The Debt: The Complete Series (An Alpha Billionaire Romance)

by Kelly Favor

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him walking towards her. “During the Green Bay game, I was out there getting my ass kicked,” he said, as if she’d asked about it and he was only now answering her. “I was getting knocked around by these fucking animals, hitting me from all sides. And you know what I thought during the worst of it?”

  She finally looked up from her beer, forcing her eyes to meet his, even though it made her chest ache and her belly fill with butterflies. “What did you think?” she said.

  He didn’t break eye contact with her as he responded. “I thought to myself, I just want to go home and have Faith waiting there for me. I want to say fuck it to this crazy sport, and fuck all the people trying to take shit from me, all the people who want something from me—and to go and be with the one person who actually seems to want to give me something.”

  His eyes were so intent on her as he stood there, the most physically stunning man she’d ever seen in her life. And he was looking only at her, and he’d just told her things that couldn’t be true. It must have been a dream, or she was actually insane and drooling in some loony bin right now, having a hallucination about the most famous football player in the world saying these things to her.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” she finally gasped.

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I’m just confused.”

  “This thing with you isn’t supposed to be complicated,” he said.

  “So this is a thing?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “What kind of thing is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. And then he moved to the couch and sat down next to her, and she slid over to make room for him.

  His massive body nearly took up every spare inch, and his legs were touching hers. She felt her skin break into goose flesh as he made physical contact.

  “I feel like maybe I’m losing my mind,” Faith admitted, laughing a little.

  “Why?”

  “This just seems surreal. I mean, you’re—you’re you.”

  “Last I checked,” he grinned, his eyes burning into hers as she looked away.

  “And I’m just some average girl. I don’t know why you’re with me.”

  “Don’t say that,” he told her, reaching out and touching her face gently, causing her to look at him again. His hand was so large that she couldn’t even fathom how he could touch her so softly, so kindly.

  “Is it wrong that I care about you already, when we hardly even know each other?” she asked him, finally meeting his gaze.

  “I like that you’d even say that to me,” he told her, sliding closer. His hand dropped to her leg and slid up and down on her thigh. “Say it again.”

  “What? That I care about you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Say that again.”

  She smiled, blushing. “I care about you.”

  He moved forward, leaning towards her now. “Say it again.”

  “I…I care about you, Chase.”

  “Again.” Now his lips were almost touching hers, and she could see clearly the bruising and red scratches around his eyes, the split lip that was somehow sexier than anything she’d ever seen.

  “I care about you,” she whispered, her heart beating so fast, as his lips pushed against hers, and his tongue entered her mouth.

  She moaned, having wanted this so badly, having thought about him almost nonstop since the moment they’d met.

  And now, he was with her, and he was even better than she remembered.

  His lips teased her, sometimes gently sucking and then other times becoming suddenly aggressive, as if he wanted to open her mouth wider so that he could taste her more and more and more.

  And then his hands were sliding up her legs, to her waist, holding her momentarily as he kissed her.

  As they became more and more fervent, Chase’s hands slid up and cupped her breasts through her shirt. He leaned in, pressing his significant weight against her, as she slid back on the couch.

  Chase was on top of her now, his body hovering over hers, his arms holding his body up as he kissed her more deeply now—so deeply that she felt her pussy moistening in anticipation.

  Faith reached up and grabbed his strong, tight buttocks with both hands and then pulled him into her hips, as she opened her legs and locked them around him.

  He grunted appreciatively, pressing his bulging cock against her pussy. They were both fully clothed, but his pressure stimulated her, and Faith turned her head and cried out.

  “Fuck, baby, I want you,” he groaned and then sucked her earlobe as his hands grasped her breasts, greedy, thumbing her nipples.

  “I want you too,” she said, breathless.

  He was dry fucking her and she liked it. His cock was hard as a rock, hammering down at her pussy, as she pushed back up into him with her own hips. She swiveled her pelvis, rocked against him as he grew more quick and heated, his lips trailing down her neck.

  “I love your body,” she said, grabbing his strong forearms and then feeling up his arms, to his huge biceps, enjoying every contour.

  “Yeah, you like it?” Chase said, driving his hips into hers again.

  Her pussy was electric with wet desire. She nodded, moaning, rubbing her hands up his arms. “I love your tattoos,” she said, looking at the one on his upper right bicep, as she slid her fingertips under the sleeve of his t-shirt and pushed the material up towards his shoulder.

  “You like ink, huh,” he said, watching her face as he teased her with his bulging cock, pressing against her hard.

  “I do,” she whispered.

  “Say it,” he commanded her.

  “I like your ink,” she sighed, as he thrust again and again.

  As she was trailing her fingers along his upper bicep, she noticed that there was a raised bump on his skin where a bullet hole had been tattooed, along with tattooed cracks, making it look as if the bullet had punctured the surface of something. Above the bullet hole was the phrase “bullet proof,” tattooed in fancy lettering.

