Paying His Debt Read online

“Then I must be distracted.”

  “I can’t afford to have you being distracted, Jack. You know I’m retiring next year—”

  “You’ve been saying that since I turned thirty,” I pointed out, well aware of the fact I sounded churlish. “Yet here we are, five years later.”

  He sighed. “Which means I’m another five years older, too. I never planned to still be running the family so actively at seventy, Jack.”

  I shrugged. “Nobody is stopping you from retiring, dad.”

  “And there you go again with that childish attitude of yours!” my father complained, sighing heavily. “You are such a smart, talented man. Do you not want more for yourself than what you have?”

  Yes, but not anything you can or want to give me.

  I remained silent, which seemed to irritate my father further.

  “Look, Jack,” he said, “I am announcing my retirement next Saturday at the Patera fundraiser. I expect to say that you’re taking over. Do not disappoint me.”

  “Absolutely not, father,” I replied rather monotonously. It was a go-to response when I really couldn’t care less. I glanced at the door. “Can I go now? I have some business to attend to.”

  “Has Grace’s sister began paying off his debt yet?”

  I paused at the mention of Freya’s surname. All I’d told me father after meeting with her was that everything was ‘sorted’.

  “She starts this week,” I said, which wasn’t technically I lie. She would be paying off her brother’s debt this week…just not in the way my father imagined. I could wrangle the twenty thousand dollars to pay off Tate’s debt pretty easily—not that I would tell Freya that. If I did then she might not be interested in going any further with me. She was scared of me, after all.

  And with good reason.

  But if what we had was merely superficial then I wanted it for as long as I could. Even if it was the result of extortion and bribery. Even if it made me despicable.

  The way my father was watching me suggested he knew fine well that all was not as it seemed, but he didn’t comment on it. He waved towards the door. “Go, then. Don’t forget about Saturday.”

  I left the family home in a daze of thoughts and feelings I didn’t or couldn’t process. My life was at a crossroads, as it were, and I had a lot of decisions to make; the kind of decisions that defined what kind of man I’d be for the remainder of my life.

  One decision I could make as to get out of the suit I’d been travelling in all day. It was far too oppressively hot out today to still be wearing it, so I headed to my condo on the beach, eagerly stripped myself of any and all clothing and threw myself in the shower. The cool water against my skin was bliss after travelling in an airplane all day, and helped to temper my strange mood.

  After showering, shaving and toweling myself dry I chose to dress in jeans and a shirt with roll-up sleeves—much better for the balmy evening, though in truth I had no idea where I was going or what I planned to do, other than the fact that my plans probably involved Freya.

  I kept my hair floppy and free of product; it swept across my forehead in a way my father would have demanded I fix immediately.

  “I’m not dressing for you, dad,” I muttered as I inspected my reflection. I looked good. Casual, but not too casual. No intimidating, expensive suit in sight. If I was going to try and lessen Freya’s inherent fear of me, the way I dressed was a good place to start.

  I was not in the least bit surprised when I found myself standing outside Rafe’s kindergarten half an hour later. I checked my watch; there was still another two hours left of the late shirt before Freya would be free. But a man standing outside a nursery for any length of time was bound to cause suspicions so, without so much as sending Freya a text in warning, I let myself in.

  As soon as I spied Freya playing with a group of kids—including Rafe—I felt all the tension in my neck dissipate. She was trying to teach them how to make origami cranes, with varying degrees of success. Freya’s long hair was tied back in a perfect ponytail, and she had discarded her cardigan on the back of a chair, leaving her in a pale green button down dress that I immediately started imagining unbuttoning.

  But that could wait. For now I was content to merely watch Freya be...Freya.

  Maybe I really had grown up.

  Chapter Five

  Freya

  Everywhere I moved, Jackson watched me.

  I was trying desperately to act like I didn’t know he was there, but he could tell I knew. I think he enjoyed it, seeing me squirm beneath his gaze as I tried not to think about what he intended to do with me once my shift was over.

