
She cocked her head at me like a meerkat who had spotted this assault on the burrow a long way off. “Have you had many offers of friendship?”
“This might be the only really serious one,” I admitted.
“I was going to say. I’ve had a few in my time, and this sort of scene is by no means the worst it’s gotten.”
“What would you have done if I did end up staying with my parents?” I had a feeling the answer was just going to twist my head up in even more knots, and yet I had to know. “Or was trying to be my friend then less serious than it is now?”
“Well if they hadn’t gone the kidnapping route there would have been no problem, right?” said Caroline.
As expected it hurt my head, and yet she had a point.
I snatched the biscuit tray from her before she could steal her fourth. “I am going to need a friend if I’m ever going to survive until the wedding, never mind any further than that. But next time, you have to make sure you talk to me if you want me to butt out of something. Don’t just dump me in the middle of a drama we didn’t need to have, my life is too complicated for that already.”
“Agreed,” said Caroline. I had a feeling she really meant it… but I also had a feeling she was willing to drop the whole project if it suited her.
I was sitting down with a good coffee, and I was exhausted.
“I’m still sort of wondering whether I can do this,” I admitted, even though Caroline seemed like the worst person to take advice from at the moment. Second only to my parents and that guy with Devin’s logo carved into his dick, maybe.
“I think I can trust you with a little secret,” said Caroline. “We’re all of us, in this world, getting up in the morning and wondering what the hell we’re even doing, I think. Trying to figure out if we can stay in the game.”
I thought about that for a few seconds. “You know what? Doesn’t make me feel one bit better.”
“I doubted it would,” Caroline admitted.
Chapter Twenty
I slid around in Devin’s oversized bed, missing most of my clothes, while he sat on the edge in an immaculate suit and watched me. I had no idea how he’d gotten from what we were doing before that to that point. It just showed some things about this partnership—this relationship—were going to take a while to change.
Him trusting me with the details of his life when he wasn’t with me was one of them, unfortunately. He still hadn’t explained what was so important that he couldn’t take a moment to enjoy an interlude with his (possible) future wife with his clothes off.
“You know,” I spoke up once I’d gotten sick of admiring his admittedly fabulous side profile. His head turned. “There have been so many guys who would have killed to get a piece of what you just walk away from on a regular basis.”
“And there are times I don’t walk away from it either,” Devin returned, “such as when I don’t have to work. I was never one of those ‘so many guys’, anyway: you never bothered to so much as check if I’d actually killed anyone before you were throwing yourself at me.”
Devin had a way of sucking the humour out of certain otherwise perfectly normal witty remarks. “Are you saying I was too easy to value?”
“Easy to value? Absolutely, my dear. Too easy… not at all, I think you provided an excellent ratio of challenge to reward.”
“I hate when you wordplay my brain into submission like that,” I told Devin.
“I know,” he said.
We fell into a silence that seemed to welcome me asking about the less contentious thing that was on my mind. “So… I’m your dear, then?”
“Absolutely.” I hardly ever seemed to surprise him when I called him out on his own statements. It made me realise just how controlled his brain really was under the surface: he never spoke a word he wasn’t prepared to account for that very moment. I had a feeling it was some sort of response to the way he’d grown up, not least the detail of what my parents had done to him, but it was an admirable quality as far as I could see. I’d done a lot worse with far more minor trauma.
“Yes,” Devin continued. “A deer in the headlights…”
“Devin.”
“…and my dear girl, who deserves everything I can give her and much more that maybe I can’t.”
“I suppose we still haven’t gotten around to organising that paperwork yet,” I remarked.
“No,” said Devin. “And it hasn’t escaped my notice.”
He stood to walk around the bed and climbed back in with me, actually unbuttoning his shirt so I could get my hands in and sliding his pants down to around knee-level under the covers: a real evolution, where he was concerned. He stroked my hair and kissed my nipples and I clung to his thighs as he pressed into me, careful to avoid the mark he was still wary about me touching. The journey to him accepting that mark as something I could have ownership over was perhaps not one he could ever make. At the very least, it would take some time. And from now on, I had to have a very good reason before I seriously messed with the head of a man who meant me no harm.
“There is… one rule I will impose on you,” Devin said, his forehead against mine as he moved slowly, too slowly, just slowly enough. “No more getting kidnapped.”
I laughed, and he moved fast for a moment just to show me how much this wasn’t a joke. “Really?” I said once my eyes had stopped rolling back in my head. “You… really think I can control that?”
“You have to make an effort,” Devin told me. “Because if you require me to rescue you again… I’m going to drag you back to this bed or an equivalent one where I know you’re safe, and I am going to nail you down under me so there’s no chance of anyone snatching you away under my nose.”
I almost couldn’t breathe. “You know what, Devin O’Hare? I’m feeling like… I might get kidnapped a lot, in the near future.”
His body stiffened with aggravation that was half real, half playing. Frightening, and exhilarating. “Then the punishment had better start now.”
He had completely forgotten he had somewhere else to be, and who was I to remind him? I didn’t even know where he was supposed to be going.
Maybe it was still okay for me to mess with the head of a man once in a while.
Thank you for reading!
I hope the first part of the Taken duet was an enjoyable read for you.
The second book in the duet, current working title Taken to the Altar, will be released in the coming months.
If you haven’t read Julia’s brief first appearance in my books, you might be interested in checking out Games Boys Play, the second book in my Troubled Playthings trilogy. It is set a few years before the events in Taken For a Debt and sees Julia in the role of antagonist. Having read this book you might be able to imagine why!