DEBT
“Her words make me ache and yearn for more.” - Dancer in the Dark
“Dark and addicting!” - Lexi Rae, bestselling author
I owe him a debt. A big one.
A dark and dangerous stranger paid for my mother’s cancer treatment, saving her life.
Now I owe him. But I can’t pay it back with money, not that I even have any.
He wants only one thing: Me.
His for one year.
Will I walk away in one piece?
One-Click DEBT Now!
* * *
DEBT is a full-length contemporary novel from bestselling author Charlotte Byrd about demands and the game of seduction. It can be read as a standalone.
DEBT Collection of standalone novels
Debt
Offer
Unknown
Wealth
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Praise for Charlotte Byrd
“The story is dark and enticing, taking me deeper into a world from which I never want to emerge.” - Lover of Alpha
“Addictive and damaged, their love burns slowly but deeply.” - Heroes and Alphas
“Sophia and Jax’ chemistry sizzles right from the beginning. He’s the gorgeous and dangerous stranger we all need in our life.” - Making Words Up
“Her words made me fall in love. They slayed me!” - Sizzling Books
“Left my head spinning! I never wanted it to end!” - Heartbreakers and Heroes
“Her words make me ache and yearn for more.” - Dancer in the Dark
Chapter 1 - Sophia
When life isn’t what it was supposed to be like…
I enter the double-wide trailer, which has been my home since I was six, with a sense of dread. My mom’s hospital bed barely fits into the back room, and ever since we had that installed, everything else had to be moved around and put into every crevice throughout the house it would fit in. Clothes, boxes, shoes, and magazines are everywhere. Now that Mom’s not working at the bar, I have to work twice as many hours just to make the same amount of money. And it’s never enough.
She has to take more and more pills, and the prices are constantly changing. Last month, one of her pills cost forty dollars for a one-week supply, and now it’s $325 for the same amount, without much of an explanation as to why. I empty my pockets. The tips from the regulars after an eight-hour shift are a little over twelve dollars. I don’t blame them. They don’t have much to spare themselves. But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.
I reach into my other pocket and pull out a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. I’ve never received a tip that big before and I’m eternally grateful. It will go a long way to paying for this month’s rent. It might even let me get some of my mom’s jewelry from that pawn shop. No, I can’t think like that. Medication is more important than heirlooms.
“Is that you, Sophia?” I hate how faint my mom’s voice is. She used to be such a tough and strong woman. She never took shit from anyone, especially not men. I’m much shyer and unsure of myself than she is. Not as confident. Not as strong. But now, my mom is weak and tired.
“Don’t come in yet,” she says when I approach the door.
“Mom, it’s okay,” I say through the door. I hear her moving around in the bed and making a ruckus. Things are falling over and glass shatters.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she says. I’m about to open the door.
“Don’t you dare open that door, Sophia Elizabeth Cole.”
When Mom uses my full name, I know she really means it.
After a couple more minutes, she shouts, “Okay, I’m ready!”
I walk in. She’s looking into her compact and adjusting her wig. Her face is made up to the ten. Her eyebrows are penciled in, and she’s even wearing fake eyelashes. She finishes off the look with a generous slather of lipstick and smiles at me.
“You look beautiful,” I say, trying to hold back tears.
“Oh, c’mon, don’t start now. If you cry, you’ll make me cry, and then all this work will go to hell.”
I smile. I love my mom’s soft Southern accent. She was born in Kentucky and moved to California when she was sixteen with her first husband, but her accent never went away.
“What would you like for dinner?” I ask, trying to change the subject. Mom looks like she’s ready to go to a ball, but all we will be doing is sitting around the television with tray tables and eating whatever concoction I dream up.
“Macaroni and cheese?” she asks.
“Again?” We’ve had it for a week straight.
“I’m afraid it’s the only thing I can keep down nowadays.”
I nod and head to the kitchen. When I get the butter out, tears are flowing out of my eyes uncontrollably and I can’t stop them.
Mom worked hard all of her life. She’s worked since the age of fourteen, and she deserves better than this. She’s only forty-four years old, for goodness sake! And now she’s dying a slow and horrible death. She can’t eat anything without throwing it up again. The chemo is poisoning her, and we can’t even afford the poison anymore. And there’s nothing I can do to stop any of this.
