Page 71 of Claiming Vanessa
She buckles herself in, but I’m not stupid enough to think that’ll stop her from trying to get out at some point during the ride. Too bad for her I have the child locks engaged and she won’t be able to do anything but sit there.
“So, I don’t want to scare you or anything,” I say cheerfully, “But this guy is really into younger girls. I’m going to tell him you’re seventeen.”
I can’t tell in the darkness, but I’m pretty sure she’s just gone totally pale.
“You’re disgusting,” she says, with the first hint of fire I’ve seen since arriving at the club that evening. “Do you actually give him underage girls, too?”
“Hmm…” I pretend to think about it, tapping my fingers against the steering wheel. The drive is mostly instinctual at this point, and the worst of rush hour is over. “Nobody at my clubs is underage. That’s just a lot of legal trouble, y’know?”
“That’s all you care about?” she asks, sounding disgusted. “The legal trouble? Not that there are underage girls potentially being trafficked alongside the women?”
I start laughing, more than amused. “Nah, why bother with all that extra trouble? There are enough skinny girls like you who can pass for underage. We turn the under-eighteens away if they try to join. They have to find some other way of earning money and getting off the streets.” I add that last part just to see Vanessa’s reaction, and I’m gratified with how she flinches.
Damn, her reactions are fun. And, I gotta admit, I like this new side of her I’m seeing. I did not expect her to take the fall for anybody, not with how she’d been moping around since we’d first taken her.
Truthfully, I don’t see the appeal of underage girls or boys, and Damien gets incensed when he sees abused kids, so I slowly phased out that portion of my old man’s business a few years ago. Even Slayer doesn’t want anything to do with them.
“That’s still just…” Vanessa shakes her head. “It’s gross. How do you know guys like yourclientaren’t going somewhere else and getting girls for real? You’re just encouraging him to live out his sick fantasies. What if someone did that toyourchild?”
“I’d kill them, obviously,” I answer cheerfully. “Ooh, remember how what’s-his-face said he fed my old man his own balls? That sounds like the right solution. Would you want to watch while I castrated the guy? It’s your child too, after all.”
“I don’t know, but it’s not going to happen to any children I have,” she says fiercely. “If it did, I wouldn’t care what happened to the person who did it.”
“Damien would protect the kid with his life,” I say as we pull into the parking garage. “Anyway, we can philosophize later. We’re here.”
She tries to open the door—surprisingly for the first time during our drive home—and finds that it’s locked from the inside.
I laugh at her. “Just hang tight. A gentleman gets a lady’s door for her.”
“You’re not even close to being a gentleman,” she mutters as I get out of the car and move to open her door.
She gets out, trying not to flash me but failing miserably as the skirt rides up and gives me a nice view of everything it had been hiding.
I use my keycard to get into the building, and I swipe it again to activate the elevator and hit the appropriate floor. The entire time, Vanessa crowds as close to the corner as she can, eyeing me warily.
“How are you going to greet the client?” I ask her, grinning. “I don’t think he’d appreciate ‘I think you’re a disgusting pervert.’”
“I don’t really care what he’d appreciate or not,” Vanessa retorts. “But I’m not going to role play this out with him. I’m not pretending to be some underage schoolgirl.”
Some of my smile slips. “I just told you that this is an important business contact. That I’ve got a lot riding on this. And I’m doing you a favor by not demanding to know what the fuck actually happened back there. You’re going to repay me by being defiantnow?”
She flinches, quickly looking away from me. She opens her mouth like she’s going to snap at me, but she pauses and gives a shake of her head in response. “I’ll try,” she mutters. “But you know I’m not good at this.”
“There’s not that much acting involved, man. These types of guys, all they care about is that you tremble a bit, act scared, then pretend theirs is the best dick you’ve ever seen.” The elevator comes to a stop, and I wrap my arm around her shoulder to lead her toward the condo door. There are only three on this floor in total, and our destination is the one closest to the elevator.
I knock on the door and say loudly, “Yo! I’m coming in.” Then I swipe my keycard to unlock the door.
It’s a nice condo, if I do say so myself. A big open floor plan, with a balcony that gives a great view of the city. There are two extra bedrooms aside from the main one, and two full baths.
It’s also devoid of other people.
Vanessa looks around, her face bleak with despair. Confusion crosses her features when she sees that the place is empty, and she glances up at me questioningly.
I tap the end of her nose and chuckle. “You still haven’t figured it out?”
“Figured what out?” she asks, jerking away from me and scowling. I can see that she’s starting to put the pieces together, though. “You… This is your apartment, isn’t it.”
I smile condescendingly at her. “Ding ding ding. You get yourself a nice prize of an all-inclusive stay for the night.”