GREED(111)

“And what if it isn’t?”

“Isn’t what?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.

“My first offense.”

“Shit. If it’s not, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

“Oh, well, there’s nothing I can do for you then either,” I said coldly, the heat in my seduction blasted cold with a bucket of ice water at the flip of a switch. Casey’s mouth grew wide and he could see that he’d been had. I turned my face away from his, done with my pawn.

Casey got into the front seat and I could see through the rearview that his face was painted red with humiliation and obvious disappointment in himself that he fell for my game. He stuck the key in the ignition and drove me to the station.

I was booked, processed and searched. I scoffed at the women who had to search me before placing me in my cell. Stripping naked for anyone of the female persuasion wasn’t exactly what I’d had planned for the evening. They looked down on me, knowing my charges, like they were somehow better than me.

“My lingerie probably costs more than your entire wardrobe,” I spit out at the short, stocky one who eyed me with disdain.

She could only shake her head at me.

“Well it’ll go nicely with your new wardrobe addition,” the dark haired one said, handing me a bright orange jumpsuit.

This made both the women laugh. I slipped the disgusting jumpsuit on and they filed me away into a cell.

I shivered in my cell, coming down from my high. I was used to this part though. I only did coke on the weekends. Unlike most others I knew, I had enough self control to only do it at the Holes. It was just enough to drown out whatever crappy week I’d had from being ignored by my mother and father.

My parents were strangely the only I knew of who married and stayed that way. Of course, my mother was fifteen years younger than my father so I’m sure that helped and she stayed in incredible shape. If you pitched a pic of her then and now, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference and she’d gifted those incredible genes to yours truly. That was about the only thing my mother ever bothered to give me. My mother and father were so absorbed into themselves, I don’t think they remembered me some days. I was born for one reason and one reason only. It was expected of my parents to give the impression of a family.

My mom was a ‘housewife’ and I use that term loosely. My father was the founder and CEO of an electronics conglomerate, namely computers and software. His company was based in Silicon Valley but when he married my gold-digging mother, she insisted on L.A., so he jetted the company plane there when he needed to. It was safe to say that one, if not two or three, of my father’s products were in every single home in America. I’d had a five thousand dollar monthly allowance if I’d kept my grades up during prep school and that’s about as much acknowledgment I got from my parents.

I’d just graduated, which meant I had four years to earn a degree of some kind then move out. I would retain a monthly allowance of twenty thousand a month but I had to earn my degree first. That was my father in a nutshell.

“Keep appearances, Sophie Price, and I’ll reward you handsomely,” my father said to me starting at fifteen.

And it was a running mantra in my home once a week, usually before a dinner I was forced to attend when he was entertaining some competitor he was looking to buy out or possibly a political official he was trying to grease up. I would dress modestly, never speak unless spoken to. Timidity was the farce. If I looked sweet and acquiescent, my father gave the impression he knew how to run a home as well as a multi-national, multi-billion dollar business. If I did this, I would get a nice little thousand dollar bonus. I was an employee not a child.

“Sophie Price,” someone yelled outside the big steel door that was my cell. I could just make out the face of a young cop in the small window. The door came sliding open with a deafening thud. “You’ve made bail.”

“Finally,” I huffed out.

When I was released, I stood at a counter and waited for them to return the belongings I had walked in with.

“One pair of shoes, one skirt, one set of hose, one set of...,” the guy began but eyed the garment with confusion.

“Garters,” I spit out. “They’re garters. God, just give them to me,” I said, snatching them out of his hands.

He carelessly pushed the rest of my belongings in a pile over to me and I almost screamed at him that he was handling a ten thousand dollar outfit like it was from Wal-Mart.

“You can change in there,” he said, pointing at an infinitesimal door.

The bathroom was small and I had to balance my belongings on a disgusting sink.