“Are you going to have sex with her?”
He jerked back in his seat, his expression riddled with confusion and dismay. “No! God, no. What the hell would make you say that, Catalina?”
“Because you want to give her a tip, and that’s what some of the men did to the women back at the compound.”
He stared at me in wide-eyed disbelief, and I felt myself shrinking, wishing I could vanish. I knew I’d said the wrong thing again, just like I’d done the wrong thing back in the restroom. Would I ever fit in with this world?
“No, Catalina.” His voice had softened, and he reached out and took my hand. Good, he wasn’t angry with me. “We tip anyone in the service industry—cab drivers, bartenders, hotel porters. It’s like an extra way of saying thank you for what they’ve done for us.”
“And we do that for waitresses and sex workers, too?”
“Yeah, we do. But I wouldn’t go comparing waitresses to sex workers too often. I don’t think the waitresses will thank you for it.”
“Oh.”
I felt small and stupid, and for one crazy moment, I longed to go back to the compound where I understood how the world worked. Only, if I went back, I wouldn’t be going back to that world—I’d be going back to Elliot Torres, where nothing at all would make sense.
The waitressed swept past, picking the money off the table. I shrank even further, hoping she hadn’t overheard any of our conversation. She returned a moment later, leaving a ten and twenty-dollar bill and some change.
“Here,” Angelo said, picking up the twenty and sliding it across the table. He pocketed the ten and a couple of the dollar bills, and left the rest of the change on the tray for the tip.
I frowned at the offered twenty, but didn’t take it. “But it’s your money.”
“Not really. I took it from my father’s office. Besides, whatever is mine is yours now, too.”
I shook my head and pushed the money back toward him. “No, I can’t take that. I’ve never had money before.”
Gently, he nudged the twenty-dollar bill across the table. “Maybe not, but you need to have it now. It’s what people do, Kitty. They have their own money so they can afford to pay for things, like our breakfast here. You need to start feeling comfortable with having your own money.”
Shyly, I slipped my hand across the table, and then picked up the money and slipped it into my pocket. The only time money ever exchanged hands in my world was when sex was being paid for, and while that wasn’t something I’d ever physically had to do, my whole future had been tied up in the exchange of money for my virginity.
A virginity Angelo had taken.
Chapter Seven
Present Day
I DIDN’T KNOW IF I should be amused by Catalina’s utter lack of understanding of how the world worked, or concerned. In short, I was a little of both. I’d never properly considered how all the little things I did day to day, without giving any thought to them, would have completely passed her by. She’d been tutored and had read books, and I guessed I thought that would have been enough to teach her how people did things in the rest of the world, but it seemed not.
“Are you going to be okay if I just go and change quickly?” I asked her. I hadn’t had the chance to wash up yet, and I didn’t want to go out onto the street looking and smelling rough. The smarter we were, the less attention we’d draw. I didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone and unprotected, however. I had my gun in the top of my bag, and if I took the bag with me—which I would need to do—that would be leaving her defenseless. I could offer to give her the gun, but I didn’t even know if she knew how to shoot one, and I didn’t want her overreacting to something in the diner, and me coming out to find her being arrested.
She glanced around uneasily. “Umm, I guess so.”
I couldn’t just leave her sitting there. “Second thoughts, come with me.”
“Into the men’s room?”
“It’ll be fine. Come on.”
I climbed out of the booth and caught up her hand. Together, we went back to the restrooms. I pushed open the door to the men’s.
“Hello? Anyone in here?”
No answer came, so we both slipped inside.
The door swung shut behind us, and Catalina wrinkled her nose. “The women’s restroom smelled a lot better.”
“Yeah, women are definitely the cleaner of the species.”
I set about stripping off, yanking off my shirt and giving myself a quick washdown at the sink, just as Catalina must have done. I guessed the difference was that she was a woman, so her being half naked would be considered a much bigger deal. Talk about double standards.
I kept my jeans on, but opened them up and pulled them down enough to give me access to my junk.
“You know,” her voice came from over my shoulder, “I can’t help feeling like I should be the one doing that.”
I glanced over at her. She had a sultry look to her gaze, her blue eyes darkening a shade, and her tongue sneaked out and swiped across her lower lip.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I replied, only half kidding. “You’re going to get us both in trouble.” My dick had already responded to her, blood flowing with a tingling rush, making me harder.
“It’s not my fault. I’m jealous of your hand right now.”
“Stop it, Kitty,” I warned her again. “We need to get out of here, remember?”
She pouted, but she didn’t say anything else. As much as I would have happily fucked her up against the sinks right now, I didn’t want someone calling the cops on us for indecent exposure, and her little jaunt in the ladies’ room wouldn’t have helped our case. Besides, even if I didn’t get to fuck her, if she kept looking at me like that, I was going to struggle to walk out through the diner.
“I can’t walk out through the diner with a massive hard-on. There are kids out there.”
“Spoilsport,” she replied, but I could hear the smile in her voice.
