Claire: The Forced Virgin Of The Billionaire

8 MONTHS BEFORE

Drake Clarke’s POV

Recently, my uncle died. He was a hardened criminal and duplicitous liar. He was also a known wise guy that was part of something larger and more evil than any of us realized. After he died I took it upon myself to legitimize and then sell the family business so that I and the rest of my siblings could move on. I’d stayed away for so long and kept away from all of my family because of my strained relationship with my brother.

But not anymore… because with Uncle gone, there was no one tough enough to protect the family. I knew my brother was more than enough but I didn’t want him to do it all alone as much as I hated to accept it. Uncle might’ve been a disgusting human being and he might’ve gotten countless people killed out of mere pettiness but he kept the family safe.

My brother and I had severe issues. I blamed him for our father’s death. I blamed him for our mother’s death. I blamed him because that was all I could do. I needed to blame someone and he was the only one there so I blamed him. Blamed him for all the s**t we had to go through.

And then I cut him off completely as soon as I got the chance.

But I was done punishing him….. our family’s protection was more important than our issues right now. My self imposed exile was over. And I needed to f*****g deal…. deal with my brother, my family, the business, everything.

Unknown to my brother even though he’d kept an eye on me throughout my “exile”, I hadn’t exactly left the family business scene. Uncle and I had been in touch very often and I handled the majority of the family business’s international relations. It would suffice to say that I was as much involved as Azriel was except that he didn’t know nothing about my involvement in the family business because I worked under an alias.

But I knew everything that’d gone down with him in the past few years.

Uncle had kept me updated on everything that had been going on with the family for the past years but only in the past few months had things taken an exciting turn.

My brother was surprised to say the least when he saw me just a few days after his wedding. Throughout the duration of my Uncle’s death and funeral, my brothers vacation and Dario handling everything in his stead…. I’d studied the will Uncle’s lawyer had sent to me a few days before his funeral took place.

The original will which had been drawn up by our father and was to be opened only in the case of Uncle being seriously diseased or on the splendid occasion of his death explicitly stated that I and Azriel were to jointly inherit everything that had the name Clarke marked on it.

But Dario had been such a huge help in Azriel’s absence and I’d entered the scene after almost everything had blown over so it was only fair of us to hand over 15 percent of the Clarke shares to him and he would be pretty much set for life.

But little did I know that before his death, uncle had started the ball rolling on giving me the same kind of gift he’d given my older brother.

When news of this gift arrived on my doorstep my already chaotic world was turned on its axis.

I had just gotten home from a particularly boring and fruitless meeting and I had every intention of going on a long f*****g run to clear my already clouded head.

I told my brother I could handle most of it on my own; I had it under control. I had a few key guys to help me here.

He could go, enjoy time with his new bride far away from home, away from secrets and lies and deceit. No matter how much I hated him, he’d been my idol all my life from afar. I’d always envied him for being our father’s favorite for as long as he was alive, God rest his soul.

That was why I left in the first place, unjustified resentment for our parents death and petty jealousy over him being better than me.

In our family he was the heir and I was the spare, the younger one, so I probably also wanted to prove that I was just as capable as he was. But that was before I knew of the will. Before I knew we would be equal partners in business.

So after the funeral of our uncle, Tom Clarke and Azriel’s wedding, my brother and his new bride Claire were giving a go at starting a fresh life overseas, away from secrets that needed to be kept.

I, however, was to be back home doing the “laundry” so that we could sell off the empire that our father and uncle had spent 30 years building.

That was one thing we agreed on. Neither of us wanted to be at the helm of our fathers empire which had turned even dirtier after our Uncle’s handling of it for years.

Before our Uncle died he arranged for my brother to get married, gifted him with a girl…

without his knowledge. Surprisingly enough Azriel had gotten red in the face when I prodded him on the matter and refused to elaborate, I barely restrained myself from bursting out laughing for I knew everything beforehand about how he met Claire, thanks to our dear uncle.

After I saw the impact of that girl on my brother’s life for myself, how smitten he was with her, I mean for f**k sake Azriel hadn’t even had a relationship before her and she’d turned him into “husband material”.

I’d joked with Uncle at an after-party in Colorado that I wanted a mail-order bride for my upcoming birthday. That seemed like a lifetime ago now.

My uncle joked back that he was already shopping around and would find me a perfect fit. At least I’d thought he’d been joking.

See, my uncle was deeply involved in a human trafficking ring, one of the many involvements he’d neglected to tell me and my brother about as he prepared us to take over the family business. We might’ve been trained separately but we were trained for the same thing.

We never knew that what he’d had in mind for us was just the top skim off a cesspool of filth he’d been too happy to be wading in. We had suspicions but we had no clue just how filthy it truly was.

Uncle and I had a conversation when talking about Azriel and Claire and how my brother went from being the non-marrying kind to devoting himself 100% to the girl uncle had arranged for him to have. Uncle wouldn’t tell me his motives behind the choice at that point but it all unfolded over the subsequent weeks.

A little less than two months before my birthday he had asked me what I wanted in a bride.

“What’s on your wish list, son?” uncle asked.

“Beautiful. Redhead. But she has to want what I want from life. She has to have an insatiable s****l appetite but want kids and a picket fence, too.”

“How about if she’s all those things because she does exactly what you tell her to do? How about if she’s been schooled in all the ways to please a man in and out of the bedroom?”

“That’s too good to be true, uncle. Too bad such a woman does not exist.” I’d laughed and our conversation got cut short.

I’d always wanted a wife and kids. I wanted the picket fence and enough kids to start my own soccer team. But when I caught my fiancée cheating on me with the DJ we’d hired for our wedding reception my heart went cold.

After seeing Azriel’s life change (albeit from faraway, it honestly wasn’t as creepy as it sounded) because of falling in love I decided that maybe it was time to open my mind up to the possibilities of connecting with someone again beyond a one night stand. When I got home from a meeting with my brother just a day before he and his wife were leaving for some place overseas, I was ready to start the massive job of cleaning up the family business so that I could move on with my life and think about finding my own happily ever after. Instead, I found out that uncle had already ordered my mail order bride. And I couldn’t cancel that order.

My uncle’s involvement in a human slavery ring, it was deep. We knew the trade existed and we knew he knew people in that trade. Azriel had seen a little more of the inside of it than I had. But neither of us knew that he had partnered with them, that he had an in that meant he could get me the woman on my wish list.

She’s waiting for me to pick her up in Bangkok. She’s been told she has been sold and is going back to North America. She’s about to turn 23, she’s a beautiful redhead, and she’s been in captivity for 2 years.

There’s no way I can accept this gift, keep a woman who was bought for me. I need to pick her up and set her free.

Don’t I?