* * *
I come home and sit by her and I don’t know what is worse. My job or my time at home. It’s not that I don’t want to be here, to spend time with her. It’s just that I feel my whole life slipping away along with hers. There was a time when I had dreams. I was a good student. I got A’s and B’s. I took the SATs. I wanted to go to college. Actually, there was a time when I wanted to go to graduate school. Maybe I could even be a lawyer or a doctor. Something fancy like that. But now? After years of taking care of her and watching her get worse and worse? I don’t have much hope for my life anymore.
I sit down next to her and put on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I recently splurged for a Netflix subscription and we have been re-watching this show together ever since. She watches other things when I’m at work, but when I come home, we watch at least two or three episodes of Grey’s. It’s the third season and Dr. Burke’s hands aren’t working too well. These episodes are scary to me, as I’m sure they are to Mom. What if one of her surgeons is going through something like this? What if his hands aren’t working as good as they once were and he’s refusing to acknowledge this fact?
I look over at Mom. She looks older than her years. Underneath all the makeup, that is. She has trouble showering and taking care of herself, but one of her favorite things to do is to ‘put on her face’ as she calls it. Every morning without fail. Her makeup bag sits on the windowsill next to her, within arm’s reach. It’s all from the local drugstore. None of it is expensive. One of these days, I’d like to take her to Sephora and buy her anything that she wants.
I give her a warm smile and go back to the screen. Dr. Burke’s hands are in pain and he makes a mistake in surgery. Blood splatters everywhere. Mom and I exchange glances.
“That’s not going to happen to you,” I say. “It’s just a show.”
“I know. Of course, it won’t, honey,” Mom says with a reassuring smile. She squeezes my hand for good measure. Then I realize that it’s not so much that I’m reassuring her, but that she is reassuring me.
“You know, Sophia,” Mom says after a moment. “You could be Dr. Burke if you wanted to.”
“What?” I ask, taken aback.
“You are still young. You can do anything you want. You are smart and beautiful and competent. And you have your whole life in front of you.”
I shrug and look down at the floor.
“I want you to go to college, Sophia. Because that’s something you have always wanted to do. I want you to do that, and then I want you to do whatever you want to.”
Tears well up in my eyes again.
“What do you want to do, Sophia?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you were little, you wanted to be a doctor. And when you watched How to Get Away with Murder, you wanted to be a lawyer.”
“That’s the thing. Maybe I jus
t watch too much TV.”
“No,” she says seriously. “You are a caring, loving person with a beautiful soul. I just don’t want to see you working in that diner for the rest of your life if that’s not something you want to do.”
“Do you really think I can do something like that?” I ask, pointing to the surgery on TV. “Because that’s a bit hard to believe.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You have been an amazing caretaker for me. But it’s time for you to start being a little less selfish. My time is coming to a close. But your life is just beginning, honey.”
I shake my head. “No, no, no,” I mumble.
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
“You have to keep fighting, Mom.”
“I’m tired of fighting, Sophia. Now, I just want to talk about your future. You have done so much for me already, but I just want you to do one more thing.”
“What is it?”
“I want you to live your life to the fullest. I want you to go after your dreams.”
“But I don’t know what my dreams are.”
“That’s what you’ll have to figure out. And once you do, you go after them with all of your strength. Because you deserve to do something that makes you happy, sweetie.”
Chapter 2 - Sophia
When I get a surprise…
A week later, I am driving home from work on a beautiful, sunny day, thinking that the sky is so blue and there’s not a single cloud as far as the eye can see. My legs are cramping up, and I can’t wait to get home to climb into bed. I’m not much of a morning person, and these morning shifts are killing me.
I worked from four a.m. until noon, and this eight-hour shift was harder than the busy evening shifts any day. Barely anyone comes in after ten, and breakfast customers don’t like to tip as much as dinner customers.
I finally pull onto our street and see the house in the distance. The paint is peeling on the side, and the porch is cluttered with junk, which we no longer have room for inside the house. I need to take care of that one of these days. Just don’t know how or when. Paint costs money. Putting junk away doesn’t, but I don’t know where to put it. A shed is close to one thousand dollars, and I’m not going to have that kind of money anytime soon. Cardboard boxes? Perhaps. But boxes full of junk are easier to steal than loose junk.
