Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75585 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75585 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Valentino moved to stand only a few inches away and gave me a slow once over from head to toe. He gave me a hungry smile when his gaze returned to mine.
Was he actually interested in me? What the hell, I might as well try and bargain with him. If I couldn’t pay him back, I was going to die, so what did I have to lose? “What if I agreed to work off my debt?”
“Work it off? All that money?”
I nodded.
“That’s going to take a very long time. What skills do you have?” His wicked grin made my stomach flip flop.
What was I doing? I couldn’t offer myself to this man. “Your family owns a lot of businesses. I could do whatever work you need.”
“Really? Can you drive a semi-truck? Do you know how to run a bakery? Are you well-versed in the art of dry cleaning?”
“No.”
“So, what do you have to offer?”
I took a deep breath. I had no other solutions. “Myself.”
He let his eyes linger on my body again, then he took a step closer. I braced for pain, but he didn’t hit me. He traced my cheekbone with the back of his fingers. His touch was feather light, and I couldn’t stop myself from shivering.
“You are beautiful. Even in these old clothes and with your hair all wild. We could fix you up, and you could really shine.”
I reached up and attempted to smooth my unruly hair. “I know how to fix myself up, I just don’t have the money.”
“That is the root of the problem, isn’t it? If you need money to live on, how are you going to use a job to pay us off?”
He was right. This was stupid, like every move I’d made since Ava had been left with no one but me.
“What exactly are you offering?” Valentino’s voice had gone low and rough. My heart pounded, and my stupid dick took notice. He was so close and so much bigger than me. He surrounded me with his presence. I should be terrified, but the way he’d touched me made him seem almost…gentle.
That was an illusion. He was a killer, and I had no way to fight him, so I made the stupidest move ever by saying, “Anything you want.”
He took hold of my chin and forced me to look up at him.
I saw hunger in his eyes, the look of a predator. I was handing myself over to him to toy with, then kill.
What had I done?
3
VALENTINO
The fear in Liam’s eyes made my cock harden. I wanted this man: his soft skin, his innocent face, and his bright blue eyes that didn’t look away when he had to know how easily I could kill him or make him wish I had. His baby doll tee clung to him and showed off a hint of his stomach, including a dark blond treasure trail. I wanted to see more, a lot more.
I could take him up on his offer and drag him back to my apartment, tie him to my bed, and use him any way I liked until I deemed his debt paid, but then I’d have to answer to Dom.
My father had been very clear about the rules we had to follow working for him. No fucking the clients was near the top of the list.
He said mixing business with pleasure was dangerous because our guard would be down. Like I couldn’t fuck someone and then kill them. I thought the rule was ridiculous, but I also knew Dom wouldn’t hesitate to punish me for breaking it.
I was going to need to find a man to take out this pent-up need on as soon as I figured out what to do with Liam. I’d never been seriously tempted to break the no-fucking-clients rule before. It wasn’t like I had any trouble pulling men whenever I wanted one, but something about Liam did me in. It was more than how stunning he was with his wavy blond hair and his lean dancer’s body. Maybe it was the way he seemed so fucking lost, so out of place?
He had been way out of his league coming to my family for money. I wondered how he’d even found us. I’d done a cursory background check on him, not because we cared what our borrowers had done in the past, but because we could often use that information to fuck with them when their payments were late. It always helped to threaten wives and children, even if the head of the family—and my own moral code—forbade us following through on such threats.
Liam had no criminal record. He’d grown up middle class with what seemed to be a decent family until he’d lost his parents in a car accident and been saddled with taking care of himself and his sister on his own with little to no inheritance. He was also supporting his sister who was in school, but even with that debt, he shouldn’t have been desperate enough to come to us. There had to be better ways to get a loan.