PURCHASED-Cora Black

This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental.
PURCHASED copyright 2017 by Cora Black. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission.
Author’s Note
Thank you so much for your support for my newest novel – PURCHASED: A Dark Bad Boy Baby
Romance. Hank and Annika’s story is dark, that’s for sure, so make sure you’re ready to take a trip into
some seriously shady territory! But I promise, just like always, that you’ll come out on the other side
awash in love, happiness, and maybe even a cute little baby.
If there are any questions, comments, concerns, declarations, incantations, or anything else you want to
share with me, please send me an email at [email protected]. Can’t wait to hear what
you thought of the story. It’s a pleasure to share my work with you.
Love,
Cora Black
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Contents
Author’s Note
Purchased: A Dark Bad Boy Baby Romance
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
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Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Epilogue
Sneak Preview: PURSUIT
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
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Purchased: A Dark Bad Boy Baby Romance
By Cora Black
Love is a treasure. Her body is merely a trinket.
She’s a toy, a pretty bauble, a meaningless thing to pass the time.
But for a cold-hearted bastard like me, there’s no feeling quite as good as destroying something
beautiful.
Her boyfriend was a drug smuggler and an all-around sleaze bag.
Small-time chump thought he could pull a fast one on me.
But playing with fire is how you get burned.
I don’t suffer fools; I take them for all they’re worth.
But the S.O.B. didn’t own much of value – at least, that’s what I used to think.
Then she walked in.
Annika, a porcelain doll, an angel in the flesh.
He thought she belonged to him, but the moment I looked in her eyes, I knew what was about to happen:
She was going to become mine.
F*ck decorum. F*ck morality.
I’ll pay whatever it takes to have her in my grasp.
Chapter One
Annika
“Thanks, babe,” Remy said as I helped him pull his camping pack off his shoulders. He shrugged it off
and let the straps fall down his arms. I set it down by the door and grabbed his coat, pulling it off for him
while he panted as if he’d walked all the way to my apartment.
Layers of cold came off of him while I removed his gear. He had brought that inside with him as well. It
lingered by my door, slowly dissipating into the small one-bedroom apartment he paid for but didn’t share
with me— except for a few nights every six weeks or so.
I dropped all of his gear and extra layers in a pile by the door and walked back into the kitchen, where I’d
been working on dinner in anticipation of his arrival. I knew he’d need a hot meal when he finally
arrived. I had also expected that he wouldn’t be too terribly affectionate or grateful. He never was.
“What’s for dinner?” he barked from the couch, where he’d plopped down after handing me his gear.
“Beef stew,” I told him. So I hadn’t exactly slaved over it. It had been cooking in the crock pot all day.
All I had to do was serve it up when it was ready, and it should have been about ready for us.
“It smells delicious,” he added, making no effort to actually get off the couch.
I didn’t say anything. I knew he was tired from crossing the border. He didn’t cross at the border
checkpoints. He didn’t want to risk going through customs with his cargo. He had a path through the
wilderness that he used to get across. Even on the northern border with Canada there were a lot of people
crossing by foot, illegally, and they all had their reasons. Remy crossed for business.
He didn’t walk the whole way. He drove to a point on the Canadian side where he could camp and park
his car for a few days. He walked across and picked up the truck he kept on the U.S. side of the border.
Then he came to the apartment and stayed with me while he conducted business. He’d bought everything
in the apartment for me. He paid the rent and utilities, and he kept it furnished. He also made sure I had
plenty of pills, if I wanted them.
So, if he wanted to come in and crash on the couch with barely even a hello, much less any sign of
affection, that was his prerogative. I was in no position to rock his boat. My job was to be there when he
showed up and to be a loyal, serving woman to my man.
“Are you ready to eat?” I asked, pulling out a couple of bowls and silverware for dinner.
“Absolutely. I’m starving,” he said, getting up from the couch and trudging into the dining room. He sat
down at the table and waited on me to serve him.
