Page 11 of Release Me

“Asking for someone’s eyes is not a little thing.”

“Nadia.” She blows out an impatient breath. “Let me be clear?—”

“Please,” I interject before going quiet, so she can continue.

“When I said I needed your eyes, I meant I needed them on me….while I have sex with a client.”

Every conversation I have with this girl gets more and more ridiculous. Honestly, I’m not sure what I expected when I picked up the phone. There hasn’t been a single time we’ve talked or been in each other’s presence where she hasn’t been making impossible requests. First, it was taking her phone number and thinking about joining some sex club she’s a part of. Then, it was my phone number, and now, it’s lunch and an exhibitionist show.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“See, this is why I wanted to talk about this over lunch.”

“You would have been wasting your money because there’s no way in hell I’m doing that.”

Just thinking about stepping into the kind of situation Desiree is talking about has me breaking out into a cold sweat. That world, that life. It’s not a place where I’ve ever felt safe. Beau made sure that I never would, and it wasn’t always with his hands—though he was fond of using them on me—it was with his words, with the clients he chose that enjoyed debasing me.

“I’ll split my fee with you.” This is the first time I’ve heard anything close to desperation in Desiree’s voice, and it, plus the monetary incentive she’s just dangled in front of my face, gives me pause. “I have this client who’s into being watched. Usually, he only comes into town once a month, and he had his normal visit last week. I guess he had to stay longer because he called me this morning asking if I could fit him in tonight. Normally, I’d get my friend Carmen to do it, but she’s booked, and I don’t trust any of these other girls around him.”

“But you trust me?”

She answers immediately. “Yes.”

“Why?” It’s a valid question. Stealing clients is an act of desperation, of survival, and I’m probably the most desperate person Desiree has come across in a long time. She’d said as much the first time we met, and although I’d resented her saying it, I had to admit that it was true then and it’s probably even more true now.

“Because you’re done with the life, Nadia.”

My brows furrow. “Don’t you think that would make me more likely to say no?”

“I considered that, but then I thought about how desperate you looked at the bar that first day, and how worried you were about getting fired by that nerd at the grocery store, and I thought maybe your desperation would encourage you to say yes one more time. It’s good money, Nadia, and I know you need it.”

She doesn’t know. Not really. Because she’s not standing in the dark, desolate representation of my need, of my despair. She doesn’t know the first night I slept in here, I did so without knowing that the door wasn’t fully latched because no one told me the series of secret movements necessary to secure it. She doesn’t know there’s mold in the bathroom that refuses to come out no matter how many times I bleach it. She doesn’t know I walk home every night and expect to find Beau waiting inside my room, allowed in by the greedy owner who would happily sell me out if someone offered him enough cash.

Desiree doesn’t know, she can’t, but somehow she does, and I find peace in the sadness of our shared understanding. When we met, she told me she’d been desperate before and that the place she worked had changed everything. I thought my change would come in the form of a minimum wage job, but today I’ve accepted that it won’t.

And that knowledge, that acceptance is enough to make me reconsider everything. I swallow, and the question working its way up my throat might as well be a sledgehammer in my hand because I’m about to use it to knock all the boundaries I’ve drawn around my new life down.

“How much?”

6

SEBASTIAN

“Still can’t believe you fired Vince,” Luca says, grinning at me over the shoulder of the woman currently grinding on his leg.

“He had it coming.” Andreas shrugs and takes a sip of his whiskey.

“Damn right he did.” Getting rid of Vince was a simple, but frustrating task that required me to spend weeks after the last round of interviews tracking down every server that quit in the last six months and getting them in the office for a face to face discussion about why they’d left. Only a handful of them agreed to come in, and when they did, they were nervous and defensive. I had to assure them multiple times that they weren’t in any kind of trouble, that I was just trying to get to the bottom of our increasing turnover rate. It was only then that they’d relaxed enough to confirm my suspicions that it all came down to Vince.

Vince and his leering stares.

Vince and his questionable comments that bordered on suggestive but were just vague enough to never really cross the line.

Vince and his disgusting behavior that he justified by telling himself, and the women he was supposed to be managing, that harassment was part of the job.

Yesterday afternoon, I called him into my office and fired him on the spot, not caring about how upset it would make Mom or Aunt Adrienne. Not thinking about how long it would take to find a new manager. Not worrying about anything besides getting him far, far away from my business and my employees. After he stormed out, I called my assistant, Regina, into my office and let her know what was what. Thankfully, she’d already seen the writing on the wall. As soon as Vince walked into my office, she’d disabled his employee ID and had his company card deactivated. With that taken care of, I instructed her to contact every server we’d lost during Vince’s tenure and notify them that he’d been relieved of his duties and they would be receiving severance checks via wire transfer by the end of the day, contingent on the signing of paperwork stating none of them would threaten or initiate lawsuits aimed at me or Adler Holdings, Inc. Everyone signed within minutes of receiving the contract, and once the transfers were initiated, I breathed a sigh of relief that only lasted for as long as I was able to keep thoughts of hiring a new manager at bay.

A curvy brunette with legs as long as mine runs her fingers over my shoulder as she walks past me and makes her way to Andreas, trying to take a seat beside him.

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