Claimed By The Ruthless Billionaire

JESSICA MILLER.

Being diagnosed with cardiomyopathy when I was ten meant I would either die soon from heart failure or live a bedridden life.

Fourteen years later, I beat the odds. I lived.

Yet the life I’ve built brick by brick comes crumbling to the floor as I stare at myself from the vanity mirror.

My lips are painted with a hideous Nars red lipstick that makes them look plump and for lack of better words, hideous.

Add in the excessive blush on my rosy cheeks that matches my recently dyed ginger hair and I look like I’m auditioning for one of those adult films my mom has been raving about for weeks.

I hate this.

I hate the perfume I’m wearing.

I hate the dress that has a slit running up my thigh like I have nothing to hide. The irony being I have no panties underneath this dress so yeah maybe I have nothing to hide at all.

I hate the bouquet of lilies in my hands. I’m a cliché. I’m a white roses kind of woman, sue me!

But who cares anyway?

Who cares if I’m getting married to a man I’ve never met and don’t love?

Who cares about me when I’m the over-fattened pig being sold in a cathedral to the devil himself?

“God’s sake, Jessie. Smile. Ten years from now you’ll be thanking me and your dad for arranging this for you. Ten years from now, you’ll be cruising in a yacht with enough dollar bills to rival the Kardashians and who wouldn’t want that?”

Mother dearest pats my head like I’m a petulant child.

I smile gingerly gazing at my reflection.

“No woman wouldn’t want that, mother. It’s always been a dream of mine to play the role of dotting wife all my life.

Spreading my legs all night for hubby dearest, spending hubby’s money on shopping and Aspen vacations, ooh and I can’t forget the cooking part. It’s always been my dream to cook for my husband while I wait for him to decide whether my cooking makes me a great wife or not.”

My sarcasm knows no bounds.

They roped me into this. I said I would do it. I didn’t say I would do it with a smile though.

My mother is about to give me a lecture about how ‘I’m being a stubborn brat’ when the door behind us budges open.

My father’s thin graying hair comes into sight followed by the polished exterior of his Brioni suit.

“Jessie”, his voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard.

Anger rips me apart and by extension makes me want to rip the dress to smithereens.

“Amery, give us a minute.”

Two minutes later, the clacking sound of my mother’s heels follows outside the door.

I stand up, push the chair behind me slightly, straighten the creases of the flowing wedding dress and turn around to face the man who betrayed me in the worst way possible not even Judas Iscariot’s betrayal can compare to this.

“Jessie…”

“Do I look presentable?”

“Baby girl I never meant-.”

“You did this to me! You are selling me to that… that bastard. A bastard I’ve never met nor exchanged words with so don’t you dare tell me you did this for my sake. I’m not here because I want to.

I’m here because you said Kai Davenport would destroy you if I didn’t marry him. And this is the last thing I’m doing for you, dad. From now on, I won’t-.”

One minute my tears are about to erase the makeup that took my mother and her imported makeup artists two hours to perfect and the next minute my father and I watch the door open a second time.

I expect it to be mom.

But mom isn’t six feet four of pure devastation in a well-fitted suit.

Mom doesn’t ooze such masculinity that it renders me speechless.

My future husband stands next to my father. No, he makes my father look like a divorcee struggling with diabetes and AIDs at the same time.

Tall, alluring, holding power and world domination by the balls, Kai Davenport sucks the air out of the small room greedily and with careful precision.

Did I google the hell out of him when I learned of his existence this morning? Damn well, I did.

Googled, Instagram-ed, twitter-ed (uh X-ed?), yahoo-ed; and not a single picture did him justice.

He’s not handsome. It feels like a crime to even say that.

He’s strikingly gorgeous. The type of gorgeous that people take one look at and dive in for a second look. Maybe a thousand even.

Dark blank eyes with fragments of brown in them stay on me as he utters a single word, “Leave.”

Daddy’s face turns beet red.

I expect him to call the wedding off right now. To stand up for his only daughter. Fight for my honor.

“This isn’t over, Davenport”, the honor I was hoping to be fought for walks out the door with my father.

Silence hovers like a stormy cloud between me and Future Hubby.

That’s until he starts moving towards me.

That’s until I realize I have nowhere to run to.

That’s until he towers over me, his expensive cologne; all man, all musky, earthy, hits me square in the face.

His eyes linger on mine, then slowly his searing gaze drops to my nose then down to my--.

“See anything you like?”

I taunt. He doesn’t back away.

“Are you offering yourself to me before our wedding night, Mrs. Davenport?”

He delivers the jab with no smile, no humor and apart from his voice rubbing me the wrong way, the thought of something happening tonight decimates me.

“I’d rather die than offer myself to you. Unless you are the type that blackmails women for sex too?”

“I wouldn’t have to resort to blackmail to get you on your knees, Mrs. Davenport. You’ll be begging me for that soon enough”, his eyes roam over my dress then up to my eyes again.

“Is that what you expect? A compliant wife you can buy with a few dollars because if that’s the case I’m telling you right now, I will be anything but. You threatened my father-.”

“He had it coming.”

“You comprised my dreams and-.”

“Parading yourself in bikinis on every billboard in New York hardly seems like a dream to me, Red. If I wanted a compliant wife, I would have married my secretary instead.”

I could tell him it’s not ‘parading’ if my job is literally being in bikinis. How else’s a chick supposed to make money? Depend on daddy’s funds?

But I don’t.

I see a way out and I take it.

“Marry her then. We’d be terrible together. We’d kill each other long before our honeymoon. I don’t want to walk down that aisle to you and you don’t want to be the man waiting for me at the end of said aisle. Stop this madness.”

