His Vengeance: The Alpha Billionaire's Revenge Complete Series Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ©2017 Deana Farrady

  Note to Readers

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  Follow Deana Farrady

  Acknowledgements

  His Vengeance

  The Alpha Billionaire's Revenge Complete Series

  by

  Deana Farrady

  Mature Content

  This book is a romance

  with mature language and spicy situations and not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

  ©2017 Deana Farrady

  All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts used in reviews, no part of this publication may be copied or distributed in any form or in any way without the author's prior written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Any character's resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental. Any references to familiar public figures, locations, events, or products are used purely to make the fictional world look authentic, not to claim any association with, permission by, or endorsement of the public figures, locations, events, or products.

  Note to Readers

  This book, recounting the love story of Jonas and Linnea, is a novelization that was formerly published in serial episodes as The Alpha Billionaire's Revenge.

  As a serial, the episodes were:

  Hot Vengeance

  Angry Vengeance

  Golden Vengeance

  Velvet Vengeance

  Satin Vengeance

  Jagged Vengeance

  Deep Vengeance

  Wild Vengeance

  Loving Vengeance

  The content may have been edited slightly from previous versions of the story. The essential story is the same.

  CHAPTER 1

  WHY EXACTLY AM I here?" Linnea Melbourne asked baldly.

  Jonas Westerling looked at the woman sitting in the chair opposite his desk, his expression revealing nothing of his thoughts. She looked just like the woman in the photos and videos, fine-boned and slim.

  The cool gray suit emphasized the bony shape of her, bulking over any natural bulge at her chest. The straight, baggy skirt disguised any feminine slope at her hips and any curves in her thighs. With her gawky frame, she looked about twenty.

  He happened to know she had tits, though. And hips. And legs—unbelievable legs. Some of the shots had been taken at a pool.

  He knew a lot of things about her.

  Like the fact that she was actually twenty-eight, two years younger than he was. Never married, rarely dated. Heterosexual.

  And soon she would know he knew—all this and more. So much more.

  "Punishment." Jonas drew out the word slowly, saying it silkily, and saw Linnea's face bleed of color.

  "What?" Her response was just a breath. "I don't think I heard you correctly, Mr. Westerling."

  "Oh, yes, you did," he said coolly. "You are here to be punished, Ms. Melbourne."

  Her face changed from disbelief to amusement. "You're not serious, Mr. Westerling. You send your goons to pick me up at my place of work and have them bring me here in a long black car like out of some mob movie for…punishment? You're insane."

  He smiled. He knew, with the confidence of a man who had built his own riches from the filthy ground up, a man who'd never had to pay for sex even before he'd qualified as one of the wealthiest people in the nation, exactly what effect that smile had on women—all women. Even women who were not normally susceptible to seduction.

  Linnea Melbourne shouldn't have been susceptible. She had a reputation for being a frigid bitch. But she was, extremely so.

  He saw it in the way she sat up straighter in her chair and a pink flush lit her formerly pale cheeks. He saw it in the hard points that appeared on her suit jacket, showing her nipples to be eagerly erect. Good. Perfect.

  He'd been gambling on it.

  His gamble was already paying off.

  "I'm going to tell you a story, Ms. Melbourne," he said softly. "It's not a long one. It shouldn't take—" He glanced at the old-fashioned pendulum clock on the wall of his spacious office, where the two of them were alone. "More than ten minutes or so of our time. First, though, would you like a glass of wine? Beer? Juice? Water?"

  She shook her head silently to each one. He could tell from her stare of wary fascination that she was still thinking he was crazy. And that would work to his advantage, too.

  "Then I'll just begin. I could start this story with 'once upon a time,' but accuracy is important. So, eleven years ago, Ms. Melbourne, there was a boy who was seduced by a girl. The boy wasn't the smartest of kids, but they usually aren't, are they, as teenagers? Wouldn't you agree?"

  "Uh—yes."

  Jonas was fairly certain she was answering him only reluctantly. The fact that she did answer despite her obvious urge to be gone from that chair and his office was also a good sign.

  He let his gaze drift down to her mouth. It was full, deeply pink, and he was pretty sure the color was natural. That was unusual and surprising. Her tongue came out to moisten her lips, and his cock twitched. That was not unusual, nor was it surprising. It was exactly how his body had responded each time he'd stared at that photograph of her for the past ten years and, too, in the weeks of watching surveillance videos capturing her strolling into her apartment, her workplace, and any other place his investigative team happened to catch her.

  In fact, he'd so enjoyed those videos that he'd taken to running them on replay just to watch her hips wiggle from side to side as she moved. His cock had liked that very much. He'd imagined the wiggle of her hips as she was impaled the way she almost certainly would be, with cock, fingers, and any damn thing he wanted.