I finished up, and gradually my erection abated. We’d been lucky no one else had come into the restroom while we’d been using it.
“Ready?” I asked her.
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of the smell.”
We left the restrooms and headed out of the diner. I felt people’s gazes on me. Had it been noticed that we’d gone into the same restroom together? Did people assume we’d had sex in there? I didn’t want to do anything that was going to bring us extra attention. There was a chance my father would send his men around with some photographs of us and start asking questions. Did he even have any recent photographs of us both? I couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken one of me, but perhaps he’d taken them of Catalina to share with Torres. I shuddered at the idea.
“Where are we going now?” she asked me as we walked down the street, her slender fingers entwined in mine. The streets had grown busier as we’d been eating, and we passed numerous people, each of them giving us curious glances. Catalina huddled in close to my side, and I loved that she felt I could protect her. I just hoped I’d be able to if and when the time came.
“We need to find a car and get out of town. This one makes it too easy for my father to deduce where we are.”
“Where are we going to get a car?”
I pulled a face. “Yeah, that’s the hard part. I don’t want to take the risk of getting a rental. I’d need to use a credit card, and that’s too easy for him to track. We can’t use any kind of public transport that’s going to require you showing ID either, since you don’t have any.”
I’d left my cell phone back at the compound. I had no idea if my father had a way of tracking it, but I wasn’t going to take the risk. It wasn’t as though I had anyone I could rely on, anyway. I had plenty of acquaintances, but not a single one I trusted enough to not call my father and tell him where we were. Even if I did have someone, I wasn’t sure I’d put that knowledge on them. Silas Cassidy knew how to get what he wanted, even if it involved hurting someone else
. I didn’t want to be responsible for him torturing someone for information.
Our biggest problem, other than being hunted by both my father and Elliot Torres, was that Catalina didn’t even exist. We didn’t even know what her surname was for sure. I’d been told her mother’s surname had been Bowers, but I had no idea if that was right or not. I guessed it didn’t matter. According to the rest of the world, Catalina wasn’t even a person. She had no birth certificate, no driver’s license, no social security number, no passport. I knew people who could provide us with those kinds of things, but they were all connected to my father, and if I contacted them, I wouldn’t be surprised to show up and find my father waiting there for me as well.
I cursed my own stupidity at having allowed my father to control so much of my life. All this time, I’d thought of myself as a man, when actually I’d been nothing more than a boy clinging to his father’s coattails. Everything had been given to me. I’d never had a single ounce of responsibility, and the first thing I was actually trusted with I fucked up on a mammoth scale.
“So, what other choices do we have?” Catalina asked from beside me, pulling me out of my thoughts.
There was only one option I could think of. “We’re going to have to steal one.”
“But I thought we didn’t want to do anything that would draw attention to ourselves.”
“We don’t, but I can’t think of any other way. We take a car, hope we can at least get a couple of hours away before it’s reported, and then dump it somewhere. We won’t damage it in any way, so the owners can get it back again. It’s unlikely that a stolen car will get linked to us, and even if it does, we should have figured out our next step by then and have put even more distance between us and him.”
Catalina pulled a face. “Stealing a car makes me nervous.”
“Yeah, me, too. I can’t think of any other way to do this, though.”
I wished I could. The last thing I wanted to do was get us both arrested. Despite my unusual upbringing, I’d never actually needed to do something like this before. Yes, my father’s business was illegal, but I didn’t handle any of the rough side of things. I invested the money it made, bought property, and shares. He had other people who looked into which men would be suitable to be allowed access to the compound, and even rougher men who would decide on which girl should be taken from the streets, should we need to bring some fresh blood to the compound. For the most part, I kept my hands clean.
I spotted something ahead. “Keep walking, look relaxed,” I told her softly.
“What?” she looked to me with wide eyes then looked to see what I was talking about. A police cruiser was heading down the street toward us.
“Oh, no.”
“It’s fine,” I tried to assure her. “They won’t be looking for us. It’s just a coincidence.”
I wished I believed what I was saying. I didn’t know for certain that the officers inside the vehicle weren’t looking for us. They could easily be on my father’s payroll, and, upon realizing we’d both gone, had gotten whoever he was paying to put an alert out on our heads. I debated turning around, or doing something to hide our faces, but I felt like every option would only make us look more suspicious.
I held Catalina even tighter, pulling her into my side, feeling how rigid her body was against mine. I knew I was the same, every muscle a tight knot of nerves. The urge to start counting fell over me in a sudden swoop, and the hand that didn’t have hold of Catalina twitched and fluttered at my side as though it didn’t belong to me, but had a mind of its own. I clenched my teeth, knowing I couldn’t give in to the urge. Walking down the street with a frightened girl pinned to my side while I counted and tapped was going to draw even more attention to us.
