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“I’m sorry I never told you what he asked me to do. I thought about it. I even tried to do it. But I was a coward and selfish.”
“Freckles, no,” Beck protested.
“I was. I thought that I was going to have to leave soon and that I wouldn’t see any of you again, so I wanted to take some time that was my own. Where I could be happy for the first time in, well, forever. But I should have told you.”
“What about the fact that he is your father?” Hux asked.
“I didn’t know he was my father. He never said. I never understood why he helped me . . . I still don’t really. If he’s my dad why did he never tell me? Why did he leave me to live here like I did? He was one of my mom’s numerous guy friends. He’d visit her whenever he was in town. I always thought of him as the weird man with the funny accent. But he must have known, right? Who I was? And he left me here.”
“Oh, little darlin’,” Hux whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“I used to dream that my dad would just one day appear, especially when the kids at school were being awful or when one of mom’s guy friends would get a bit rough.”
“A bit rough?” Owen asked in a low, dark voice.
She swallowed heavily. “Mostly with my mom. Not me. I usually hid. But sometimes I wasn’t as quick as I needed to be.”
“Fucking bastards!” Owen glared at the house she’d grown up in as though those men were in there. “I’ll kill them all.”
“Most of them are probably dead now. They didn’t exactly lead healthy lives.”
“I hate that you grew up like that,” Hux said in a tight voice.
“Me too. But it was what it was. I always thought that my mom kind of loved me, though. To learn that she’d basically sold me to a gang to pay off her debts. That really hurt.”
“Oh, Freckles,” Beck said in a sad voice.
“So how exactly did Jonathan save you?” Judd asked. He was still holding her against him and she was grateful for the support.
“Like I said, my mom sold me to satisfy her debt. I know that sounds insane, but these guys . . . they seriously thought they owned me.” She licked her dry lips. “They had a strip club that was a secret brothel out the back. They put me to work in the club. Thankfully, I was only stripping. For a start. But I knew what was coming. That they’d start whoring me out. It was horrible. I always hated having people look at me. At school, the kids used to pick on me, they’d make comments about how dirty I was. How tatty my clothes were. They’d call me trash.”
“Motherfucking bastards,” Owen said. “I’ll fucking kill them all.”
Dear. Lord.
“Jonathan bought me,” she whispered. “I never really knew why. The one time I tried to ask him . . . he completely lost it. He had a bit of a temper. And that question really set him off. He grabbed my arms and shook me and told me to never speak of that again or else.”
“What the actual fuck?” Judd snapped.
“I don’t even know why he had a . . . a lover halfway around the world. Although, it could have been because of his father. He was a very strict, old-fashioned man. And Jonathan seemed scared of him. He died shortly after Jonathan rescued me.”
She rubbed at her forehead, and Judd reached up to massage the back of her neck. “You don’t have to tell us.”
“I do, though. I owe you this much. And I want to say it.” To get it out. She’d never told anyone, and it had eaten away at her.
“He came into the strip club one day. I was on stage . . . I had gotten to the end of the song, so I was naked. I didn’t notice him. I just wanted to get off stage quickly. They had me sleeping in a small room out back and I wanted to go there and hide. That night . . . later that night I was meant to start working in the brothel rooms and I was terrified.”
They all started swearing.
“And he came in and bought you?” Beck asked.
“Yeah. Sounds so simple, but that’s what he did. I was dragged out to another room, still naked, and there he was. The strip club manager said I was his now and shoved me at him. Jonathan looked me up and down and kind of sneered. I thought I was in for a life of sexual servitude. But he took me away from there. Gave me a place to live, a job, clothes, jewelry, as much food as I wanted.