I filled his bowl and grabbed a beer from the fridge on the way to the table. I set his food and drink
down, and then I went back for my own. When I finally sat down, I was able to get my first good look at
him.
“Rough trip?” I asked.
He looked up at me with his dark eyes. They were brown, but sometimes they seemed almost black. His
tired, haggard face told the story of a troubled crossing. The weather didn’t seem to be cooperating
either. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his cheeks were a little sunken in. He had dark circles around his
eyes, and his thin hair was a matted rat’s nest on top of his head.
“You have no idea,” he croaked.
“Well, don’t worry, baby. I’ll take care of you tonight,” I said in a soothing tone. “Eat some of this stew
and get a hot bath. You’ll feel better then.”
“I hope so,” he remarked, returning to his food. “I wouldn’t have crossed if I’d had a choice,” he said a
few moments later.
“Why did you, then?” I asked.
“Those fucking impatient bikers, man. We can’t keep Satan’s Vanguard waiting.”
Satan’s Vanguard was a local MC. We were in a small town near the border, but the Vanguard had big
city dreams. The MC was Remy’s number one buyer, so I understood why he wouldn’t want to keep them
waiting.
“Well, you’re here now,” I told him. “The worst is over, and you get a few days to rest, baby.”
“You’re right about half of it,” he said as he continued to eat. He didn’t say much else, just kept eating.
He got up at one point and refilled his bowl. When I realized what he was doing, I protested, telling him I
could have done it for him, but he shrugged off my offer to help and sat back down to eat.
Without a word, he got up after he finished and put his bowl in the sink. Then, he went down the hallway
toward the bathroom. I heard the door close, and then water running. I sat at the table with my half-eaten
bowl of stew and listened as the man who was supposed to be my boyfriend went on about his business
like I wasn’t even there. I finally got up and dumped the rest of my food in the trash.
Remy never talked much, but the last few times he’d crossed, he had grown shorter with me. I had long
since accepted that our relationship was little more than a business arrangement for him, but that didn’t
mean I didn’t grow lonely or weary sometimes from the lack of attention.
I had met Remy back when I was in high school. He rescued me from an abusive foster home. He needed
someone to help him keep a kind of home base while he ran back and forth across the border, and I
needed a safe place to call home. That was when he’d set me up in my own place. Well, in our own
place.
“Babe, this is only for a little while,” he’d told me the night we moved into this apartment. “After about a
year, I should have enough money to live off of. Then, we’ll get married and I’ll take you away from
here.”
I couldn’t remember feeling happy and hopeful at the time, though I was certain I must have felt that way.
Otherwise, why had I put up with him for so long? No, what I remembered was feeling grateful. The
gratitude I had felt then was what had kept me with him for so long. That, and the fact that in between his
visits, I had about six weeks to myself at a time.
I stayed loyal to my man, which meant only having sex a few times every few weeks, only when he was
on the U.S. side of the border. Even then, sex was more of a chore. Like cooking dinner, it was
something he expected of me when he was home. It was also something I needed by the time he made it
back across, so it worked out for both of us.
As with any relationship, it had been incredibly intimate at first. There was a point when I had confused
my gratitude for love. But as the promises went unfulfilled and he seemed less and less genuinely
interested, I realized I was simply another tool of the trade for him.
I got a nice apartment out of it. I got to spend my time with friends. I had all the clothes I needed. He
kept the pantry stocked, the bills paid. I had drugs, and not just the pills he occasionally supplied either.
He paid for anything I wanted. It might have been lonely from time to time, but all in all, it was a pretty
good arrangement.
By the time he got out of the bath, I was lying in bed wearing a nice piece of lingerie I had bought. It was
a silk and lace teddy, lavender and black. I had bought it to surprise him with something a little new. I
had pushed the covers back and waited for him to come out of the bathroom.
