Bad Blood: Book One




She’s the daughter of the man I hate most in the world...

For almost ten years, I’ve been waiting to exact my revenge.

Ten years to allow her to blossom from a child to a woman.

Ten years in which I’ve grown a million-dollar business and built a powerful body to match.

And now my wait is over.

I’ve kidnapped her. Taken her. Made her mine, just as her father did to others before her.

With her sexy body, fierce mind, and sharp mouth...

The one thing I did not expect was to fall for her.





Chapter One




“Jolie Dorman, how does it feel to be the daughter of a serial killer?”

The question came from one of the reporters in the audience.

Standing on stage in front of a hall of strangers, I sucked in a breath and answered.

“It was something I tried to deny for a long time. Honestly, I wanted to hide from it. I wanted to become someone else. I thought about changing my name a million times, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.”

I looked into the watchful eyes of fifty or more people, all here to listen to what I was going to say. I was breaking my silence after almost ten years of refusing to talk about this with anyone. But I’d come to the conclusion that if I really wanted to help young people deal with their traumas, I needed to face my own.

I’d been in this university lecture theatre hundreds of times before, but normally I was where the audience is now, rather than standing on stage with everyone watching me. A microphone was attached to the collar of my shirt before I’d stepped out, and now my voice sounded too loud, booming around the vast space.

I thought these people sitting before me probably had as many issues as I did. Some were reporters—I could see that in the way they were dressed and scribbled in notepads as I spoke. Recording devices and camera equipment had been banned from the hall. It was one of the stipulations I’d set in place before agreeing to do the talk. The last thing I wanted was to see my face plastered across the news, or even worse, on social media or YouTube. There were others there, too, not only reporters. I spotted several women with an obsessive glint in their eye, who were probably the type of weirdos who had decided they were in love with my father, despite him most likely never seeing the outside of a prison cell. And then there were the people who were obsessed with serial killers, who liked to collect information on them, and try to link murders and solve crimes they thought the cops weren’t smart enough to figure out.

“Do you still see your father, Patrick Dorman?” a female voice called out of the crowd.

It was one of the women I thought was probably in love with him. What kind of sick person fell in love with a killer?

You loved him, a little voice spoke up in my head. You should know.

I shook the voice away.

“No,” I replied. “I haven’t seen him since I was a child. I went to visit him with my mother and brother after he was arrested, right before my mother—” My voice broke and I struggled to regain my composure. “Did what she did. But I haven’t been back to see him since. I guess I blamed him for my mom’s death, as well as all those other women.”

At five feet two, I was tiny, and I tried not to feel intimidated by all the people watching. My height wasn’t something I’d inherited from my father, as he’d been over six feet, but it was the only thing I didn’t share his genes for. I had his light brown hair and dark, marine blue eyes. After it had all come out and was pasted across every news channel and newspaper, it was widely speculated that my father’s good looks was what had helped him kill so many women. The women were disarmed by his charm and easy manner, and no one thought this handsome man would be dangerous. That was the trouble. If he’d looked like a rough trucker or a homeless man, they might have been more cautious, but when he batted his baby-blues at them and offered to be of assistance in a situation he’d orchestrated—a broken down car, or lost keys, or purse—they were flattered and happy to accept his help.

But now, every time I looked in the mirror, I saw my father staring back at me. For a long time, I wondered if I was capable of the same sort of violence. After all, I shared his genes physically, so why not emotionally, too? It was particularly bad during my teenage years when I was just so damned angry at everything. I’d lost both my parents because of my father, and had been forced to change my home and friends, too. Combine that with a rush of teenage hormones, and I was always going to have been a train wreck.