Page 10 of Fierce

“Your job, it sucks,” Natalia, a tall blonde with fierce cheekbones and slanting deep blue eyes had told me in her guttural Russian accent.

I’d laughed out of sheer surprise. “Um…yeah,” I’d said, then looked around to see if Vincent were anywhere in earshot. “But, you know…rent.”

“There are other ways to pay the rent. You could do what I do.”

“No, I couldn’t. I’m too short. Nobody wants a five-two model with no boobs.”

“That is not what I mean.” She’d looked around herself, then slipped me a card.

Boris Aristov,I’d read. Agent.

“And again.” I’d made to give the card back to her. “No point.”

“Not that kind of agent, not like you are thinking. It is an escort service. Very expensive, very discreet. You could be making ten—” She’d waved a long, elegantly manicured hand. “Even twenty times what you are getting now. Thousands of dollars an engagement. When I moved to New York, it was cockroaches everywhere. A bathtub in the kitchen. Worse than Russia. And now? I have a doorman. I am living like a princess. I go on some dates, I have my regulars…” She shrugged an expressive shoulder. “The money, it is easy. And you are small, yes, and your figure is not so good as mine. But some men, they like that. The look of a little girl.”

Ick.I’d thrust the card back into her hand as if it were on fire. “I’m not judging,” I’d hurried to say. “But—no. That’s not for me.”

“You are thinking they are nasty, sweaty, dirty,” she’d urged. “That you are standing on the street corner. But it is not like that. They take you to the functions, so the other men can see you and be jealous. You converse. You laugh at the jokes. You speak perhaps a little French. You are elegant. A lady. And then you go back to the hotel room and…well. We have all had the bad dates, yes? Where we were perhaps sorry it ended as it did, because it was not so much fun, and we had to pretend? How much easier to pretend when it is his tuxedo jacket you are taking off, when you are in a suite at the Four Seasons? When you have a belly full of champagne, and there are thousands of dollars in your purse? Beauty does not last forever, and men are, how do you say? Fickle. But money…” She kissed her fingertips delicately. “The stocks and bonds, they are beautiful.”

I’d said no then. I was still saying no now. It wasn’t even enough of a choice to be a choice. If this job depended on my sleeping with Hemi Te Mana, no matter how much I wanted to do just that? Then I’d go get another job.

A stab of anxiety at the thought. Oh, God. Crawling back to Vincent…even if he’d take me. No. He wouldn’t take me. I’d be unemployed.

Why couldn’t life be simple?

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