Free Bought and Bound by Lyla Sinclair

Chapter One
    “Where the hell are we, Eric?”
    I’d awakened when the car stopped. We were parked in front of a warehouse. I’d thought we were going to Eric’s house after dinner.
    When he didn’t reply right away, I asked, “You don’t live around here, do you?” although I was pretty sure he didn’t. There was no way an “uptown boy” like Eric would live in an area like this. I looked around again. It was dark out and all these deserted-looking warehouses gave me the creeps.
    He laughed. “Yeah, right. This is my ‘hood.’” He sounded flip, but he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in what seemed like a nervous gesture. But that couldn’t be right. Eric was never nervous.
    “So why are we in the warehouse district on a Saturday night?” I noticed my last words were a little slurry. My tongue still felt numb from the four glasses of wine he’d bought me with dinner. I was a lightweight. Couldn’t hold my liquor. But if anyone had a reason to drink, I did.
    The last threads of my life were unraveling and I was helpless to stop it. All I could do was try to take my mind off my problems for the night by answering what I thought was a booty call from Eric.
    “That’s not the question you should be asking, Tanya,” Eric replied. “You should ask,
    ‘What’s in it for me to be at a warehouse on a Saturday night?’”
    Just because my wits were dulled didn’t mean I couldn’t recognize a con job when I heard it.
    “Eric, have you and Alexis cooked up another one of your kinky scenarios? Because I was serious when I said I didn’t want to see her anymore.”
    If I hadn’t had the wine, I would have been hesitant to even mention Alexis’ name.
    Although they’d tricked me into their little “parties,” both times, I was embarrassed about how my body had reacted to their demands. And I still got wet remembering the way they’d dominated and controlled me and made me do things I’d never imagined.
    “I swear Alexis isn’t here, and I haven’t cooked up anything except a way to save your ass.”
    “Save it from what?”
    “Are you kidding? You’ve lost your job, run out of severance pay and you’re about to be homeless.”
    I didn’t like hearing it spelled out so bluntly, but he was right. My company had downsized because of the economy, and I hadn’t been able to find another job. But worse, I was about to lose the one thing I had left that mattered to me—my home, built by my grandfather. It was nothing fancy, but it was my last connection to my family.
    “Why would you still have a mortgage on a house that old anyway?” Eric asked as he tossed his perfectly highlighted hair from his eyes with a head flick and checked himself out in his visor mirror.
    I took in a deep breath. “We had to take out a mortgage when my mom got sick…to pay hospital bills.” For all the good it did.
    “It sucks that you still have to pay them even if the patient dies.” That was probably a pretty astute observation for a guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
    “Yeah,” I agreed.
    Eric went back to his drumming. Now he was making me nervous, despite the booze. He checked his car’s digital clock. He and I hadn’t spent that much time together, but I’d never seen him even a little anxious before.
    “Okay,” he said, turning his body sideways in the bucket seat. “I have a solution to all our problems and it may sound crazy at first, but you need to hear me out.”
    What in the world was he up to now? And what did he mean by “our” problems? There was no “our.” But what the hell? “Um…okay go ahead.”
    “How much do you need to pay off your house?”
    “Twenty thousand.” It might as well have been twenty million.
    “There’s a way for you to get fifty.”
    I started to open my mouth, but Eric put his hand up to stop me.
    “Look, there’s this…well…’club.’ It’s one of the ways multi-billionaires keep from being bored out of their skulls since