“I bet that wasn’t cheap,” he said, nodding at my lingerie.
“I think it looks good on me. What do you think?” I asked, ignoring his comment and trying to salvage the
mood.
“I think you spent too much on something that’s just going to get taken off and left on the floor,” he said in
a firm, gruff voice. He wasn’t even trying to be playful about it.
“I just thought it would be nice to do something a little different,” I told him. Hell, I was loyal to him; the
least we could do was pretend every once in a while that I was present in the bed during sex. It wasn’t
like I was going to ask him to tell me he loved me or anything stupid like that. I didn’t want that much out
of it, but a little acknowledgement wouldn’t hurt.
“Yeah, and did you put this ‘something different’ on the card, or did you pay cash for it?” he asked as he
walked over to the dresser and pulled out a pair of gray cotton boxers. He pulled them on, covering his
manhood.
So far, it didn’t look good for sex. It must have been a pretty rough crossing.
“I put it on the card,” I told him. “I ordered it online, what else was I going to do?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if trying not to unleash on me. “Why do you insist on
putting so much on the card?” he asked.
“Like I said, I ordered it online. I couldn’t very well pay cash for it,” I argued. I didn’t see his point, and
there wasn’t much I could have done about that.
“Do you need it, though? The card is to be used as sparingly as possible. What if I don’t get a score this
month? What then? What if I can’t pay for all these things you keep putting on the card? I give you
enough money for you to buy the things you need, don’t I?”
“Yeah, you do,” I said, giving up any arguments I had for the lingerie. When he started raising his voice, I
knew he wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say.
“There are shops here in town if you feel like you need something nice or sexy. Hit up the mall with your
girlfriends,” he said.
We often referred to the mall as the small because it was just that – small. We didn’t have a Frederick’s
of Hollywood, or anything close. We didn’t even have a Victoria’s Secret. We had a department store
whose sexiest piece of clothing was a silk nightgown that stopped right above the knee and had a little
lace across the top. And the way it was cut, it made every woman look pregnant. Not sexy in the least.
“I know you think you’re living the life here, Annika, but we’re one missed score away from having to cut
back on things,” he said as he climbed into bed
He cut off the bedroom light and pulled the covers up. Then, he rolled over away from me and lay facing
the other wall in the dark.
“Don’t put anything else on the card for a while,” he mumbled, and a moment later he was snoring.
In all the years we’d been together, he’d never talked to me about money. He had always acted like the
money didn’t matter. He treated it like we had enough to do whatever we wanted, and if anything came
up, he handled it.
I lay in the dark, in my sexy new lingerie, and I found myself crying silent tears. What had I done to
deserve this life? What could I have possibly done that was so wrong that I wound up with a man who
took me for granted?
I had always pretended I understood why he kept me around. I was there to feed him, to take care of his
American home, and to serve his needs when he was with me. If he didn’t need me for those things, he
could have simply paid rent on the apartment to make sure he had a place to sleep where he kept his
clothes and stuff like that. Hell, for that matter, he could have paid for a room for the few nights he was
here.
I rolled away from him and pulled up the covers, and cried myself to sleep, careful to keep it quiet so I
didn’t wake him.
Chapter Two
Hank
“Hey, Pop,” I said to my dad as he picked up the phone on the other side of the Plexiglas divider between
us. I’d sometimes call him Pop to get a reaction out of him. He hated it.
He’d been locked up for the last year on assault charges after a fight with a member of a rival MC from
downstate. They were a city group trying to expand to the rural market. They were encroaching on
Vanguard territory, and my father had gone out to handle it with a few other old-timers. They’d handled it,
but it landed my father behind bars.
“Don’t hey, Pop me, boy,” he said. “Not unless you’ve come to tell me you got one of those girls of yours
pregnant and you’re keeping her around to raise your son. If you can’t tell me that, I don’t know why you
even bothered coming up here.”
