The Debt

by Jackie Ashenden

  Christ, the fire in her was sexy. The way she refused to back down got me hard as much as it irritated the shit out of me.

  ‘No, of course not.’ I gritted my teeth. ‘But I promise you there isn’t anything dodgy going on.’

  ‘Lying sounds pretty dodgy to me.’

  You’re going to have to tell her about Dumont.

  Because clearly she wasn’t going to agree to anything until I did. Fuck.

  Lifting my glass, I downed the Scotch in one go, scowling.

  I didn’t relish the idea of telling her about Dumont, but then not telling her made it seem as if I gave a damn about her opinion of me and I didn’t.

  At all.

  I put the empty Scotch tumbler down on the low table in front of the couch and met her gaze.

  She had those pretty, slender fingers wrapped around her glass, and I had to drag my focus away from them, my brain helpfully replaying memories of how those fingers had felt stroking my cock through my jeans, then adding fantasies of how good they’d feel if there were no denim between us. If they were wrapped around my dick...

  Focus, arsehole.

  ‘Fine, you want to know why I want those particular islands?’ I didn’t bother adjusting my surly tone. ‘Because my half-brother, Sebastian Dumont, also wants them and I don’t want him to have them.’

  Ellie frowned, studying me over the rim of her glass. She still had her chauffeur’s cap on and there was something vaguely endearing about how she was sitting there so primly in her uniform in a dark club with thumping music.

  ‘Okay,’ she said slowly. ‘So why don’t you want him to have them? I mean, I have four brothers, so I sort of understand.’

  Yes, she might. Then again, her family had a certain level of privilege. Her father built supercars, for fuck’s sake. You didn’t do that without money, regardless of his financial difficulties now.

  She must have seen something in my face because suddenly sympathy flooded through her expression. ‘Oh, hell. Is this painful for you?’ She leaned forward and put one of those delicate hands on my arm. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to. I just get curious. Tell me to piss off if it’s too much.’

  The concern in her eyes jolted through me like an electric shock, the light touch of her bare skin against mine only deepening the sensation.

  People never looked at me like that, as if my feelings mattered to them. Usually because I was too busy showing them how little theirs mattered to me.

  Yet right here, right now, despite how grumpy and rude I’d been, Ellie was looking at me with sympathy and concern.

  As if I mattered to her.

  Which, given the way you’ve been treating her, is absolutely undeserved.

  A muscle flickered in my jaw, my chest feeling suddenly tight. ‘You’d better not touch me like that, Miss Little,’ I said brusquely. ‘Not if you don’t want to be naked and on your back right here on this couch.’

  That’s right, make it about sex.

  I wasn’t making it about sex. It was about sex. Certainly it had nothing to do with the constriction in my chest, the ache in the vicinity of my heart.

  Something flickered in her eyes, but then her lashes came down, veiling her gaze, and her hand dropped from my arm. And I couldn’t get rid of the sense that my response had hurt her in some way.

  Unexpected shame crept through me.

  She does matter.

  I had no idea why or even how she’d managed it. But that didn’t change the feeling inside me. I didn’t like that I’d hurt her.

  Ellie was looking down at her orange juice, fussing with her straw, and I noticed that her hand was shaking a little. ‘Okay, so anyway,’ she said quickly. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. No worries at all.’

  You bastard.

  Well, technically, I was a bastard. And it had never bothered me before that I acted like a bastard, too, not when caring about other people’s feelings and what they thought of you was a vulnerability I could never allow.

  Except, I was bothered now.

  ‘You want to know where I got these scars from?’ I asked abruptly, following an impulse I never normally listened to.

  She looked up from her drink to the scars on my face. ‘I heard you were a street fighter or something.’

  The media loved my background; the story that I’d been into illegal street fights to get my start-up money was great fodder for them. The reality was a hell of a lot less romantic.

  ‘I was. And one day my opponent brought a knife to what was supposed to be a fist fight.’