  Oh, yeah. He was looking forward to finally answering the need that had been building in him. But there were other things demanding satisfaction, too. He leaned back in his chair and regarded her lazily.

  "Kids are foolish," he drawled. "It's expected. But sometimes more than the expected occurs. Like eleven years ago."

  "Would you just get to the point, Mr. Westerling?'

  "Of course," he said politely. Courtesy, he knew, could be as deadly a weapon as a knife. He'd learned how to use the latter on the streets of Chicago and in self-defense courses. The former he'd taught himself.

  "That boy," he went on, "was not only foolish, he was weak. He didn't just let the girl pop his
cherry. Which was, by the way, a crime, since he was fourteen and she was seventeen. But let's forget that for a minute. He let her give him some highly unpleasant drugs. Not just your run-of-the-mill street drugs. We're talking the nastiest of the nasty, Ms. Melbourne. Drugs that don't have a name because they're not on the books yet. Drugs that were rejected by the hardcore addicts as too vile and not even very fun. You're getting the drift? Not nice dope at all. It's a sad thing, how easy it is for a sexy young girl to influence an innocent boy that way, don't you agree?"

  She was pale again, he saw with satisfaction. Her shoulders had come forward with tension. Her pearly skin was tightly stretched over her angular, almost exotic features, making her shortly-cropped black hair look ebony with its shine.

  Vulnerable. Beginning to be scared.

  Good.

  "The story ends in a predictable fashion, I'm afraid. I must apologize for being boring, but it's a true story, so I'll just tell you the ending. Unless you can guess it?"

  "Did he die?" The words were husky, just barely a whisper.

  "Did who die?" he said softly.

  "The—the boy."

  "Actually, no. It was close. Messy. Astoundingly bloody. He would have died, except he was found in the nick of time by, well, me. His brother."

  Linnea Melbourne gasped. It was a tiny, almost invisible reaction he was gratified to see.

  "We looked for the girl, of course. She should have been easy to find. Unfortunately, we weren't very solvent then financially. We lived, you see, on the wrong side of the tracks—or, since we're talking Chicago, it's more accurate to call it the wrong neighborhood. Not the worst of the slums. Just no place special. A sad story, isn't it?" He shook his head with mock sympathy. "No resources. Nobody to hire. Nobody wanted to talk to me. I did look for a while on my own, and I came up with some intriguing conclusions. She wasn't in a local gang. She wasn't at his school. She didn't have a social media presence. He'd met her at a free concert just a few weeks previously. So quick it must have been. Target him, fuck him, hook him, kill him, all in a month."

  "But he didn't die."

  "No. No, that's true, Linnea. You didn't kill him. Just almost. And to be honest, we forgot it for the most part, eventually. He grew up. He got married. Kid on the way. I won't say he's not messed up. He's actually a fairly fucked-up individual. But he's okay with it, enough so that he wouldn't want to be part of any legal proceedings now. But you know what?"

  He held her gaze unblinkingly. She seemed mesmerized.

  "I'm not. I keep thinking about that day. Not the day I found him. I try not to think of that. I'm talking about the day he woke up a week later. He talked about you. You're a piece of work, you know that?" Jonas smiled and leaned forward. "You enjoyed what you did to him. You were—what, seventeen? Was it on a dare?"

  She was shaking her head continuously now, leaning back in her seat as if in denial. What the hell did she think was the point of denying anything?

  He didn't understand why he was disappointed. He'd always known she had to be a cowardly bitch.

  "I'll bet that was it. I'll bet your friends dared you to see how long it would take you to ruin the kid. Or maybe he was a test case for your lab." He injected just a bit of steel into his voice. "Or maybe I'm giving you too much credit and him too much credit. Maybe you just didn't give a fuck and wanted to share your pathetic excuse for a lifestyle with some random boy too naive for words. It's not important. What is important, Linnea Melbourne, is that he had a photo—not the best photo, but something. And as time went on, we started to be able to do things with images. Digital things. Forensic artists are truly amazing creatures. Search engines are powerful. One year it was impossible for me to find you. The next, it was as easy as anything. After that, all we had to do was correlate data. Places you'd lived, when, and where. And you know what's funny, Linnea?" He picked up his own glass of water and took a sip, peering at her above the rim. "It's been eleven years, but you really haven't changed a bit."

  CHAPTER 2

  LINNEA STARED AT THE COLD-EYED, dark man across the vast expanse of his ridiculously luxurious desk and hoped he couldn't see her trembling.

  Even before he'd started talking, she'd known he was deeply disturbing to her. For one thing, he was wealthy. Disgustingly wealthy. She was pretty sure the fact that a person like herself was sitting in the same room with this man breathing the same air had to be breaking a fundamental law of the universe somewhere.

