A Prince's Ransom: Kidnapped by the Billionaire (46 page)

“Yeah, I am. Thanks,” she confirmed before glancing toward the kitchen, where she could probably smell something cooking. A brow quirked and she moved toward the oven, opening it up. “A frozen pizza?”

“It’s still food,” he pointed out with a light grin. “And I did tell you that I wasn’t a very good cook. But you’ll probably survive until morning this way.”

“I wouldn’t say that it counts as you cooking me dinner, though.”

He lifted his own brow with a slightly mischievous expression, barely noticing Oliver licking his wrist once. “Well, since I can’t cook you dinner, there is still that date you agreed to that we could go on,” he pointed out slyly.

Tobin lowered herself into a nearby chair and frowned at him. “And going out publicly with you right now would be a good thing why?”

Sebastian paused a moment. That was a good point. “If you don’t, you’ll probably just end up shutting yourself away in here, right? That’s not healthy.”

She looked away. “Probably.”

For a moment, he glanced at the dog he had been petting, but then he was gently drawing back his hand and moving to stand. Oliver’s tail stopped wagging, but he was still watching Sebastian while he started toward Tobin. “So, a night out would probably do you some good, wouldn’t it?” he murmured, gently wrapping his arms around her waist and nuzzling into her damp hair. He shivered a little bit, when she didn’t try to pull away from him for once, and kissed her cheek. Her dark blue eyes shut, and she sighed.

“Sebastian, how did you get involved with all of this? Why did you get involved with all of this?”

He stilled, then drew back, sighing himself. A glance at the oven showed him that there were still twelve minutes until the pizza was done, which meant that she wouldn’t be easily distracted from the question. He supposed he did owe her an explanation, though, so he propped himself up on one of the stools next to her kitchen counter, looking at her quietly.

“My mother was a nurse,” he started, considering his words carefully. “It’s why I know a few things about medical care—just a few. Like how to start an IV. Just some simple things. And I had an uncle who was into a few shady things on the side of running his own restaurant. Nothing serious, but he would… look the other way when someone unsavory wanted to use the restaurant for a certain sort of meeting. Probably just out of fear and self-preservation, but I won’t lie and say he didn’t get a few nice incentives for his cooperation.” Sebastian paused as she sat down next to him, not saying anything. “When I was thirteen, my mom got sick—breast cancer. She was raising me by herself then—my dad was some deadbeat who flaked out years earlier, and she struggled through chemotherapy for two years.”

He ran his hands through his hair again, hating talking about this. He knew he needed to—he knew he needed to explain himself to Tobin—but remembering his mom like that was not something he enjoyed. “I took a job at my uncle’s restaurant to help out financially. It was the only thing I could do. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough. The chemo wasn’t. My mom died when I was fifteen.”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted, almost compulsively, until she realized she had, and he looked at her. “I… my mom died of breast cancer when I was fifteen too. I still had my dad, but I know how hard that can be. I know things are never quite right after that.”

Sebastian felt his heart ache, and he reached out to brush her cheek lightly. “You did have your dad, though,” he murmured with a sigh. “And with my mom gone, I didn’t have anyone except for my uncle. So I went and lived with him and kept working in the restaurant to help out with my expenses and… at the time I had plans to go to college, so I would put away some of my paycheck to try and save up.”

Tobin frowned a little bit as she listened. “That sounds like you were doing okay, in spite of your mom dying. How did you go from trying to save up for college to… this?”

For a long moment, he was silent, staring at the timer counting down. “Capozzi wasn’t in charge then. He was still… high on the totem pole or whatever, but he wasn’t in charge. The guy who was in charge, my uncle’s restaurant was his favorite spot for meetings, so I overheard things, sometimes. And he took an interest in me. He started sending me on these errands for him. Little things. At the time I didn’t think anything of them. Just a bit of extra cash. My uncle saw what was happening, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t try and stop it. But those little errands, they steadily started to become bigger and bigger things—with bigger and bigger tips left when I served their tables. I would swipe them wine or cigars or anything else they wanted. I got pretty good at that part, and I still thought it was pretty much harmless.