  She looked aghast. ‘So...you fought him?’

  ‘Of course.’ I smiled, feeling the pull of the scar. Remembering the pain and the blood, and how everyone had roared my name afterwards. ‘I never backed down from a fight.’

  Her gaze followed the lines of my scars, her hand twitching as if she wanted to touch them. And quite suddenly I wanted her to. Wanted to feel her cool fingers on my hot skin with a desperation that took my breath away.

  The crease between her brows was deep. ‘But you could have been killed.’

  Something pulled inside me, like a muscle that hadn’t been warmed up properly, and it hurt. I wanted to snap at her all of a sudden, the pain and the strange desperation for her touch making me angry.

  But I didn’t want to hurt her, not again, so I bit back my retort. ‘Maybe,’ I said mildly enough. ‘But I was very good at fighting.’

  ‘So...’ Her gaze roamed over my scars again. ‘You won?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I won.’ A ghost of that familiar savage satisfaction echoed through me, the power I got from winning. From pitting myself against the odds and coming out on top. ‘I always won.’

  ‘You didn’t care about getting hurt? Or losing your life?’

  I shrugged. ‘I needed the money. And that was more important.’

  It always had been. For my mother’s sake.

  ‘My brothers like to win, too,’ she said quietly. ‘Which makes sense given that they’re racing car drivers.’

  ‘What about you?’ I watched her lovely face, shadowed by the brim of her cap. ‘Do you like to race cars and win as well?’

  Slowly she shook her head. ‘I don’t race. I like driving, don’t get me wrong, but my talent is design.’ One corner of her mouth lifted in a shy kind of smile. ‘I do like speed, but I’m all about making things go faster more efficiently from the ground up. The whole machine rather than simply putting your foot down.’ There was a certain sparkle in her eyes as she spoke, an excitement that for some reason caught me by the throat and refused to let go.

  ‘Your electric car,’ I said, suddenly desperately curious. ‘Tell me about it.’

  Her smile turned from shy into something a whole lot more forced and fake-looking. ‘No, you don’t want to hear about that. Anyway, you still haven’t told me why you want those islands.’

  But I didn’t want to talk about me. I wanted to talk about her. Because it hadn’t hit me until now what a fascinating collection of contrasts she was. Direct in a way that was very masculine, yet she was sitting primly in a way that was very feminine. She called me mate, pointed out my rudeness, and yet she blushed. Looked horrified at the knife scars on my face and yet had seemed pleased when I’d told her that I’d won.

  She was interesting. But getting interested in her was not at all what I should be doing.

  Which was getting her to agree to be my date.

  Which she still hadn’t.

  ‘Fine.’ I tried to mask my irritation at the change of topic and failed. ‘I took on those fights for a reason. I needed the money.’

  ‘Right. To start up your business.’

  ‘Partly. I also needed it to pay back a debt.’

  She sipped at her drink, watching me. ‘What debt?’


  ‘I already had that start-up money. In fact, by the time I left school, I had a nice little nest egg stashed away. Money I’d saved over the years through jobs here and there.’ My chest tightened but I forced myself to say it. ‘But mostly the money came from my mother, from the retirement savings I convinced her to give me. I was going to invest it in property and by the time she actually had to retire, she’d have millions. At least, that’s what I promised her.’

  She hadn’t wanted to give me that money, either, but I’d convinced her. I’d told her she’d get it back and with interest. And she’d believed me.

  Ellie grimaced. ‘Oh, no. Don’t tell me...’

  ‘I lost it. I lost every penny.’ My jaw ached. Christ, this should not be so hard to say. ‘My half-brother took it all.’

  ‘Hell,’ she muttered. ‘What did he do?’

