Hard Time Read online

  “Not much, this time,” I say, choosing my words carefully. When I sit before my father I’m a child again, helpless and bracing for his wrath. One day I’ll break away from my family. I’m biding my time. I’ll live off the millions I’ve earned and socked away and go by another name. No one will know who I am or where I came from.

  My father glares, and I swear at times like these his eyes glow red. My mother left us when he busted her jaw and I’ve never forgiven her. Who leaves her children with a monster? But the fact I’m still here only fuels my own self-loathing.

  I’m planning my escape. But it’s a long way off still.

  “Do you have a photo shoot this week?” he asks. It’s an innocent enough question, but I know why he asks, and my stomach plummets. The only reason he wants to know is because he’s going to hit me, so he wants to plan accordingly. I can’t help the fear that simmers in my belly when I see that look in his eyes, the barely-contained fury looking for an out. I tremble and don’t answer.

  “Friday,” Leon says, crossing his arms and narrowing his eyes. Sadistic son of a bitch. “Plenty of time.”

  My father rears back, and when he smacks me, his palm connects with my jaw. My eyes blur with unshed tears, and I involuntarily bring my arms up for a blow, but Leon restrains me, holding my arms back. My father won’t touch Leon. Leon’s stronger and lithe, and would hurt my father, but Leon’s more than happy to let my father abuse me.

  I wince when a second smack hits my cheekbone.

  “You were supposed to get me the names of the officers,” he says. “Not flirt with the agent like your brother says you did.”

  Copper hits my tongue and my lip’s swollen.

  “Let this be a warning to you.”

  “You know the officers,” I tell him.

  “No,” he growls, and his palm cracks against my cheek once more. God, it hurts. I shut myself off from the pain and humiliation. I hate them. I hate them both so damn much. “I wanted all their names,” he says.

  He never told me that, but if I contradict him again, he’ll hurt me more. He turns away from me and with a howl of rage he picks up a coffee mug on his desk and hurls it against the wall, shards of glass scattering across the floor.

  “Let her go,” he growls at my brother. “Let her fucking go.” Then he turns one shaking, furious finger at me.

  “You get him to take you in again this week. Understand me? Get that information I need or I’ll give you over to Felton.”

  Felton. My stomach churns with nausea. Felton’s my father’s partner, the man who’s been trying to seduce me since before it was legal. He disgusts me.

  God, I need to get out of here sooner than later.

  “And go ice your fucking cheek so you make the shoot.”

  My choices are dismal. I get taken in tomorrow and Rico sees my bruised face. A man like him will ask questions. I wait too long, and Felton makes his play.

  “I’ll get it done,” I tell him, lifting my chin to show he hasn’t taken my pride, but turning away so he doesn’t see my unshed tears. I wait until I’m out of their sight before I brush the tears from my eyes. Jasmine Francoise will not waste her tears on monsters.

  When I get behind the wheel, I can pretend I’m free. They can’t catch me when I’m driving fast, they can’t stop me. I revel in the wind in my hair and the excitement that makes my pulse race along with my car. Taking a turn on two wheels makes fear trip in my chest, but when I hit the straight road, a thrill of victory thrums through me. I love facing danger head on and conquering it.

  And a small, secret part of me hopes that this time I’ll be caught.

  I know who I want to catch me.

  I don’t spend time thinking about why I want him to catch me. I like breaking the law and driving recklessly when I don’t get caught. But I like when he catches me more.

  Finally, when my eyes grow droopy and my stomach churns with hunger, I head back to my place. He didn’t catch me tonight, and it’s just as well. I don’t know how I’ll answer him if he sees the damage to my face. I’ve done my best to cover it with makeup, but a little part of me wants him to find me. Agent Rico might smack my ass, but I know he’s not the type to abuse a woman.

  God, I’m so goddamned fucked up. Who hates the slap of a vicious palm across the face but craves being tied to someone’s bed? Who fears the wrath of a monster, but wishes for pain meted out by a man who exercises self-control and restraint? I confuse even myself.

