Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
When Lena’s mom goes missing, she’s left with a ransom note and one hope—me.
I wanted Lena back then, standing at the door, perfect and curvy in all the right places. But I didn’t want to make her mom’s life more difficult. Now, there’s no choice.
My job is to do bad things, and it’s catching up with me.
“I’m doing this to keep you safe,” I tell her when I lock her up in my penthouse apartment.
That’s what I tell her. This is about her safety, and that’s true. It’s also true I can’t stop fantasizing about her thick, perfect body.
I don’t care if she’s only twenty-one and I’m forty. I don’t care if I had something with her mom. She doesn’t know it yet, but she belongs to me.
*Kidnapped By My Mom’s Ex is an insta-everything standalone romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
Lena
I sit on the couch, the note in my hands, the note that basically tells me they’re going to kill my mom. They don’t come right out and say it, whoever these assholes are, but I get the message.
We need your daddy’s wallet, or you can say goodbye to Mommy. We will send a courier tomorrow at six p.m. to collect the wallet.
The message is written in jagged, almost angry handwriting. They’re talking to me like I’m a kid, some scared twenty-one-year-old coward who will bend the second I see this, but I don’t even know what they mean. I run my thumb over the words daddy’s wallet.
I look around at the middle-class living room. The window looks out onto the suburbs. It’s a Saturday morning, and a few children are riding their bikes on the street, making that part of me ache, the one that always longs for a family. But I can’t think about that now.
This place, the expensive coffee table, the fancy wallpaper, it’s all new. We moved in two years ago, five years after Dad died in a plane crash. The crash has been turned into a Netflix show since then. It was a huge tragedy for the world, but it obliterated Mom. She cried all day and night. In our neighborhood, we had to find a way to make money, not just to pay rent but because we were robbed, too.
I stepped up. I worked illegally, cash-in-hand jobs. I tied my hair up in a cap and wore overalls to the warehouse and hoped none of them noticed or cared I was a girl, a teenage girl. I had to grow up fast. Then, just like that, we were in a new world—this suburban paradise. I’d always assumed Mom’s ex had given her the money. Just before we moved, she’d had a brief month-long relationship with a rich kingpin-type guy, Jamie King. I get the sense this type of cash is nothing to him.
With his dark hair, his strong jaw, those sharp blue eyes, and that smirk on his lips when he glanced my way as if he liked what he saw… No, I can’t think about him, either. Although, I might have to call him. The cops were reluctant to register my mom as a missing person. Mom had a girls’ trip to Vegas but was supposed to return the day before last. They probably assumed she was on a bender. This note would change their mind, but what if the kidnappers somehow find out?
I stand and grit my teeth. I have to know if Jamie’s the one who gave Mom the cash for us to live here. My skin shivers just thinking about him, which is distracting and not what I should be doing.
I remember walking into the warehouse, the man laughing at me when I asked for a job and giving me one almost as a joke. Then, the look in his eyes months later when I worked hard and never missed a shift. Not that I liked the work, but I proved myself.
I don’t know who’s taken my mom. I don’t know what they mean by my dad’s wallet, but I’ve got a theory. If Jamie didn’t pay for this place, then something to do with dad’s wallet did, whatever that ultimately means. That’s why people do things. I learned that the first time somebody broke into our house and took my battered old MP3 player. People are driven by money.
Walking into the foyer, I flip through Mom’s address book. She was weirdly proud when she bought this chic table and the leather-bound address book, though she had a cell and had never used an address book before. It was just nice to see her smile. When she told me a barefaced lie about some distant uncle leaving her the money—she actually said this—I turned off the critical part of my mind. I just accepted it to see her smile. Maybe that was a mistake.