“Capozzi comes to me one day, and he offers me three thousand bucks to help him out with something. Me being seventeen at the time, that much money is mind-boggling and I agree without any sort of reluctance. Didn’t even ask what he wanted me for. It turned out that he wanted me to steal someone’s car. He wouldn’t tell me whose, but he was very specific about which car I was supposed to steal. He showed me how to break into other cars, and he would pay me for ones I stole while practicing, and when I was finally ready for the one he wanted, he told me where to take it, and I just went along with it, like a stupid kid in way over his head. As soon as I brought the car back, he paid me the three grand, only to then take me… out. It doesn’t matter where, but just somewhere where it was really appealing to spend a lot of money really quickly.”

“Strip club?” Tobin asked with an edge of amusement to the tension in her voice.

“Brothel,” he corrected, and saw how she flinched from the corner of his eye. “Before I even had a chance to consider what I was doing, I had burned my savings down to a measly seven hundred, and pretty much ruined my chances of going to college. I did decently in school, but not well enough to get good scholarships, not with a full-time job at the same time. And after going once, I am sorry to say that I wanted to go back again. I was a hormonal seventeen-year-old. So Capozzi continued to pay me for cars I brought in and… other things I did, all of it bigger than his boss had ever wanted me to do. Around the same time, though, I noticed that those meetings in my uncle’s restaurant had more or less stopped. I hadn’t seen Capozzi’s boss in a couple of months, which was unusual.”

Sebastian stood and moved to open up the oven. He needed to move, he needed to do something. He hated telling her any of this. Telling her of how his promising life had spiraled into nothingness. “I found out, then, that the car that Capozzi had been so keen on me stealing had been his boss’s. And he had done something to the car, and when his boss drove it again, it blew up. It killed him. Allowing Capozzi to take control of the Family.”

“The Family?” she breathed behind him. “I… I’ve heard of them. Everyone’s heard of them. Some big huge crime syndicate, right? That… that’s who you work for, Sebastian? That’s who you’re involved with?”

“Yes.” The fear in her voice was the worst thing he had ever heard in the world. He had wanted to make her less afraid, not more, but now… now it was too late. “I was horrified when I found out. But I’d still been doing things for Capozzi. I’d still been getting paid. And he had shown me every lavish thing a criminal lifestyle could get me, I was hooked on it, addicted to it. I couldn’t shake it, even knowing how disappointed my mother would have been. Even watching everything I’d wanted in life crumble away. And I needed the money. I was eighteen, my uncle had gotten fed up with the things I’d been doing, I needed a place to live. So I kept working for Capozzi. Became one of his lieutenants. Did everything I needed to in order to keep the money flowing. And here we are.”

For a long, long time, with six minutes left on the counter, silence reigned between them. When the oven beeped, he was grabbing oven mitts he had found and pulling the pizza tray out of the oven and letting it clang loudly onto the stovetop. She still hadn’t moved.

“If you had gone to college instead, what would you have been?” she asked quietly at last.

He turned back to face her. “Before all of that started, I actually found that I really liked working in a restaurant. My uncle had been letting me have more responsibilities around the place—I tried cooking but I wasn’t any good at that part. I was thinking about going into the hospitality industry, though. Maybe opening my own restaurant, at some point. I wasn’t sure. But what ended up happening—that was never what I had wanted, Tobin.”

Sebastian met her blue eyes, seeing them filled with fright and sorrow. “I wish you had been able to have that life,” she whispered.

“Me too.”

Frozen pizza really wasn’t the worst thing in the world, Tobin decided. It wasn’t necessarily food—along the same lines that fast food wasn’t necessarily food. But it was edible, it tasted good, and it ensured you’d live until you next had to eat something. Ultimately, that meant that she and Sebastian ate all of it between themselves, with her picking off the pepperoni for him to eat himself. She’d never really liked pepperoni, she explained, but she could never find just-sausage frozen pizzas. He had accepted her offering with a laugh, slowly loosening up from having told her about his childhood and his past. She wanted to punch this… Capozzi for having manipulated him as much as he clearly had, so that now Sebastian was just trapped by it all. It wasn’t right.