  “What’s this?” she purred, rubbing the raised area of his skin where the tattoo of the bullet was displayed.

  Chase suddenly jerked his arm away from her probing fingers and sat back on the couch. His eyes had changed from seductive to suspicious in a flash. “Why are you so interested in my tattoos?” he said, unrolling his sleeve to cover the ink she’d been curious about.

  Faith was confused. She slid into a sitting position, smoothing her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I just think they’re sexy.”

  Chase stood up and began pacing. “See, this is exactly the shit I was talking about,” he said, as if to himself. “Complicated. I don’t need fucking complications in my life.”

  “I don’t need to know about your tattoos if you don’t want me to. I won’t ever ask again.”

  He turned and faced her. “But you’ll keep wondering, won’t you?” he challenged. “You’ll always wonder why I wouldn’t tell you what it meant.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Why are you attacking me for something so small?”

  “Because,” he said, “it’s not just some little thing. It’s my life, Faith.” He stared at her. “You’re messing with my life.”

  “I’m messing with your life?” she said, completely baffled. “You must be joking.”

  “No, I’m not joking.”

  She was starting to feel angry now. “Last I checked, you’re the one who got me fired from my job. You’re the one making me sign papers, making me play by your rules. It’s my life that’s getting messed with, not yours.”

  “I guess it seems that way to you,” he muttered.

  “It is that way, Chase.” She stood up. “And I don’t really need this shit either.” She started to walk past him, fully intending to exit his home and keep going until she reached the nearest T stop, from which she could get back to her apartment.

  But before she could even get by him, Chase’s hand grabbed her arm, lightning fast, stopp
ing her. “Don’t,” he said.

  She glared at him. “Let me go.”

  Then he did let her go, and she started walking again.

  “You want to know?” he said, his voice raising.

  “No, I don’t want to know anything,” she called back over her shoulder, still determined to leave.

  I don’t need this crap, she thought, even as her heart told her that she couldn’t possibly resist him. Not even for a second.

  “That tattoo is where I got shot,” he said, and that did stop her in her tracks.

  Her mind raced with this new piece of information. Nobody—nobody—had ever reported anything about Chase having been shot in his life. Was he lying? But why would he lie about something like that? And she’d felt the scar herself. So it had to have been something…

  Faith turned around and looked at him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, and then he stripped off his shirt and threw it to the floor. Chase was standing bare-chested, and he looked both proud and ashamed, vulnerable and strangely defiant as he watched her watching him.

  He pointed to a tattoo under his left pectoral. What was pictured there was a red bow, as if a present had been untied. “That’s where I got stabbed,” he said.

  She felt suddenly faint. “Chase, please…”

  “You wanted to know, right?” he asked, stepping towards her now. “You wanted to know about my cool, funky little tattoos. You thought to yourself, he’s like some cool hipster football player with all those neat little pictures drawn on his body. Sexy, right?”

  She couldn’t look at him anymore. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Tell the truth, Faith. You don’t really want to fucking know about me, about the reality of my life. You don’t really want to know that my mother was a prostitute who got murdered by some john, and the cops never bothered catching whoever did it.”

  She wanted to cover her ears. “Please,” she begged, as if he might stop talking.

  But he continued. “Shit, you definitely didn’t want to know that I never even met my father. Or the fact that both me and my little brother were in a gang in Detroit, and we dealt drugs and mugged people and fought with other gangs and tried to kill people who fucked with us.” He was walking closer and closer to her as he said these things.

  She couldn’t breathe or swallow, and her heart was racing, her body frozen in fear and confusion. This couldn’t be true. None of this stuff was public knowledge.

  He’s just messing with me.

  But she knew—she knew as much as she knew anything, that he wasn’t lying.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said.

  “Just look at me,” he demanded.

  And so she did look at him. The tattoos looked totally different now to her, as she surveyed them and realized that most, if not all of them, had to have some kind of gang significance. Even if she didn’t know exactly what they meant, she understood that they weren’t just cool symbols like what her friends would get from time to time.

  Friends who’d stroll into a tattoo parlor and page through books with pictures and drawings and symbols—they’d get a tribal band, a leprechaun, a heart with a boy’s name in it.

  Those kinds of tattoos weren’t anything like what Chase Winters had emblazoned on his body. And the reasons for them were altogether different as well.

  Finally, Faith nodded. “I see you,” she said softly.

  He was breathing heavily. His eyes were dark, his expression somehow completely stony and also terribly pained at once. “You see that I’m fucked up beyond repair.”

  She shook her head. “I see that you’ve been through terrible things.”

  “Nothing you could ever even imagine in your worst nightmares.”

  “I believe you,” she said, her chest catching.

  “See, it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he told her, shaking his head. He was laughing, but not with good humor.

  “What was it supposed to be like?” she prodded.

  “I wanted something simple. No strings, no attachments. Nothing emotional.”

  “Is that why you chose me out of all the girls you could have been with? Unless—I don’t know, maybe there are dozens of others,” she said, as if realizing it for the first time.