I was conscious of the weight of my gun in the bag. Would I start shooting if I had to? I was more concerned about the police shooting back and Catalina getting hurt than I was about causing trouble for myself. But I’d have no choice. I wouldn’t be able to just let them take her. If they handed her over to Torres and my father, there was a good chance she’d be dead anyway, and Torres would make sure she suffered before she died. Getting killed by a police bullet suddenly didn’t seem so bad.
But the cruiser drove right on by us, and though I checked, the officers inside didn’t even turn their heads to look at us. I waited until they were at a safe distance and then let out a breath.
“I think we need to get off the main streets.”
Catalina nodded. “Me, too. I feel like everyone is watching us. Like they know who we are.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Let’s get out of town. Houses on the outskirts are more likely to be trusting as well. Hopefully we’ll be able to find a car where someone has left the keys under the visor.
She looked up at me doubtfully. “Do people do that?”
“Yeah. Not so much in the big cities, but in smaller places where they feel safer and like they don’t always need to lock the doors of their houses every time they go out.”
“They will afterward, though, won’t they?”
I didn’t understand what she meant. “After what?”
“After we steal their car. They’ll decide where they live isn’t so safe, after all.”
“We can’t do anything about that. We need their car more than they do right now.”
She let out a long sigh. “I know, you’re right. I just hate that we’re going to be taking someone’s feeling of safety away from them.”
That was how she felt. Unsafe. That was why it bothered her so much. I loved that she was empathetic to how the people we stole the car from would feel afterward, but I also needed to get her to toughen up if we were going to survive this. There was going to be a good chance that we’d have to make some difficult choices over the next few days, and while I didn’t want to change who she was as a person, I also had to remember how sheltered she’d been while growing up. Bizarrely, considering what her role was to have been in life, my father treated her more gently than he had me. I’d never once felt resentful about it—she was a girl, after all, and six years my junior—but while Silas Cassidy had been quick with a hand and cruel in his punishment of me, he’d rarely laid a finger on Catalina, at least that I’d seen. That was probably a good thing. I’d have been able to handle him beating me, but if I’d seen him beating Catalina, I didn’t think I’d have ever been able to forgive him.
We left the main street, with its shops and restaurants and people and cars, and slipped back onto the side roads, heading out of town. At first, the streets were just as built up, the property made up of houses rather than businesses, but the more distance we put between ourselves and the center of town, the wider the spaces between the homes became, until they ended up being detached properties surrounded in huge yards.
“I wish it was dark,” Catalina said.
“Yeah, me, too.” This would be far easier to do under the cover of night. I hated feeling so conspicuous, but there was nothing we could do about it. I wasn’t going to just hang around for the next ten hours and wait for night to fall again. That would give my father and Torres far too much time to track us down.
We kept going. I stayed alert for any signs for either someone following us, or for a vehicle that would make an easy target. Each time we passed a car on the side of the street, when no one else was around to see, I pulled on the door handle to see if it opened.
“My father didn’t teach me the right sort of crime,” I said, half to myself.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I know how to launder money, but what I really could have done with being taught was a little old fashioned breaking and entering. I don’t even know how to get a car door open, and I sure as hell don’t know how to hotwire one.”
She gave an awkward shrug. “You’re still up one on me. I don’t even know how to drive.”
I pulled her in for a quick hug. “What a useless pair of runaways we are.”
She laughed, and my soul lightened at t
he sound. “Yeah, pretty useless.”
A car approached—a people carrier of an older style that must have been almost as old as Catalina, in an ugly beige color and with empty roof racks on the top. The car swung into the driveway of one of the houses a little farther ahead. All the doors opened except for the driver’s door, and multiple kids tumbled out. The driver’s side opened eventually, and a harried woman climbed out. She went to the trunk and opened it using a key, which she left sticking out of the lock, and proceeded to haul bags of groceries out of the car. With her arms piled high, the woman hollered out to the kids to get inside the house and then carried the groceries onto the porch. The front door wasn’t locked, and she vanished inside the house, the kids all going with her, and the door swinging shut behind her.
The car was still unlocked, the trunk and driver’s door hanging open.
I exchanged a glance with Catalina. “This is our chance.”
Catalina’s face twisted. “But it’s a mom with her kids.”
We didn’t have time to debate this. “We’ll get her car back to her, I promise. Hell, I’ll even leave a twenty-dollar bill hidden under the seat as rental, if that’ll make you feel better. We have to do this, Kitty, and we have to do it now.”
I didn’t know how much time we had. The mom might come back out to the car at any moment and ask who we were and what we were doing. Or, if luck was on our side, she’d be occupied with trying to corral the children and put groceries away, and wouldn’t even notice for an hour or more that the car was no longer where she parked it. Yes, this was going to cause her some stress, and I did feel bad about that, but right now we needed the car more than she did.
Dragging Catalina along behind me, we reached the back of the vehicle. I sneaked up my hand and plucked the keys from where they were still hanging out of the lock. For the moment, the open trunk was protecting us from the view of the house, but we couldn’t drive off with it still open. It would get us noticed right away.
For Him: The Complete Series Page 21