  I’m two blocks from my place when a flash of lights in my rearview mirror makes my heartbeat spike. I pull over to the road obediently. Hoping. It’s too dark and the headlights too bright for me to see who it is. God, I don’t want to get tagged by a rookie, or some blustering idiot of a cop. I have my connections and easily slip out of their grip, but they’re not the ones I want to see.

  Boots grating on gravel. The beam of a flashlight. My breath hitches and my body tenses. No matter who this is, I need to play it right.

  “License and registration, ma’am.” My heart sinks to the ground. The voice isn’t the low, powerful rasp I long for, but a high-pitched, nasally voice. Fighting back tears, I open up my glove compartment and hand the papers to the man standing beside me with an air of resignation.

  “Do you know why I pulled you over?” he begins, but I don’t get a chance to answer when I hear a second car pull up behind me. The crunch of gravel. Sound of doors unlocking. Heavy footsteps. Hope soars.

  I turn to look but can’t see who it is in the dark. The officer standing beside my window drops his flashlight and takes a respectful step back.

  “Agent Rico,” he greets. I close my eyes with the sudden rush of emotions. Jesus Christ, I need a smoke. I’m a fucking basket case, and that isn’t me.

  “I’ll take it from here, officer. Miss Francoise and I have a history, and it will be best if I handle this.”

  “She was speeding, sir. 100 in a 65 zone, barely braking, whipped through two red lights and a stop sign.”

  Rico’s standing outside my window and I can see him now. He smirks at me. “Only one stop sign? Losing your touch, little girl.”

  I almost smile.

  “Thank you, officer,” he says, waiting for the officer to go.

  “Are you going to prosecute?” the officer says, looking from me to Rico. “I was just about to--”

  Rico’s eyes flash in warning. “I said I’ll take it from here,” he says, and the officer backs away at the authority in his tone. I hide a smile. Damn, I love when he gets all bossy.

  The officer mumbles an apology and hands my papers to Rico. Rico glares at him until the cruiser pulls away, then turns to me with a frown.

  “Out you go.”

  I hold my breath without meaning to, and my hand on the door handle trembles. A brisk wind kicks up and brushes along my bare arms. I didn’t bother grabbing a coat or sweater but just left as quickly as I could, and now the temperature’s dropped. I look to the ground. Now that I’m standing before him, I’m afraid of his reaction when he sees my face.

  It’s not that I fear he’ll get angry. I fear he won’t.

  “Look at me,” he orders, cuffing my wrist with his firm grip and when I don’t, the grip tightens. I can’t avoid him any longer. With a deep breath, I lift my face to his.

  It takes a moment for him to register what he sees and when he does, I watch his eyes go from stern to smoldering, the stern set of his jaw firm, and his whole body vibrates with anger.

  Releasing my arms, he chucks a surprisingly gentle finger under my chin. “Who the hell did this to you?” he rasps. His finger trembles.

  I try to tear my gaze away, but his grip prevents me. I swallow hard. “I fell,” I lie. It’s the most pathetic attempt. I’m not trying too hard. “And I smacked my face on the way down.”

  His storm cloud eyes narrow on me and his lips thin. Slowly, he shakes his head from side to side.

  “That’s a lie,” he whispers, as if he has to keep his voice low to contr
ol his temper. “Your father or Leon? Or someone else who needs his teeth knocked out?”

  God. How does he know?

  But I have an image to uphold, and he’s given me what I needed. Just for tonight.

  “I said I fell, Ricky,” I say, conjuring up a mischievous grin with every bit of effort I can. “You know I would never lie to you.”

  He stares at me longer than he should before he lets me go. “I’m impounding your car,” he says. I blink in surprise. What did I expect, though? My mind races. I have to find a way to make this work. Then my heart freezes in my chest at his words.

  “You’re coming with me.”

