Page 9 of A Dark Mafia Christmas

I can go back to work and not worry about him picturing me naked.

Something happens then, and my stomach lurches like I’m on an airplane. And all at once, I take in my surroundings: Emmett is seated on a couch that isn’t a couch because it’s attached to my bed, which isn’t a bed because there are other seats just like it. And there are round windows, and I can see the sky outside, and the humming isn’t coming from a refrigerator or a heating system.

It’s coming from the engines of a fucking aircraft!

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and try to stand as the aircraft dips to one side, throwing me into the arms of Emmett O’Hara. The man who proposed to me with someone else’s diamond ring, drugged me, and then kidnapped me on his private bloody jet.

“Get off me.” I bat his hands away and leap back onto my feet.

“Youfell onme.” His voice is so calm it winds me up to cranky time.

I look around the plane for something to stab him with. All I can find is a bottle of water, so I pick that up and start hitting him with it, taking some small pleasure from the way he crosses his arms in front of his face like he’s trying to fend off a vampire.

“Stop. This. Plane. Right. Fucking. Now,” I grind out between slaps that are nowhere near as hard or as painful as I’d like them to be.

“We’re already in descent preparing to land.” Emmett snatches the bottle from me mid-swipe and hides it under his seat. “You need to sit down and fasten your seatbelt.”

But I’m way past doing what this man tells me. Right now, he has shrugged off the role of boss and stepped straight into the mantle of crazy-abductor-with-a-private-jet-in-which-to-hide-his-victims. I spot his briefcase and pick it up, swinging it directly towards his smug good-looking face.

“No, Mary. Not the briefcase!” He jumps up and wrestles it away from me, and I can’t believe how weak I am after whatever it was that he drugged me with. “Sit. Fucking. Down.”

“Help!” I yell, my eyes darting around the cabin trying to find a way out. “Help me! I’m being kidnapped!”

He takes a deep breath, stows the briefcase in a cabinet above his head and faces me with his arms crossed over his chest.

“You’re not being kidnapped, Mary. We’re engaged to be married, remember? Do you think anyone is going to believe that the Managing Director of O’Hara Developers kidnapped his own fiancée?”

The Managing Director of O’Hara Developers.

Even the way he says it makes my blood boil. But it slowly dawns on me that I played right into his hands when I impressed everyone at the office party with his marriage proposal. He’s right. No one is going to believe that Emmett O’Hara, player extraordinaire, would need to kidnap the woman from IT. If hewants a woman, all he has to do is snap his fingers and there’ll be a whole bunch of beautiful women waiting in line to be chosen.

“Where are you taking me?”

I sound exactly how I feel. Defeated. How does anyone stand a chance against someone who can buy his way out of any situation?

“Home.”

“Home?” My head is clearing way too slowly. It’s like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded.

“Sit down, Mary. Please?” He gestures to the seat where I’ve been sleeping for God knows how long.

I do as I’m told. Even I can tell that the plane is making its descent, and there’s no point trying to get away from him while we’re in the air. My only hope is to make him believe that I’m going along with his plan—whatever it is—and then try to get away from him in the airport.

“Thank you.” He sits in the seat next to me.

He’s wearing a sky-blue sweater that clings to his chest and makes his eyes appear even brighter, and it would be so much easier to hate him if he wasn’t so goddamned hot.

“Where’s home?” I don’t dare peer out the window because if I don’t look, I can pretend to myself for a little longer that we’re still on the same continent.

“Ireland. County Wicklow to be precise.”

Tears well in my eyes as I try to work out how much it’s going to cost me to get back to the States from Ireland without a private jet at my disposal.

“Look, I’m sorry I drugged you, okay? But, well, you weren’t exactly keeping quiet, and these things have a habit of going viral online, and I didn’t want my family to find out about it before I had a chance to tell them.”

“Don’t they have cellphones in Ireland?” I sniff loudly, blinking back tears.

“It wasn’t that simple.”

---