  I wanted another Scotch, but I ignored the urge, concentrating instead on Ellie’s face. ‘About the only thing my bastard father did for me was to pay for a private school, the same school Sebastian went to. We became close friends and had plans to go into business together. He had money, plenty of it, but I didn’t and so I had to work hard to get my share of the cash together.’ My hands had closed into fists at my sides and I had to take a breath to unclench them. ‘There was a property we were aiming to buy and I thought we’d agreed on it, but soon after we left school, he decided on a different site that he thought would be more profitable. I told him the deal was shady—believe me, growing up on the estate, you get a sixth sense for that kind of thing. But he refused to listen. He went ahead and shelled out the cash without my agreement and, sure enough, the deal fell through and we lost everything.’

  More sympathy flickered in her eyes, making something inside me ache. ‘Oh, that’s awful.’

  ‘I was furious.’ And I had been. I could still feel the rage coursing through my veins to this day, boiling me dry. The sheer betrayal of it. Seb had been my closest friend and he was supposed to have my back. He wasn’t supposed to completely ignore me, treat me like I was just a know-nothing kid from a shitty council estate. He’d been shocked when it had all fallen apart, as if he hadn’t been warned that something like this was going to happen. Warned by me.

  After my father’s rejection of me, Seb’s refusal to listen had been too much.

  You could have talked to him at any time over the years. You didn’t have to turn your back on him so completely. But you did, didn’t you?

  ‘If it had been only my money that had been lost, it wouldn’t have been so bad,’ I went on, shoving the thought of my own culpability in the destruction of our friendship aside. ‘But it wasn’t. It was all my mother’s savings, too. He told me to relax, that we could get more money from somewhere else, but he was rich. Of course he could get what he wanted, whenever he wanted it. He even offered to put in my share for next time, but I refused.’ The embers of that anger burned sullenly inside me, turning my voice into a growl. ‘I didn’t want his fucking money. I didn’t want to have to be beholden to someone who didn’t listen. Someone who should have been my friend.’ I stopped, trying to get a handle on myself. ‘Anyway, I swore I’d make it on my own from then on. So I went out and tried to raise as much cash as I could, doing what I could. Street fighting was lucrative, paid cash, and I could earn it relatively quickly.’

  Plus, you enjoyed it.

  Yes, there was that. The gangs and the dealers threatened and intimidated everyone on the estate, my mother and me included. And it had given me immense satisfaction when I’d finally grown into my height and build, and I’d earned a reputation for being a mean son-of-a-bitch, to pay back that intimidation in kind.

  After that knife fight, no one had messed with me again.

  ‘What about your mother?’ Ellie asked. ‘She can’t have thought fighting was a good idea, surely?’

  I bared my teeth, remembering Mum’s disapproving face. ‘No, she didn’t. She said the money didn’t matter, but she was wrong. She’s always been wrong about that. Money always matters.’

  Especially when it had been money she’d worked hard for. Money that would have given her the kind of life she would have had if she hadn’t had me.

  There was a brief silence, Ellie’s gaze uncomfortably sharp. Uncomfortably knowing.

  Shit, I’d been too vehement, hadn’t I? Too angry. Betrayed too much.

  ‘Anyway, I got the money back,’ I went on, too quickly. ‘And I made my fortune. And I want those islands because Dumont wants them, too, and so I’m aiming to buy them out from under him.’

  ‘So...this is revenge or something?’

  I smiled. ‘It’s a reminder. That I’m still here. And that I haven’t forgotten.’

  She looked at me for a long time, not saying anything.

  Then she put her glass down on the table and said, ‘If I do this, you’ll give Australis some more time, right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a man of my word.’ That was the one good thing people could say of me. When I gave my word, I stood by it. ‘Plus, I can introduce you to a few key people at my club. You might find future sources of income for your own project.’

  Strangely, colour rose in her skin and she looked away. ‘I need to get Australis back into the black before that happens.’

  Her response wasn’t what I’d expected—given the sparkle in her eyes when she’d spoken about it before, I’d thought she’d be excited to talk about it. But again, this wasn’t about her as a person. This was about her as my date.