And it was on the verge of destroying both of their lives. Happy thoughts. She was trying not to focus on the fact that so many bad things were happening, although she didn’t think herself very successful on that front. Possibly, she admitted to herself, why Oliver had been so despondent, beyond the obvious. After they had finished eating, Sebastian had taken to petting the dog more and offering him a few treats. He’d managed to get the Bichon out of his bed and walking around on his own, which was a welcome change. Even her cats seemed to perk up to see a bit of actual life in their new roommate, for however long it lasted. They had been properly introduced to her new houseguest, with Autumn turning up her nose and stalking away in the most obnoxious way a cat could. He had laughed.

Now, though, when it’d already been late to start with, Tobin was drying her hair diligently in her bathroom, so that the brunette strands wouldn’t be sticking out at odd angles when she woke up. He was in the other room. Sitting on her bed. Unlike last time he had spent the night, he told her, he would not be sleeping on the couch. Her attempts to protest had gone swimmingly, and she hadn’t gotten anywhere at all. Predictably. She never got anywhere with him.

But she had to admit she was glad that he was here. If he hadn’t been here, and she’d been by herself, she would have stayed up all night, probably drinking whatever alcohol she could find in her apartment and sitting in the dark staring at the door. Waiting for someone to barge in and kill her. That was still a possibility, but Sebastian had quietly assured her that that wasn’t likely. The cops were watching her apartment, after all, and they wouldn’t be as careless as that. Over the past few days, he’d already made certain that the ones assigned to her protection detail weren’t the ones who were having their palms greased by Capozzi and the Family. Very good things to be told, ultimately. Things she hadn’t considered and that terrified her in retrospect.

Finally, after maybe fifteen minutes of blow-drying her hair, she found herself content with the few lightly cool patches that dictated lingering dampness. They wouldn’t cause too much of an issue in the morning. Not that that mattered. She had nowhere to go right now. Her office was a crime scene. Swallowing slightly, she hesitated as she glanced at the door. Even for the fact that Sebastian had been naked with her in the shower before, she was still nervous about untying her bathrobe and placing it on the peg behind the door. But she did it anyway after a few moments of hesitation, then opened the door.

Her gaze flickered to him uncertainly. He was half-naked on her bed—his shirt discarded, and his pants, leaving him in only his boxers. The rest of his clothes were in a careless pile on the floor, and he was lying low upon her pillows. She’d already made sure that her blinds and drapes were firmly drawn shut so that the cops outside wouldn’t notice his silhouette, but he wanted to be cautious even so. Sebastian’s hair was sticking out at odd angles, Tobin noticed in vague amusement. He probably hadn’t even noticed that he’d been compulsively running his fingers through it the entire time he’d been telling his story, leaving it in such a state when it dried from his brief stint in the shower with her. God, he was handsome, though. He hadn’t climbed beneath the covers of her bed yet, as she stood there naked herself, his brown eyes were upon her, a roguish heat in them that she was familiar with by now.

Quickly, she headed toward her dresser and pulled out her pajamas, tugging them over her head and pulling them up her legs before turning to face him again. For just a heartbeat, her eyes raced over his broad, bared chest, and her throat tightened when a smirk twitched at the corner of his lips.

“I liked what you were wearing before better,” he mused playfully, and she glowered at him.

“Oh, shut up,” Tobin muttered, and then moved over to the other side of the bed, tugging back the sheets. He lifted up his hips so she could, and then slid his legs underneath them himself. After she adjusted her pillow, she was reaching over and turning off her bedside lamp, plunging them into darkness. “Goodnight, Sebastian.”

Her head lowered into the pillow, and she shut her eyes. He didn’t answer her, though, and he didn’t seem to move, watching her as she sought sleep. And then the sheets were rustling, and she could feel his heat moving closer to her. Without more warning than that, his arms went around her waist and he was tugging her back into his chest, nuzzling against her soft, freshly washed hair.

“Sebastian,” she started with a sigh in vague protest, and he shook his head against her.

“Are you really going to argue with me about this?” he asked her gently and pulled her closer. She could feel every inch of his strength against her, his heat engulfing her, and his breath rhythmically brushing against her cheek. His stubble brushed against her jaw. “Or can you admit to yourself, just for tonight, that you actually like having me around? That you’re glad I’m here? That you feel safer with my arms around you?”