The street leading up to the house isn’t really a street, but a dirt road. When we first moved here and Mom’s second husband, my father, was still around, we would wash the car every week. Within a day, the desert’s dry climate and our dirt road would deposit a thin layer of dust on the car, making the exercise fruitless. My father insisted that we had to do it because of pride, but he’d left by the time I turned eight and took the car. I guess his pride extended only to the car, not to his family. We didn’t have another car for more than a year after that.
I pull up to the chain-link gate and get out. The neighbor’s pit bull and Rottweiler are already going nuts. They welcome me home from work multiple times a day with the excitement of a full marching band and always put a smile on my face.
“Hey, Bella. Boomer.” I wave to them. “I’ll be right over.”
I get back in the car, park, and head over to the dogs. The other neighbors are afraid of them, but they are the sweetest dogs I’ve ever met. I stick my hands through the chain-link fence and pet them each on their heads.
After the brief hello, which is honestly the highlight of my day, I try to pull the gate closed before heading in. Usually, this is barely a process at all. But today, the wheels on the bottom, which squeak so loudly they send shivers up my spine, get stuck. When I pull them harder, they take off and run over my foot.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I curse, hopping on one foot. “Dammit.”
The gate needs to be oiled, but I don’t really have any extra money to spend on WD-40 or the time to drive out to Home Depot to get it.
“Stupid gate!” I kick it instead. Not a great solution.
I’m about to head inside when, out of the corner of my eye, I see the mail truck. I am about to turn back, but something keeps me here. Getting the mail is not as exciting of an event as it once was. A long time ago, I remembered looking forward to getting cards in the mail from my grandparents and tearing through envelopes with the words “Sweepstakes” and “Winner” on the cover. Nowadays, the only thing that comes in the mail is medical bills.
Despite that, something is holding me back. I wait for the mail truck to pull next to the house. The mailman is a sweet old man who has been delivering mail for close to thirty years or so. Whenever we are short on money, and I have to say that the check is in the mail, even though it isn’t, I’ve always felt bad about it because I know that I’m blaming it on him.
“How’s your mom?” he asks. There’s no way to really answer that question. Throwing up every morning, afternoon, and night. Staying in bed all day long. People don’t want to hear these things.
“Hanging in there,” I say. It’s the best way to describe the teetering that she’s doing between this world and the next.
The mailman hands me a thick stack of envelopes. All are approximately the same size, and I know they’re all bills. I sigh and head to the house.
I don’t have any money to pay any of the bills. I will have to spend days in the coming week on the phone talking with various administrators at the hospital and Mom’s different doctors’ offices, all with the hopes of getting some of the bills reduced.
I toss the pile of bills on the kitchen table and open the refrigerator door looking for something to eat. I’ve been up since 3:30 a.m, so a simple grilled cheese sandwich is a no-brainer. While the skillet is heating up, I check on Mom, who’s fast asleep with the blinds still down.
When I sit down at the kitchen table, I reach for the remote to flip on the TV and accidentally knock the stack of bills onto the floor.
“Dammit,” I say. I gather all the envelopes, but one stands out. It’s different than the rest, and my name is written on it in a beautiful cursive script.
Ms. Sophia Elizabeth Cole
I look at the envelope closer. The paper is fancier than the others, and the stamp is unusual, not the standard issue stamps that they sell at the post office. It has a detailed painting of a buffalo in a field of grass.
There’s no return address in the upper left-hand corner. When I turn the envelope around, I see that it’s from The Grayson Foundation. Something about that name sounds familiar. Grayson. What’s Grayson? Is it Grayson International, the pharmaceutical company?
Instead of tearing the envelope open like I usually do, I get a knife and carefully slice open the top.
* * *
Dear Ms. Sophia Elizabeth Cole,
It has come to our attention that your mother is gravely ill. Please use the following check to pay for her treatment.
* * *
There’s more to the letter, but that’s the only part I see. I read it over and over, not believing my eyes. I look into the envelope again and pull out a check.
$250,000
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About Charlotte Byrd
Charlotte Byrd is the bestselling author of many contemporary romance novels. She lives in Southern California with her husband, son, and a crazy toy Australian Shepherd. She loves books, hot weather and crystal blue waters.
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Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Charlotte Byrd
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval syst
ems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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