  Just the memory of the big, bulky men waiting outside the campus building where she worked and the way they'd ushered her into a car, terrorizing her with surprise before she'd even had the wherewithal to protest made her suck in her breath. It was like she'd embroiled herself in the mafia. Only Jonas Westerling wasn't mafia.

  He was big business.

  The biggest business.

  And apparently into her business.

  That was disturbance factor number one. Then there was the part about his being tall, dark, and terrifyingly handsome. Something niggled at her about his looks. She'd never been particularly affected by pretty men. Only he wasn't pretty. His wasn't the kind of handsome that slowly aged into puffiness as a man went from his twenties to his fifties. No, with his sharp, angular nose, narrow eyes, and high cheekbones, he could almost be described as ugly-handsome, and the effect of that harsh male beauty would only get more defined as he aged. Right now he looked barely older than her—certainly not older than thirty. And his looks were already devastating.

  He was also built. Not like a weight lifter, which wasn't her thing anyway, but like an athlete. It showed not just in the cut of his suit, but in the way he'd moved around his desk to shake her hand when his goons had brought her into his office.

  Five seconds. That was all she had of being close enough to him to touch, only two of those containing actual touching. But it was all she needed to know that she wanted to keep as far away from him as possible. He was too hot. Too intense. Too sexual. Too…everything.

  She closed her eyes for a moment to give herself time to think. To control her reactions to being in the room with him, to the effects of his gaze wandering down her body whenever he felt like letting it. She needed to process what he'd told her. Her mind was racing.

  "You seem to know a lot about me, Mr. Westerling," she lied, hoping her voice didn't sound as shaky as she felt.

  "Sure I do," he said in that easy, deep-velvet voice that was deceptively casual. "I know you come from a nice suburban Chicago family. I know your parents are in accounting and insurance and your sister lives somewhere in Florida. You're something of a loner—you hardly date and you don't have any close friends. You lazed around a bit before starting college, then took a job straight out of school for the same insurance company your mother works for until—last year, was it? When you started a course in food science—very forward thinking of you, by the way. I commend you. You also have a job on campus there. Your hobbies include swimming, making quilts, and eating at salad bars. I also know the car you drive and where you buy your lingerie and, well, frankly, the list of things I don't know is probably shorter."

  If she didn't know better, she'd almost have thought he was teasing her. But she did know better.

  He was deadly serious.

  And it was beginning to look a lot like she was just dead.

  Ah, but the joke's on you, Mr. Westerling. Somehow your investigators missed the most important thing here. You don't know that the person you're looking for isn't me at all. It's my identical twin sister. And she's even more messed up than your brother is. You don't know that I'm still here listening to your shit because she has a husband and two kids and I know she's no more safe from you in Florida than I am here in Chicago. And now that she's finally made something of her shitty life, I'll do almost anything to protect her from having her former mistakes, however unforgivable, come back to haunt her.

  "Impressive," she said, lifting her chin. "So you're bent on taking some kind of revenge. What do you inten
d to do? Clean out my bank account? Have me arrested? Sue me? Have your goons r-rough me up?" She laughed derisively to cover the note of unease she was pretty sure lurked in her voice.

  He looked taken aback for a moment. Then he smiled.

  "So you are brave after all, Ms. Melbourne. Courage is an important quality in somebody in your position. No, I'm not threatening you. I'm not the criminal or slimeball here, sweetheart. I'm telling you you're going to be punished for what you did to my brother, starting today. I'm not normally a vengeful person, but I have to say I've been looking forward to this for years." He tossed a piece of paper across the desk.

  Automatically she reached for it and gasped. Even though it only showed part of a girl's face, her throat, and her upper torso, Linnea could tell the old photo was indeed of Lauren. A seventeen-year-old Lauren in full emo mode. Fashion-wise and personality-wise, she and her sister had never been identical. Body-wise and face-wise, though, it really was uncanny.

  "So what then?" she whispered.

  "Let me back up by saying you do have a choice, because I decided to give you one. I'm going to let you choose your punishment. That sounds more than fair, doesn't it?" He didn't wait for an answer but went on smoothly. "Choice one is to pay me—or rather, my brother—five hundred thousand dollars. You don't have it, of course, so I'll give you till next week. There are a number of ways you can get it. You can sell your body for it, raise money, go to a moneylender, rob a bank—it's up to you. I do warn you, though…I'll monitor how it's done and I'll raise a stink if it's illegal or immoral. So there would be a cascade of consequences if, say, you lied to get money for your cause. I think that's reasonable, don't you? After all, it wouldn't be right for your punishment to cause other people to suffer, would it? You're the perpetrator here. You're the one who should suffer."

  "That's—that's insane," she breathed. "You could give your brother the money any time you wanted."

  "I not only could," he said. "I have. And more. But that's not the same as your doing it, sweetheart. It loses something. Something…punishing."