Sold #2 - A Desperate Love

Chapter 7

When Darcy left the room as quietly as she did, with little complaints, Asato couldn't help but let out a deep sigh and hold his head in his hands, hoping that the poor girl wasn't crying over the way he had shouted at her. He hadn't meant to sound so angry, but he had still held the hope that he might have been able to talk Michiaki out of marrying her, by which time she would still be as pure as she had been when she had arrived at his house. But he knew that for his son to have, perhaps, influenced her into their physical relationship, then he must have loved her much more than he could ever understand.

"You had no right Michiaki...she's just a child." Asato couldn't help but say the words, knowing they made little difference to the fact that anything he had to say, was already being said too late to make a change to the circumstances. There was no way for anyone to bring back the young girl's innocence and he only hoped that his son wasn't going to disgrace their family name or the young girl anymore by going against his word and not marrying her.

"I really can't believe you." Michael sighed, raking both hands through his hair in disbelief, making sure to keep calm as he crossed over to his desk and leant against it, burying his hands in his pockets so that he didn't lash out at anyone or anything and make things worse. "You're the one that decided what I needed was an eighteen year old girl to marry. You're the one who brought nine of those girls to my house and made them suffer all those disgusting things they had to for three days..." He reminded him, Asato's head snapping up at, not only the passion in his voice, but the implication that the girls had suffered some injustice. He stopped him with an adamant hand as he stood, confused and angry.

"What do you mean?" He asked, making Michael laugh to himself.

"Do you really think it's like any other arranged marriage...that you told them you wanted the eldest girls they had for me to look over? It's not the same as when you were young dad." He explained, glad that they could actually talk it through like men and not shout and scream at each other as he had thought he would have to, just to get his point across. "They were dragged, by the hair, out of bed in the middle of the night...practically thrown down a flight of stairs and without any explanation as to what was happening, or how the people that they trusted and had grown up with, were suddenly treating them like dirt, they were told to take their clothes off and put on the dresses they had on when you saw them." He couldn't bear to remember the way his sweet girl had been treated on that day, but when he saw the shock on his father's face, he felt less of a hatred for what he had done, able to see that he hadn't known about it.

"Their parents did not explain to them? They were uninformed of the situation?" Asato thought to himself, having to take a deep breath as he paced the floor, now capable of understanding why the eldest girls had been the most well behaved and just what reasoning Darcy had for being as unruly and as foulmouthed as her teachers had told him she was. "I was unaware of this Michiaki...I would never have..."

"I know." Michael could see how upset he was, but it didn't make his objection to his relationship with Darcy any easier to bear. They had managed, somehow, to find a perfect peace and love amidst all the chaos and pain that her teachers had inflicted on her and he wasn't going to let anyone take that away from her, or from himself. "But it doesn't change the fact that it happened. And to be honest, Darcy and I are happy you did it, even though neither of us are happy about what she had to go through, but we both know there's no way we would have met otherwise. I just can't believe that you're going back on your promise."

"Excuse me?" Asato was thrown off by the words, spinning to face him.

"When you told us how you met mom, and you knew I wanted to find the same thing..." He explained quietly, remembering the way his fathers words about how he had met his mother, about the instant reaction he had and how he had always told him it was like a jolt of electricity going through him, forcing him to pay attention. "...you promise that if I ever found it, if I ever found the girl that I just had to look at once, to know I wanted to be with her, to know I wanted to marry her and spend the rest of my life just looking at her...you promised that no matter who she was or how you felt about her, you wouldn't interfere and you wouldn't try to stop us from being together." He reminded him of all that he had promised, however long ago it had been. Michael could remember the way his father had disapproved of Georgina and the very fact that she was preoccupied by his fathers money and reputation, but left him when he started to make a name for himself. But he had kept quiet about it then, and he had obviously thought that she was the one he had planned to spend the rest of his life with, but now that he found that girl, now that he found Darcy...he was going back on that and he didn't like it.