  He’d been gone for a week. An entire week for me to relive and overthink every moment of our altercation. I didn’t really know what else to call it—it hadn’t exactly been a planned meeting, nor an entirely positive one.

  The guy was blackmailing me, for God’s sake. I was paying off Tate’s debt with my body (or my ‘everything’ as Jackson had put it) because I had no other way to pay the money back. I had to wonder what would have happened if I’d not signed up to being Jackson’s personal…I don’t know. Slave? That sounded wrong. Girlfriend? Definitely not. Lover…?

  No. They all sounded wrong. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be.

  All I knew was that, after Jackson left without actually taking my virginity I’d ended up supremely disappointed. When he touched me he’d made me feel like I was melting, or exploding, or any number of other verbs that could explain the sensation. All of them. None of them.

  I’d wanted him to touch me more. I’d wanted to touch him.

  But that wasn’t the most unsettling part for me. No, it was the fact Jackson stayed and ate Chinese food and watched trashy T.V. with me like it was the most natural thing in the world. Jackson Patera. Scary, impeccably-dressed, impossibly wealthy, ridiculously hot Jackson Patera.

  And then he’d left.

  And now he was here, in the kindergarten, watching me.

  Jackson wasn’t wearing a suit today, instead opting for a grey shirt with rolled up sleeves and dark jeans. Even his hair, which was usually slicked back, was swept over his forehead. He looked amazing, as well as completely different to normal. I guessed it had to do with the air he was giving off—his expensive suits and formal hair screamed to people that he was someone important who shouldn’t be messed with.

  Dressed like an ‘ordinary’ person—though Jackson was far from it—made him seem far more approachable. Less intimidating.

  Well, going by the number of mothers fawning over him as they came to pick up their kids, anyway.

  “Hey, Freya. Freya. Freya!”

  “What is it?” I asked without looking at Louisa, instead choosing to finish perfectly folding my umpteenth paper crane to demonstrate how to make the final wing folds to the kids. One might have said the repetitive action was a surefire sign that I was sexually frustrated.

  “Jackson Patera is looking fine today. Like, supermodel hot. How can it be that the guy looks even better in jeans than he does in a suit? That should be impossible!”

  “It’s probably because we always see him dressed formally, so we’re used to it.”

  “Spoiled by it, more like,” Louisa said, a little longingly. “I’ll be so sad when little Rafe moves up to elementary school and we won’t see him or his brother again.”

  “I’ll be sad when Rafe moves up to elementary school because then I won’t be able to spend every day with him,” I said, realizing that the boy in question was listening to us talking about his uncle. He beamed at me, then came over to show me his seventh attempt at a paper crane. He almost had it. Almost. I let him sit in my lap, my hands over his to help him get used to the right way to fold the paper.

  “The trick is—”

  “To find a far more interesting hobby,” a low, amused voice finished for me. Rafe squealed in delight, reaching up to grab for his uncle the moment he saw him.

  My lips quirked into a smile before I could stop th
em. “Origami is great for teaching kids fine motor control as well as helping to keep them calm before dinner.”

  Jackson laughed then, as if this was the kind of thing he did all the time, plonked himself down beside me, allowed Rafe to crawl onto his lap, then picked up a new piece of origami paper. With deft, impossibly quick fingers, he folded the paper into a crane almost as good as my own.

  “Not bad,” I mused, as the kids surrounding us ooh-ed and ahh-ed Jackson’s attempt. “Clearly this ain’t your first origami rodeo.”

  “My grandmother enjoyed it,” he replied, moving onto making a far more complicated jumping frog—one of my favorites. “Her best friend was Japanese, and she taught her everything she knew. I used to have to spend hours folding paper when I visited because she insisted it ‘built character’. To be honest I’d have preferred to be outside.”

  “I think your grandmother would consider her endeavor a failure, given how little character you have,” I quipped, which was something I never did to people I barely knew. But Jackson, despite his strangeness, had been physically closer to me than anyone I’d ever met before. I supposed that counted for something.

