Dream Maker (Dream Team 1)

“Okay, I, for one, do not want to attempt to escape.”

“Why not?” Hattie asked.

“They have guns,” Pepper replied. “They might get testy if they show before we get loose, and see we’re trying to get loose. I don’t want a guy testy at me who’s also a guy holding a gun. And anyway, we all came in wearing hoods. We don’t know the lay of the land. Whatever’s beyond that door might be filled with bad guys. Testy bad guys. With guns. So, Hattie, stop doing that.”

“One thing I learned in the movies, if they wanted us dead, they’d kill us on the scene,” Ryn told us. “They certainly had enough bullets to make that happen.”

I looked to the ceiling.

No effigy for Mick.

Voodoo doll.

Absolutely.

“I’m relatively certain the training the guys had did not come from watching Bruce Willis movies,” Pepper retorted. “And sisters, I have a kid. We can just say my main priority right now is the same as it always is. That being, going home to Juno, alive and kicking. So, stop picking, Hattie.”

“Right. Juno,” Hattie said quietly. “Maybe we shouldn’t try to escape.”

“Okay, I hear you, Pepper,” Ryn said. “It just feels stupid, sitting here, doing nothing but waiting to get rescued.”

“Did anyone read those Rock Chick books?” Hattie asked. “Those women got kidnapped all the time. Maybe they’re like an…I don’t know. A how-to. As in, how-to-behave-when-kidnapped type a thing. Or how-to-know-whether-you-should-attempt-to-escape-or-not.”

“Nope,” Ryn said. “Haven’t read them.”

“Me either,” Pepper said.

“I only read part of the first one,” I told them. “And to where I got, Indy had been kidnapped twice, she didn’t know what to do either, but before she figured it out, Lee rescued her the first time, and Tex rescued her the second.”

“Well, you’ve been kidnapped,” Ryn pointed out. “What did you do?”

“I’m learning there are various forms of kidnappings. The last time, after the guy tied me to a chair, he interrogated me then hit me. Although the numbers involved in this one do not make me happy, in ranking them, so far this is better than the last,” I shared.

“Well, we got that going for us,” Pepper noted. “I’ve never been hit and I never wanna be hit.”

“Me either,” Ryn said.

“I hadn’t either, until I was kidnapped,” I told them.

Hattie said nothing.

In fact, it was weird how Hattie said nothing.

I knew I wasn’t the only one who thought that when Ryn prompted softly, “Hatz?”

“I, uh…you know, my dad really wanted me to be a successful ballerina,” she said.

I knew she was a dancer, and a good one, what with our occupation and all.

I also knew she’d wanted to go professional with that, and not in a zone where she had to take her clothes off to earn her money.

But a ballerina?

Hattie was naturally curvy. Very curvy. I’d never seen a ballerina that was curvy like she was.

Oh boy.

I didn’t have a good feeling about this story.

“How does that factor into whether you’ve been hit or not?” Pepper asked a question she knew the answer to already, we all knew the answer to it, but she asked it gently.

“Well, you know, early on, it’s known whether kids are gonna…make it. Obviously, I…didn’t.”

“So, he…hit you?” Pepper asked carefully.

“He was frustrated. He invested a lot of money and time in my training,” Hattie replied.

Pepper’s voice had risen when she repeated, “Invested a lot in your training?”

“You are fucking kidding me,” Ryn spat.

“Oh, honey,” I whispered.

“So, you’ve got an asshole dad,” Pepper started, now sounding fit to be tied. “Evan has an entire asshole family. I have an asshole ex who brought out the asshole in most of my family. Or maybe it was me getting pregnant young and unmarried and them being high-horse, judgmental, Bible-thumping dickheads and they’d just held their tongue before and not exposed it. And Ryn has an asshole brother.”

Uh-oh.

Ryn had an asshole brother?

We were Asshole Brother Sisters?

I did not like that.

“Pepper,” Ryn muttered warningly.

“How do you have an asshole brother?” I asked Ryn, obviously, case in point, where our asses were at that time, knowing a little something myself about the assholery brothers could get up to.

“He’s not an asshole. He just has problems,” Ryn told me.

“He’s an asshole,” Pepper told Ryn.

“It’s a disease,” Ryn said tetchily.

Oh God.

He had a disease that made him an asshole?

“You’re right,” Pepper agreed. “It’s a disease. Like cancer. But if you get cancer, you don’t deadbeat-brother your sister. You get help for your cancer.”

“It’s a mental disease,” Ryn stated. “That makes things different.”

“It’s alcoholism, Ryn,” Pepper retorted. “And there’s a treatment. I’ve never had to do it, thank God, but I still know it’s no fun doing chemo. But you still do chemo so you can get better and not make the people who love you watch you waste away.”

Whoa.

Harsh.

And Pepper wasn’t like that.

Thus, I could read from that, Pepper and Ryn had had this conversation frequently and Pepper was growing impatient.