  Chapter Five

  Rico

  “You can’t arrest me. I haven’t done anything bad!”

  “Wrong, and wrong. That car is going into impound, young lady. And you’re coming with me,” I repeat.

  She gives me a pout, but not any real resistance. This isn’t like her. Usually she’d argue me down in three different languages and then call her favorite pet lawyer.

  When I saw her speeding again, I thought it was another trap, another distraction.

  Then I saw her face. She’s wearing a bruise across her cheek, the sort of mark only a man can leave on a woman. Takes a certain amount of practiced force to bust a girl like that without leaving more serious damage.

  She says she fell, but nobody falls face first. There’s always bruises somewhere else. I look to her arms, and I do see marks. But they’re not heavy blotchy things from falling into something. They’re quite defined finger marks. Someone held her. And someone hit her.

  The anger is boiling inside me now. Jasmine is beautiful and delicate and brilliant. She deserves so much better than the life she’s been given. In a good family, she would have been an unstoppable high flyer. But her father and her brother have turned her into a shadow of what she could be - and they’ve put her on a fast track to life in prison.

  I open the door to the back seat of my car, and gesture for her to get inside.

  She hesitates, looks at me with eyes that don’t hold her usual cocky defiance. They’re rimmed with red. She’s held back tears. My stomach clenches at the thought she’s probably quite practiced at not crying, not showing weakness.

  “You’re going to lock me up, Ricky?”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  There’s a moment where she thinks I mean back to her father. The stricken expression is enough to make another surge of fury roll through me.

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  “My home.”

  Her expression wavers. I see relief, curiosity - and fear. This is a young woman who has lived in fear for a very long time. She’s afraid of everything, though she doesn’t show it. She’s afraid of me, too, though I know she’s drawn to me.

  “I can’t go to your house, Ricky. They’ll kill me.”

  She says the words softly. They ring with truth.

  “They won’t. I won’t let them. Get in. Now.”

  I am being firm with her, because she needs it. She’s going to resist this rescue, I already know that. She doesn’t know what it means to be safe. I don’t think she’s been safe a day in her life.

  There’s enough authority in my tone to make her obey though. She gets into the back of the car. I shut the door and get into the front, set off around the city. I’m not going straight to my place. I’m making sure we’re not being followed first.

  “This is kidnapping!” Jasmine chirps up from the back.

  “It’s not,” I say. “It’s protective custody. You’ve been hurt.”

  “Hardly,” she snorts. “Do you run around the city scooping up every woman who got smacked across the face?”

  “Is that what happened?”

  She goes quiet.

  I don’t need her answer. I know exactly who hit her. There’s nobody in the city who would dare lay a finger on this young lady. Her father and brother don’t tolerate male company around her. They guard her with the kind of jealousy which makes me worry what else they’ve done to her over the years.

  If she’s been hit, it was by them. The finger marks on her arms suggest she was held. I doubt her father held her for her brother to hit her, so that means that little scumbag Leon helped her father assault her.

  “You know, you deserve better than this,” I say. This is a speech I’ve given to a lot of women over the years. Rich, poor, it doesn’t matter. Social status doesn’t prevent abuse.

  “Better than what? You were telling me earlier I deserve to go to jail.”

  “You do.”

  “I’d rather be free and smacked around a bit than be in prison,” she says disdainfully. “It’s not like they even hurt me.”

  Of course she’s playing it down. I’ve seen that a hundred times too. Victims never want to admit to themselves how badly they’re being hurt. It makes them feel weak at the moment they most need to feel strong.

  “Besides,” she says after a few minutes. “You hit me.”

  I look up into the rear-view mirror and see her looking at me defiantly.

  “I swatted your bottom,” I say. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Why not? Hypocrite.”

  “Well,” I say, checking my mirrors for following cars. “For a starter, I didn’t do it in anger. I wasn’t taking anything out on you. I was getting you to behave yourself because you were being a brat.”