  ‘So, do we have a deal?’ I asked, leaving the subject of the car alone. ‘You’ll come to Dubai?’

  She glanced back at me, her expression unreadable.

  And a word escaped me, a word I never said to anyone. A word that I didn’t need to say to her, not given the power I had over her. Yet it came out all the same.

  ‘Please.’

  Her expression softened. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Okay. We have a deal.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ellie

  THE FIRST THING I realised on accepting Mr Evans’s deal was that I had nothing to wear. Or at least nothing that a ‘serious girlfriend’ would wear to a billionaires event in Dubai.

  I didn’t wear dresses or skirts or make-up—I hadn’t since my mother had died—and had never seen any reason to start. But even I knew that I was probably going to have to scrub myself up for this. Sadly, my chauffeur’s uniform—the nicest, most professional clothing I had—was probably not going to work.

  Which meant I was going to have to buy something nicer.

  However, that required a level of female know-how I did not have.

  A couple of my flatmates could have helped, but I was reluctant to tell them what was going on. They knew me as Ellie the chauffeur and the thought of asking them to help me buy dresses made me feel strangely self-conscious.

  Luckily, Mr Evans had an assistant called Petra, who soon took charge of Operation Get Ellie Ready for Dubai by taking me out on a shopping spree the Saturday before we were due to leave.

  It took me all of two seconds to realise that the shops she was taking me to were so far out of my price range they might as well have been the sun to my poor, poverty-stricken Pluto, and that there was no way I could afford it. I quickly told her the situation but she informed me crisply that this was a business trip and that Mr Evans would cover any and all expenses. Then she ignored my protests, dragging me into yet another designer shop on Bond Street.

  She was very good at getting her way. Some of the dresses and skirts she made me try on I protested about, uncomfortable at seeing myself in the mirror looking so...female. But again, she ignored me. She even got me into a gown—a green thing made out of some gossamer-like fabric that wrapped around me like a second skin—and then bought it, not even blinking at the outrageous price tag.

  Business expenses. Bloody hell.

  Eventually I ga
ve up protesting. If Mr Evans wanted to pay for all that bullshit, who was I to argue? He could probably pass the dresses on to his next girlfriend anyway and, besides, I had bigger things to think about.

  I called Dad that night with the good news that Mr Evans wouldn’t be pulling his investment from Australis any time soon, and he seemed pleased, though, as always, it was difficult to tell.

  He didn’t thank me—both of us knew that if it hadn’t been for Mark we wouldn’t have been in the position of me having to go to Mr Evans to start with.

  Yet, even though I’d expected it, Dad’s response sat in my gut like a small piece of glass, cold and sharp. He didn’t ask how I’d managed to get Mr Evans to listen and I didn’t tell him.

  He didn’t need to know that in return for doing what I had for Australis, I had to promise to go as Mr Evans’s date to some billionaire event in Dubai.

  I still didn’t know why I’d agreed. I’d demanded at least that Mr Evans tell me his reasons for lying to some guy so he could get a bunch of islands and also get one over on his half-brother.

  I hadn’t expected him to tell me, but he had. And it was clear that as much as he was angry with his half-brother for losing the money his mother had invested, he was also angry at himself, too.

  The blame game was something I was familiar with myself, and I couldn’t help feeling for him. But that wasn’t why I’d agreed in the end.

  It was the way he’d said ‘please.’ As if the word was foreign to him and he didn’t know its power, but had said it anyway.

  And because he’d needed something from me and it had been far too long since someone had needed anything from me.

  Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of trepidation.

  Being his girlfriend would probably involve some...physical closeness. And I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.

  Watching him talk about his fights, knowing the reasons for his scars, seeing the ferocity in his face as he’d mentioned how he’d won...

  The man had a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood and I don’t know why that fury fascinated me so much, but it did. Like a moth drawn to a burning bonfire, I was compelled towards him.