against his fly as he walked toward the door, reminding him that he still needed to release a little tension. He had to be on top of his game, now that the ball seemed to be rolling.
Maybe he’d find himself a working girl tonight after shift. Nobody really noticed or even gave a damn when somebody roughed one up, but it lost a little of its appeal knowing he was paying some bitch to let him do it.
He thought of little Sammy again, wistfully. She was a risk he couldn’t take.
But Karen the High and Mighty… maybe if he played his cards right, and was real cool about it, he could have a little fun with the bitch and the boss would be none the wiser. She wasn’t nearly as built as Sammy, but she had a nice enough ass.
And all the other essential pieces.
Joey brought a vivid mental image of the nosy little brunette to his mind, thinking she wouldn’t be quite so damn superior when he had her beneath him.
Nurse Karen didn’t know it yet, but she was about to make him real happy.
He’d just have to make damn certain that her body was never found.
SAM’S shoulders slumped as she left the Family Violence center, heavy with the combination of empowerment and despair that always came with manning the rape crisis hotline. She wanted nothing more than to climb into bed and sleep for the next fifteen years. She was tired. Tired of working in that damn bar, tired of stretching every damn penny, tired of the stress of not knowing when or even if her brother was going to wake up.
Letting her forehead rest on the steering wheel, Sam acknowledged that a nasty little voice inside her urged her to quit. Quit shouldering other people’s burdens. Quit cleaning up messes that weren’t hers.
To grab her life back with desperate hands.
You’ve done what you can, the voice said slyly. Reasonably even. No point knocking yourself out for a lost cause.
But that was the exhaustion talking. Maybe Dane was right, and she needed to take a little personal time, if only to recharge. What she did at the center was important. Not only to the women whose lives had been shattered, but also to herself.
And as for her brother…
She’d keep doing what she had to do. Sam had been through enough crises to know that if you didn’t keep taking that next step, you’d never climb out of the pit into which despair inevitably threw you.
Donnie hadn’t given up on her when it mattered, and she’d be damned if she gave up on him.
She turned her car in the direction of the hospital. She’d just peek in on her brother and then catch some much needed sleep.
Except that thinking about heading back to that little hovel made her think about Joshua Harding. What exactly was she going to do when he confronted her again? She’d run herself ragged today in an effort to avoid giving his proposition any consideration, but from a practical standpoint she couldn’t exactly pretend it hadn’t happened. And it was a damn generous offer – pretty characteristic of the man himself.
But Lord, could she actually go through with it? She’d fled a city once upon a time, because it didn’t seem big enough to house both of them. What made her think that she could survive coexisting in the same apartment? But if she didn’t accept, she was right back where she started, forced to make sacrifices which made her physically ill just to keep her little family going.
Wipers pushing away the remnants of the heavy rainfall which had assaulted Charleston today, Sam peered at the slick black streets as she weighed her options. It was… surreal that Josh had somehow reappeared in her life at exactly this moment, when she was struggling over how to ensure Donnie got the care he needed and keep herself fed and housed as well. If she’d just been able to finish her degree before this happened, she could be getting paid to do the work she now volunteered for.
But if wishes were horses…
Hell, if
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