“Well, damn, Paul, I’m glad to see you, too,” I said, using my dad’s real name. “Are they taking care of
you in here?” He’d grown a beard, full and gray, but he kept his head shaved while he was inside,
showing off the tattoos he’d gotten on the sides of his head when he was younger. One was a skull with
the letters F-T-W underneath it for Fuck The World. The other was a diamond with 1%er tattooed in the
middle of it.
“Boy, cut the small talk,” he barked. “Why’d you come in today?”
Paul knew I didn’t usually come by to check on him. If I was in, I was seeking his advice on something.
He was still technically the president of Satan’s Vanguard, so there were times when he was the only
person who could handle things.
“I think someone’s trying to make a move on us, and I think it’s an inside job. I think they’re going to try
to take me out and replace me,” I told him. I had been reluctant to put my suspicions on the table because
I felt like it would have opened the door for more mockery from my father, but there had been some moves
made on our people in another market, and I felt like the MC needed some guidance from our real
president.
Paul laughed. “I guess they think they’re going to pull the same shit I did. And you’re the perfect target,
too, coming in here to cry to your daddy because someone doesn’t like you.
Boy, you’re supposed to act as my proxy, and when I step down, you’re the next president in line. You
know that, right?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Then fucking act like it, kid. Grow a pair and take charge. Where have they been making moves?”
“New Hampshire,” I told him.
He shook his head. “You might want to send a couple of guys out there, guys you know you can trust to be
loyal to you. Guys who won’t be scared to handle the threat and set everyone else straight again.”
“Got it,” I said. I already had a couple of guys in mind.
“And as far as the threat from within, you know why they’re coming after you, right?” He continued before
I had a chance to answer. “They see you as weak. They see that you’re sitting in as my proxy, and you’re
not making an effort to secure the position as your own.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Are you saying I should try to take this position from you while you’re in
here?”
Paul smiled. “Not exactly, but you need to be at a point where the MC won’t let you step aside for me
when I get out. Take it from me, because I’ve done it. The stronger you are as a president, the less likely
they will be to try to push you out of the way. And you don’t want them to come after you,” he warned me.
“I know.”
“Do you? Boy, they will kill you, just like I killed the president before me, corrupt bastard.” He shook
his head, thinking back on his old president. “That was the day I earned this tattoo,” he said, pointing at
the diamond on the side of his head. “That’s how I became president. And I’m supposed to be handing
that job down to you, but unless you show them you’ve got your old man’s cold blood in your veins, you
won’t make it.”
I sighed. I’d heard the story hundreds of times, in varying amounts of detail. It wasn’t his only murder,
but it was the one that mattered the most. Some kids had dads who bragged about that one game in high
school, that moment when they had the chance to shine. My father bragged about that one kill. That was
his big game.
“You need to quit fucking around, boy, and you need to show your MC that you’re serious about being
their prez. You need to have a boy, someone who can take over behind you. You need to take an old lady
and show them that you are ready to rule with a cold hard bitch by your side.”
“Like mom?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. My mother had run out when I was little. She’d left me at the
clubhouse with one of the other old ladies while Paul was out on a job with a few other higher ups. He
came back, but she never did.
He chuckled. “I was hard enough for both of us, apparently,” he said, looking at me with cold eyes.
“Yeah, I’m sure that was it,” I said. “Well, thanks for your advice, Pop.”
“I’m serious about the kid, Hank,” he said, but something in his tone had changed. He wasn’t talking at
me anymore, wasn’t throwing his harsh, gravelly tone at me. He was speaking to me like another person,
an equal or a friend.
“I know you are,” I said, “but why would I want a kid, outside of playing politics with the MC? I can’t
even imagine trying to have a kid with one of the club girls. I mean, they’re all practically kids
themselves.”
“Then, don’t use a club girl. You need to leave those girls alone anyway. Using them and throwing them
away when you’re done is childish and a sign of weakness. It shows that you’re not ready to be
pr...