Wild Dirty Secret(27)

I examined Ella, her soft brown hair and smooth, creamy skin. Her nose tipped up, her eyes slanted up, doe-like. She was an attractive girl, no doubt, but there would have been plenty of them at that club, more sexed up than her. And the fact that he hadn’t fucked her before sending her on a job meant he didn’t have a sexual interest in her.

For the most part, Henri didn’t take seconds on his girls. He fucked them first or not at all.

Neither did he bother with rape. Henri liked his women willing; it made the girl’s inevitable fall more perverse. I shuddered—a residual reaction, a creak in the shadows of my memory. Only twice had I ever let Henri fuck me. Once upon a time, it was the price of entry to work with him and to gain access to the best clients.

Later, I’d been desperate to help my friend Allie fight for her daughter. I’d gotten the cash, but the experience had been painful and humiliating. That night I had made a promise to myself. That had been the last day I worked for him—until the night I met Ella.

Life was about finding the positive, picking the wildflower from a field of brittle grass. At least she didn’t know that pain, and if I could keep her safe, she never would.

Resolved, I turned back to her story. “Are you sure the guys were bringing you out to him? Maybe they were looking for somewhere private, and you guys saw him doing some deal.”

“No, I remember one of the guys saying how the rich guy needs to pay up.”

Shadows flitted across her face, pain and horror and grief for a man she didn’t even know, a man who’d hurt her. This was more than innocence, her instinctive caring for her enemy—it was goodness. No wonder we fought all the time. We were oil and water, destined never to mix.

“He was the one I saw on the ground as the door closed.”

I thought back to what Jade had said. “And Henri wasn’t doing any shady business when you got there? Drugs, women, something?”

“No. He was just standing outside, waiting.”

“Did he give you anything?”

She pursed her lips in frustration. “Like what? No, nothing. See, this is pointless.”

“The point is saving your ungrateful behind,” I said mildly.

From her position where she reclined on the bed, she suddenly turned onto her belly and rested her forehead on my jeans-clad knee. Her words were muffled when she spoke.

“I don’t know what he wanted with me. I didn’t do anything to him. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

She was bowed down to me, her words like a prayer. I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, a fake object of worship, a fraud. My skin itched, too tight, all wrong. She probably needed comfort, but I couldn’t give her that. I’d known all along I wasn’t cut out for this. I’d said all along that this wasn’t my thing. I would protect her, not baby her.

I slipped out from her grasp and out of the room, leaving her arms outstretched to nothing, ignoring the darkened stains of her tears on the bed. I really didn’t care at all.





Chapter Fourteen





I found a workaround to the phone situation in the form of Adrian’s cell phone and a well-placed Chanel catalog for distraction. Locking myself in my room, I dialed Luke’s number. I wasn’t ready to deal with his desperate search for some other girl, but this situation needed him. Ella needed him.

“He is only one cares enough,” Jade had said.

I called his apartment first, disconnected. Then his cell phone; it rang and rang. If he cared so much, then where was he? Not just now, but every time I had ever been hurt, ever been humiliated, why hadn’t he been there to protect me? It was irrational to think he could have saved me before we’d even met, but my love for him was irrational. It was obsession and affection, all blackened with the taint of resentment that I wasn’t pure enough. It was lust and it was familial, but then those two things had always been twist-dyed for me.

I kept thinking if I only had a name for what I felt for him, the solution would reveal itself to me. But there were no words for it, only sensations. Only the hollow sound of my voice calling out in a well where no one could hear me. There was only this churning, choking feeling in my gut, the remembered bite of a whip I had sworn never to feel again. Now I felt it always—phantom pain.

How much would I pay to keep my friends safe? It began as a mantra, a way to help someone who needed it at the time, a way to prove I wasn’t the shallow rich girl everyone thought I was. How much of myself could I give away and still be me? I feared we had already passed the mark, the sacrifice like a cancer that ate away at me inside, always hungry, never full.

A knock at the door startled me. I flung it open, expecting to see Ella: penitent, indignant, forgiving. Instead Philip glowered there.