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?”