  Jackson stared at me with a faux-pained expression. “You wound me, Miss Grace. And to shame me in front of the children—I’d say the one lacking character is you.”

  To this the children all laughed raucously. The next hour or so passed so quickly and so easily I was distinctly disappointed when seven o’clock arrived, and the children were slowly picked up one-by-one.

  I tried hard to keep my disappointment from my face when Rafe was the only child left. “I guess the two of you are heading home now,” I said.

  To my—entirely pleasant—surprise, Jackson shook his head. “Rafe’s nanny will be here any minute now. I actually came to see you, Miss Grace.”

  Rafe was very confused by this. He wrinkled his adorable little nose as he tried to process this. “Why are you hear to see Miss Grace? Did I do something wrong?”

  “Oh, no,” he reassured his nephew. He ruffled his hair, and Rafe giggled. “Miss Grace and I are…friends. I thought we might get to hang out a little longer if I got here earlier.”

  Rafe swung his head to look from me to his uncle. “You’re friends?”

  “Yes,” I assured him, though it felt bizarre to say as such. I could see Jackson grinning at me out of the corner of my eye.

  “But I’ve never seen you talk before!” Rafe complained, put out that two adults that he knew had somehow become friends without him knowing about it.

  “Aw, I’m sorry, Rafe,” I said, before bending low to his ear to whisper, “but you’re still my favorite Patera. Do you really think I give cookies to anyone else?”

  Rafe beamed at my comment, while his uncle stared at me suspiciously.

  “What did you tell him?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Just a secret. If you find out what it is then it isn’t a secret anymore.”

  “Rafe, that’s your nanny here!” Louisa called, who was throwing on her backpack and heading to the door as she spoke. “Freya, I’m heading out now. You still okay to close up by yourself?”

  “No problem!” As if I was given a choice in the matter, I added on silently. I’d covered four late shifts this week for people. Four. Individually we were all only supposed to do one.

  Jackson eyed me curiously after he hugged his nephew and waved him good-bye. “You work late an awful lot, Freya.”

  “Yeah, well…that’s the way things are.”

  “You don’t get tired?”

  “Of course!”

  “So why do you pick up all these extra shifts?”

  I sighed as I began the long process of cleaning up the kindergarten. The kids had been particularly rowdy today—hence why I had tried my hardest to keep the late afternoon session as calm as possible. “They all know I won’t say no if they ask me to cover their shifts,” I eventually admitted. “I’d say no but to be honest…I don’t exactly have much else going on in my life. I’d rather be at work than sitting in my apartment alone.”

  “Well…now you have some company, so I suggest getting better at saying no,” Jackson said, smirking as he began helping me to clear up.

  I put out a hand to stop him. “You don’t need to help—”

  “I want to. And besides, the quicker we get this place cleaned up the quicker you’ll be free to spend some proper time with me.”

  I chewed on his words for a long moment, before nodding in agreement and getting to work cleaning. But now my heart was beating a mile a minute, and I became distinctly aware that I wasn’t wearing matching underwear, and that I’d been working in a hot kindergarten all day and probably needed a shower.

  Jackson, on the other hand, looked and smelled amazing. Like citrus and saltwater—two of my favorite smells. It was refreshing and exciting, especially paired with his lean, tanned forearms which I was finally seeing bare of fabric for the first time. His muscles grew taut as he lifted heavy boxes up onto shelves with ease and righted fallen toys.

  Eventually all that was left to do was to wash the chalk off the tarmac in the outdoor play area, which was situated in a private garden to the back of the kindergarten. When Jackson dutifully followed me outside with a bucket of soapy water in hand, he whistled upon spying the jungle gym.

  “That’s pretty big for kindergarten kids,” he said.

  I shrugged. “You’d be surprised at how acrobatic they are. There’s a smaller one over in the corner for the littler kids, anyway. This one’s for the bigger kids.”

  “Like us?”

  I frowned at the question just as Jackson put down the bucket of water. “Jackson, what are you—ah!”

