Zac coughed and rolled over at me pushing the door open, but he was still sound asleep on the blow-up mattress on the floor, curled up right under his covers. Lola was totally crashed, too, one leg thrown out of her pink covers, arm over her head, and mouth open like she was catching flies.
I stifled a giggle at their polar opposite sleeping positions and quietly closed the door. Certain they were both still sleeping—the tiny snore from one of them clued me in—I headed for the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Within seconds, the small room filled with steam. I stripped and jumped into the shower, make-up still on, and instantly regretted it. Mascara stung my eyes, and it was a blind scramble toward the sink to reach my wipes to clean it off.
I scrubbed at my eyes, still standing in the shower with the curtain pulled back. The mirror was steaming up a little more with each wipe at my face, but inch by inch, I stared at my reflection as the make-up disappeared from my skin and my eyelashes. Harder and harder I pressed, getting rougher with each rub of the wipe across my face.
Soon enough, the make-up was gone, and I looked like myself again. Light lashes and brows, a lightly freckled nose and pale pink lips. The skin around my eyebrows was red where I’d wiped so hard, but I threw the final wet wipe into the sink to trash later and stepped back fully into the flow of water.
The water washed over me as my thoughts returned.
The gigolo. We’d named him. Confirmed it through the police record. Had a pin on his whereabouts for tomorrow night.
Taking him down was my job. It would be the first arrest I would be completely responsible for, and after seeing him tonight, I was strangely okay with it. Whether it was because he was the biggest asshole I’d ever seen pick up women—and that was saying something—or because I was becoming desensitized to this whole thing, I didn’t know, but I wanted to put my money on the first option.
The way he’d approached potential female clients as if they owed him something had made me cringe. He was handsome and he knew it—he worked it, he played it, and he abused it.
The thought I had to worm my way into being on the other side of had me wanting to throw up.
But, I would. Not only did I not have a choice, I wanted to. You could be paid for sex and still be a decent damn human being.
I washed the soap from my body, made sure the conditioner was fully out of my hair, and killed the water. I wrapped a towel around my hair and grabbed a second for my body. The bathroom was humid with the steam that swirled thanks to the heat of the water.
Wiping my hand over the condensation-coated mirror, I sighed. Was this what my life had become? Was this what my choices had really lead me to? From loneliness and disrespect to loneliness and disrespect?
Self-loathing trickled through my veins.
I’d distanced myself from my family because they’d hurt me, because I knew they didn’t see my life the way I did, but in doing so, I’d fucked myself and my daughter.
How had my showers gone from scrubbing another man from my body to wanting to take one of the motherfuckers down?
How had my life gone from riches to rags?
I was the reverse Cinderella.
I’d been a princess before I’d ever been a servant. And that’s all I was, really. I was a servant to others’ pleasure for years and now I was a slave of the Las Vegas police force. I’d gone from one to the other without batting an eyelid to save my ass because I’d been caught in the act.
And all for my pint-sized mini-me.
The same person who benefit far more from me righting the wrongs with my family. The same family who had the chance to give her the world.
But would they?
My brother wanted to see me, if his new bit of stuff could be believed, but how much of it was truly real? Would he accept Lola? Me? Was it from a true place or borne of regret and a need to right the wrong?
There was only one way to find out, but the idea was stomach-turning.
Despite it all, I loved Damien. I loved my big brother the way any little girl did, and I would give anything I had to have the man I once knew and loved back in my life.
Those facts made it worse—harder, more nerve-wracking. It’d been almost a decade. There was no way he was the young man who’d put me on a pedestal all those years ago until the second line on my pregnancy test faded into view. He had to be older and more jaded. He had to be crueler and harsher.