Page 14 of Sentinel's Kiss

Okay, so he wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t going to make this easy on her.

“Now that you’re retired from the military, what do you do?” She crossed her legs and tried to exude an air of careless professionalism, instead of coming across like the jittery girl who just wanted to grind against the sexy soldier across from her. Absently, she fanned herself with the manila folder in her hand.

“I own a bar.”

Ashley waited. Josh didn’t elaborate. “By yourself?” she prompted.

“With an old friend.”

“Where’s the bar?”

“Babylon, New York.”

These short answers were going to be deadly on television. She had to turn the interview around or most of it would wind up on the cutting room floor. Uncrossing her legs, she leaned forward, ignoring how his eyes flicked to her thighs.

“Tell us about Sarah. She was an obstetrician, right? Did she always want to be a doctor?”

“Yes,” he said.

She waited. Nothing. “She was your older sister. Was she very bossy?”

“Yes.”

Really? No examples? Or something to make her seem like a real person instead of a statistic?

“It must have been hard for her when your mother died.”

He gave the slightest twitch. So she had managed to surprise him. If this was the only way she could get him to have a conversation with her, she’d have to go down this route.

“It was actually easier,” he said.

She blinked. That was unexpected. “How so?”

“We no longer had to take care of her. More often than not, we’d come home from school and our mother would be passed out drunk. Either in a pool of vomit or her own shit.”

Ashley flicked her eyes at her producer. That’s why they weren’t taping this live. They’d either cut that last part out or bleep him. “Where was your father?”

Josh shrugged. “If he was home, he was beating one of us. So we tended to avoid him. He was probably at the bar or at a whorehouse.”

Ashley took in a deep breath. Sarah had a history of abuse, then. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she married another abuser. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said sincerely. “You and Sarah really went through a lot. How did you find the strength?”

“We had each other. And our friends. They fed us, gave us clothes and, when we needed it, a place to hide.”

“Didn’t you want to call Social Services?”

Josh sneered. “No. It would have made things worse if they didn’t take us away. And if they did take us away, they would have separated us and taken us away from our friends.”

“So you left to go to the army when you were eighteen?”

“As soon as I could.”

“What did Sarah do?” Ashley asked.

“She got married. At sixteen. She forged our mother’s signature, allowing her to get married that young. She might have even lied about her age too. I can’t remember.”

“Anything to get out of her situation, right?”

Josh nodded, but this time it worked because he was into the interview now.