“Madness?” I see a hint of a smile ghost his face before he leans closer, gobbling down every inch of my personal space.

“Madness would be putting a collar around your neck with a leash on it and forcing you to crawl on your hands and knees down the aisle.

But I’m scheduling the madness for our wedding night. What do you say, Red? Walk to me? Or do me the pleasure of seeing you on your knees?”

JESSICA MILLER.

‘Or do me the pleasure of seeing you on your knees?’

The sexual innuendo makes me sick to my stomach and part of me wants to get away when he leans closer, not a hint of any backing down incorporated in his features and the other part feels…

I stand my ground.

My eyes look up at his, then I blink.

And again.

And again.

By the fourth time, a tear falls from my left eye and I’m weak.

“Please, don’t do this.”

“Crawl or walk, Red?”

Don’t call me ‘Red’.

Don’t threaten me into marrying you and call me ‘Red’.

“Walk”, I whisper, ashamed, stripped down bare.

Future Hubby isn’t done with the humiliation. That would be too much of a mercy to ask from him, from the gods and from the freaking universe.

“Don’t cry”, he whispers in that gravelly voice that torments me to no end, his thumb touches my cheek lightly as he wipes the tear like he’s cleaning a child, “Don’t ruin that makeup. I get to do it later.”

“Over my dead body”, is all I get to say.

One minute my face is pale with horror at the words he just uttered and the next minute, my future husband walks away from me and exits the room like he didn’t just upheave my life and turn my world upside down.

Worse?

I’m quivering like a leaf.

And it’s just not my knees shaking, my inner thighs shake too and my core…she purrs like a cat on heat.

The door is opened again.

My heart is still thumping.

My mind is still short-circuited.

But my rage flays raw when my mother gives me a guilty smile.

“It’s time, Jessie.”

“I hope you are happy, mom. I hope selling your daughter is going to make you happy.”

“He’s going to treat you right, Jessica. That’s my hope. Sure, he hates your father but he will not hate you. You are good.”

“Yeah? I guess the words ‘treat you right’ changed over the course of the years because he just promised to redo my makeup tonight. Wanna know something else mom?

I think your new son-in-law is planning to buy me a collar and walking me around like I’m his new pet. That’s what being good has brought me to. I’ll be no more than a dog to my husband.”

“Oh, Jessica I never-.”

“It’s time.”

I repeat her words.

XxX

The pews of the church are filled with all kinds of aristocrats New York has to offer.

There’s the Senator and his wife who’s baked with makeup on top of Botox and other cosmetic surgeries she’s had over the years.

There are my father’s friends, the ones I saw visiting our home while I was growing up.

There are the CEOs I’ve only seen on magazine covers. I’ll not even be surprised if I find out we have a prince in the congregation.

Because that’s what this wedding is.

The wedding of the century.

The most fucking lucrative business deal there is.

But no one splices the air in half like the man at the end of the aisle.

He’s taller than the old priest standing behind him.

He eats and chews the air in the church with as much brutality as you’d imagine in the devil himself.

Clutching my lilies and mastering up pathetic courage, I take the first step towards a man I don’t love.

There’s no music.

There are no flower girls.

There are no bridesmaids.

Just me.

Just him.

“I’m so sorry, Jessie”, my father mutters under his breath before we reach the end of the aisle and he hands me to my new husband.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to witness the union of Jessica Ariel Miller and Kai Jeong Davenport.

Jessica Ariel Miller, do you promise to love your husband, to be by his side through trials and successes and obey him for as long as you shall live?”

What?

Those are not the right vows.

Yet…

“I do.”

I slip the ring right down his finger.

“Kai Jeong Davenport do you-.”

“I do.”

He slips the ring down my finger slowly, torturingly, making sure he holds my hand in his for an unnecessary amount of time.

The whole church falls into silence.

The old priest looks at me with sympathetic eyes before he turns to Kai with a slightly horrified expression.

“Then by the power vested upon me, I declare you husband and wife. You may kiss the-.”

The priest’s words are cut off when Kai’s hands land on my ass and he pulls me to his hard chest with a thud.

My heart plummets into my stomach when my husband’s lips take mine.

I don’t kiss him back.

But him?

His lips play with mine.

His tongue licks my bottom lip trying to pry my mouth open so he can destroy me worse than this whole wedding has.

When I fail to kiss him back, one of his hands moves from my ass to my hair and he pulls me back only to leave my lips and lunge for my exposed neck.

God Almighty.

His teeth graze my collarbone and he bites, Christ does he bite my skin.

The pain hits me in a nanosecond before his tongue licks it away. An action that has my knees quaking.

I’d be ashamed that everyone is watching were it not for the fact that the trail of hot kisses he leaves on my neck has me teetering to the edge of delirium.

“Kiss me back”, he growls.

I open my mouth to say no but he plunges his tongue inside me and takes everything away from me.

My new husband…he destroys any kiss I’ll ever have with any man again.

I hear people standing up.

I hear people shrieking the cliché ‘congratulations to the newlyweds’.

But I’m too stunned and frazzled by the kiss to register everything that’s happening around us.

I don’t stop my husband when he kisses me like we are making love in front of everyone and in front of the eyes of the Lord.

I don’t stop my husband when he detaches his lips from mine and runs his thumb on my bottom lip smudging my red lipstick.

I don’t stop him either when his hands find the back of my thighs and he scoops me up from the floor like I’m made of feathers; carrying me out of the church like a prize he just won in the rodeo.

But I know one thing I’ll stop.

I’ll stop this marriage if it’s the last thing I do.