  He picked me up, carrying me over to the jungle gym as if I weighed nothing. He climbed the rope net single-handed, then carefully balanced his way up a ladder, only stopping when he reached the highest platform. It was covered with a roof, like a little house, with a metal slide running down from it. It was hot from the sun; the air was filled with the faintly sizzling smell of metal.

  When he put me down I had absolutely no shadow of a doubt about what was on Jackson’s mind. He eyed me up with a filthy expression on his face, and when I glanced downwards I could see the unmistakable bulge of an erection beneath the fabric of his jeans.

  “Have you ever behaved badly at kindergarten, Miss Grace? Or in school at all?”

  “No…” I replied, as blood roared in my ears and my brain told me to put a stop to what was going on. If we were caught I would lose my job. But it wasn’t my brain currently in control of my faculties right now. I reached out to Jackson and curled a finger around his collar.

  “…but I have a feeling that’s about to change.”

  Chapter Six

  Jackson

  I’d have been lying to myself if I said I’d never viewed a kindergarten in a sexual manner. Well, not since Freya began working at one, anyway. Half the time when I picked up Rafe I’d have to physically fight a hard-on out of existence.

  But I had never seen a jungle gym as anything other than a thing kids played on. That was rapidly changing. Now it was the turn of two very turned-on adults to use it.

  ‘Play time’ had taken on a whole new meaning.

  I wasted no time in sliding Freya’s panty hose off; she sighed in relief as I did so. I raised an eyebrow, to which she laughed.

  “It’s some kind of personal hell to wear panty hose when it’s so hot,” she explained. “Pulling them off after a double shift is like…I don’t know…taking off a bra after wearing one all day.” She paused. “Though I can’t imagine you know what that feels like, either.”

  “No, but I enjoy the suggestion of you taking yours off.”

  When I reached over to unbutton Freya’s dress and reach the bra in question, however, Freya put a hand on my chest to stop me. She sat up, pulling on my shirt to pull me further onto the little platform I’d brought us up to.

  “Lean against the wall, Jackson,” she said, v
oice a little wobbly. But there was a determined set to Freya’s eyes that told me not to question her, so I all too eagerly obliged.

  Her hands were on the buttons of my jeans as soon as my back rested against the bottle-green plywood wall. The platform was fairly small; when I stretched my legs out my feet went through the opening we’d climbed through.

  When Freya settled herself properly between my legs and slid my jeans off my hips I got the idea of what she was up to—an idea that my rapidly stiffening cock wholeheartedly agreed with.

  “Are you sure you want the first time you do this to be in public, in a jungle gym?” I asked, stifling a gasp when Freya took the tip of me in her mouth and nibbled on it playfully. Playfully. As if she wasn’t nervous at all, and this wasn’t her first time sucking a guy off.

  She glanced at me. “You were the one who wanted me to do something bad, Jackson,” she replied, flicking her tongue against the tip of my cock to emphasize her point. “And besides, last time you were the one who made me feel good. Surely it’s my turn, now.”

  Well, I wasn’t going to argue with that—certainly not when Freya enveloped the top of my dick in her mouth and sucked. Fuck, it felt so good.

  I resisted the urge to run my fingers through her hair and destroy her ponytail. Freya’s hair would only get in the way of what she was doing in the sticky, oppressive heat of the evening.

  That only made me want to ruin it all the more.

  I resorted to placing a hand on the back of Freya’s head instead, as she took more and more of me in her mouth with every stroke of her irresistible tongue.

  Freya tried to shift on the floor to get a better position, but there was little and less room for her to maneuver about.

  “Maybe next time we’ll pick somewhere a little bigger,” I joked, voice low and uneven. “I guess for now we’ll have to make do.”

  Freya frowned upwards at the little pointed roof. “Can you kneel up?” she asked.

  I dutifully tried to do so and just about managed it, though the top of my head brushed the ceiling.

  Outside the jungle gym, we heard the unmistakable chatter of people walking nearby on the sidewalk. Freya paled a little—which is saying something, considering how pale she already was—but then waved a dismissive hand.