  He shook his head again. “There are no others.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m shaking,” she said, holding up her hand and realizing it was true.

  Chase reached out and took her hand in his, and his touch was so gentle, so loving, that she was instantly calmed.

  “I shouldn’t have told you those things,” he said softly. “I don’t know why I did.”

  “Because you’ve been holding it all in for too long,” she replied, and he blinked at her, his expression startled.

  “You think?”

  “You can’t hold the world on your shoulders,” she told him. “You can’t be expected to do all of this alone, Chase.”

  He pulled her even closer now. “My life isn’t pretty,” he said to her. “I do it alone so nobody else has to deal with it but me.”

  “What if I want to deal with it?” she asked, tilting her head up towards him.

  “I’d never let you get in the middle of a fucking war zone, Faith.”

  She put her free hand on his chest and rubbed her palm over the surface of his skin. Now, when she drew her finger along the lines of ink, it meant something different. The truth was, she still found his tattoos sexy, but for a completely different reason.

  His tattoos were personal. Deeply personal, and almost nobody knew what they meant.

  But now I do.

  Chase had let her in enough to tell her about those horrible things from his past. His mother, a prostitute—murdered by a killer who was never caught.

  She shivered, just thinking about it.

  Chase watched her as her eyes grew teary, just imagining what he’d been through in his life. And now she knew that he was carrying the weight of his history all on his own. It didn’t seem fair.

  “I want to know,” she said, still caressing his chest, understanding now that it was like a map of his life. There was a code that prevented most from reading that map, but she had the code now.

  The code, she realized, was Chase Winters himself. He was the one who could explain what the map meant, show her the territory in all of its grim detail.

  “I can’t tell you everything,” he said, his voice tight with emotion, but still letting her touch his body. His muscles flinched a little when her fingertips ran over them. Traced the lines that swirled intricately, made pictures and words that had deep meaning, but most of which was still inscrutable to her.

  “You can tell me exactly as much as you want to,” she said. “Or as little as you want to. I just need you to be aware of the fact that I’m okay. I can handle it.”

  He smirked a little bit. “You think so. But it’s not quite that simple.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “Nothing with you ever is, Chase.”

  And then he leaned in and began kissing her mouth, softly, delicately, his lips tender and patient.

  She trembled at his touch—but now the trembling was less from fear than hope, pleasure, lust, and emotion. There was a wellspring of emotion inside her, and Chase had found the way to tap into it and let it flow.

  Faith hadn’t even realized that she had so much within her, but now that she felt it, the emotions threatened to overwhelm her.

  Chase, as if sensing it, slowed down, kissing her softly, stroking her hair as his other hand slid around her waist and lingered on her lower back.

  They stood there, kissing, their lips broadcasting so much more than either of them could truly say with words.

  He’s damaged.

  He’s damaged and he’s carrying terrible secrets on his back.

  Chase is tortured by his past—by what happened to his mother, his father. All of it.

  To have be
en exposed to the gangs, the violence, and then having this incredible gift fall in his lap—to be able to escape all of that ugliness and play in the NFL…it was almost too much for any one person to handle. Who wouldn’t be overwhelmed by such a drastic change?

  She inhaled his breath as he kissed her more deeply now. His hands both moved to hold her face, as he broke away and looked into her eyes. “I want you to be with me,” he told her.

  She felt her heart lift at his words. “But…what does that mean?”

  “It means that you’re with me and me only. You don’t see any other guys. And I won’t see anybody else, either.”

  Faith nodded. “I don’t want to see anyone but you.”

  “Good.” He trailed his fingers down to her neckline. “And it also means I get to do things to you,” he said, his voice low and husky.

  “What kinds of things?” she asked, her breath thick in her throat.

  “Whatever I want.” As he said it, he took hold of her shirt and pulled it up and off. “Anything I want to do to you,” he continued, as he slid her bras straps down and then removed the bra with a quick snap of his fingers on the clasp.

  Her breasts spilled out, bare, her torso naked like his now. Her nipples were stiff, hardening even more as Chase looked at her without disguising his own lust.

  “I want you to have whatever you need from me,” she said, meeting his gaze.

  He smiled ever so slightly, and then his hands were covering her breasts, his fingers grazing her tender nipples.

  “I need a lot,” he said, still massaging her breasts, and then he suddenly grabbed her and spun her around so that she was facing away from him. “Can you handle everything that comes with this?” he asked, his breath in her ear as his palms clasped over her breasts once more, squeezing them tightly. Her nipples slid in between his two fingers and she moaned.

  “I promise I can do it,” she told him. “I can handle anything.”

  She didn’t know if that was true, but she wanted it to be.

  “I can be very demanding,” he whispered. “And I can be rough sometimes.”

  She felt his hands squeezing tighter on her breasts, and her nipples tingled expectantly. “Rough is good,” she whispered.

  “Yeah?” he asked.