  “That’s what my father would say. If I just did what he wanted…” her voice hitches and she stops talking before the tears start to well and she loses control.

  I want to pull the car over, get her out and hug her, tell her that everything is going to be okay, that I’m going to take care of her and show her what it means to really be taken care of - but I’ve just spotted a Maserati two cars back and I know exactly who’s in it.

  I pick up my radio and make a quick call, using the short code Jasmine won’t understand.

  It takes less than a minute for a NYPD cruiser to come out of a side street and flash Leon Francoise to the side of the road.

  Problem solved.

  Time to get her home.

  My place is out of the city, not quite upstate, but far enough into suburbia that I know all my neighbors. It’s calmer out there, pretty, peaceful, and it has multiple advantages security wise. Pretty hard to sneak up on a place where at any given time, there are multiple busybodies twitching their curtains to see who is coming and going.

  “White picket fence, Ricky?”

  She gives a disdainful laugh. My home cost less than the car I just impounded. At least, it did when I bought it 15 years ago. It’s a nice, simple place, bungalow with a lawn I keep pristine because it relaxes me to do it.

  I park the car in the garage and open the door for her. She swings her long legs out and gets up, looking around her with a little half-sneer.

  Jasmine looks out of place here. She’s too elegant for this simple world of mine. But this is what she needs, simplicity and safety.

  “Come on in,” I say, opening the door into the house.

  Jasmine follows after me. I’m sure she doesn’t like the place. I’m sure it’s a hovel compared to what she’s used to, but she doesn’t say anything, which surprises me.

  “How long are you going to keep me here?”

  Reasonable question.

  I answer as I lead her into the lounge and gesture for her to take a seat. “As long as it takes.”

  “As long as what takes?”

  A knock at the door interrupts my reply.

  It’s Mrs. Brown from across the street. She’s holding a bowl of sugar in her hand. I do not have time for this right now, but if I don’t deal with her, she’s going to go and gather a posse of neighbors and they’ll be “dropping in” all day and night long until they know why there’s a beautiful younger woman in my home. If I could recruit a few hundred Magdalena Browns into the agency, the country would be a whole lot more secure.

  I open the door to her and try not
to scowl too hard.

  “Oh hello,” she smiles. “I’m just returning that sugar I borrowed…” she cranes her neck around me with the agility of a giraffe getting the last leaves from a tree. “Oh! Who is this?”

  “This is Jasmine,” I say. “She’s my niece. Staying with me for a while.”

  “Your niece! How nice!”

  Jasmine grins broadly.

  “What happened to your face, dear?

  There’s no interrogation like a Magdalena Brown interrogation.

  “None of your business,” Jasmine replies, accurately, but rudely.

  “Jasmine!” I chastise her. “She plays lacrosse,” I explain to Magdalena. “And she’s just had a really long day, so we’ll get settled in.”

  “Oh of course. Enjoy the sugar!”

  Magdalena leaves me holding a bowl I don’t want and totters off across the quiet street to the home she’s lived in for forty years, ready to ring around and tell everyone what she thinks she now knows.

  “Sorry about that,” I say, closing the door.

  “You live in some kind of 1950’s sitcom, Rico,” Jasmine smirks from the couch. She’s kicked off her shoes and has her feet tucked up under her. She looks very comfortable for a kidnap victim. “Little old ladies bringing you sugar…” she grins and shakes her head. “Are we gonna gather around the radio later on and listen to the Waltons?”

  It’s good to see her smile, even if she’s giving me attitude.

  I take a breath. Okay. What am I doing here? This was spur of the moment, and it’s not exactly protocol. I should get her to an approved safe house - and I will. But right now, I want her fed, settled, I want to start earning her trust.

  “You hungry? Want something to eat?”

  “Oh, I’m hungry,” she says, her voice dropping to the sultry tones I recognize so well. Jasmine is a very, very naughty girl. She has two modes: defiant brat and vixen. I guess we’re done with the brat, and the vixen is coming out to play.