Heart of the Hunter (67 page)

I turned back to the man.

“No, not particularly.”

He shook his head. “Shame, baby. You, me, and Dolly here could have had a really nice time.”

“I’m here with Rob,” I said.

“I bet you are,” the guy said.

I turned to Rob again.

“What the hell, Duke?” Rob said.

Duke wasn’t put off in the least. He put his hand on my thigh, right in front of Rob. I pushed it off and crossed my legs. Rob saw but didn’t say anything to the guy. He just put his arm around me and pulled me closer to him.

“Don’t worry about Duke,” he said. “He’s just playing.”

Despite having severely mixed feelings about Rob, I found myself clinging to him tightly. “Well, I don’t like his game,” I said into Rob’s ear.

Rob leaned toward me, put his mouth on mine, and began kissing me passionately. His tongue found its way into mine and before I knew it, I was leaning into him, straining to get as close to him as possible and as far from Duke’s hands as possible. It didn’t help. Even while I was kissing Rob, Duke’s hand kept stroking my thigh. I pushed it off but somehow, even with his own date sitting right there, it kept finding it’s way back onto my leg.

I was making out heavily with Rob, but I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was because I was enjoying it, or because I was scared that if I stopped, Duke would think he could move in on me.

I whispered to Rob between kisses, “Let’s get out of here.”

He put his hand on my thigh and I was shocked to see that both his hand and Duke’s were on my legs at the same time. Rob knew, and he liked it.

“Not yet, baby,” he said.

*

I
’M GOING TO ASK YOU
right now, what would you have done in my position? I mean, there were so many emotions and conflicting thoughts running through my mind. My head was spinning at a million miles an hour.

Should I play along? I’m not ashamed to admit I really, really wanted a boyfriend. I wanted a relationship that I could count on, I wanted to know I had someone to spend time with, and be affectionate with. Even though Rob had done a lot of things wrong, he was still an eligible guy. He was rich and successful, he had his own business, it looked like he liked to have fun. If I played along, I would probably have him as a boyfriend and I’d no longer be going to bed alone every night.

But even as I thought about the supposed advantages of letting Rob treat me however he wanted, I already knew it wasn’t the right decision.

I mean, what was the advantage? I wanted a boyfriend, but why did I want one? So that I could feel loved? So that I could feel secure? So that I could feel accepted for the person I was and the person I was aspiring to be?

Rob didn’t treat me like that. He didn’t make me feel loved, he made me feel inadequate. He wasn’t offering to love me for the person I was, he was only going to love me if I allowed his professional makeup assistants to transform me into someone completely different.

As Rob’s and Duke’s hands continued to fondle me, one hand on each thigh, I realized that I had to get out of there.

It felt so good to finally come to my senses. I looked around the table at the other girls. They weren’t bad people. They were doing the best with their lives that they could, but I knew in my heart I didn’t want to be one of them. These rich
boyfriends
of theirs, if that’s even what you could call them, didn’t love them. They abused them.

I had to get out of there, but it wasn’t going to be easy. I didn’t have my phone. I couldn’t call for help. I was in a public place, but it was only semi-public. Obviously, Rob pulled some weight there. We’d gotten in without standing in line, we were in the VIP section, there were security guards everywhere. Could I trust the people there to let me leave if I wanted to? Even if I could walk out, I didn’t even have money to use a payphone, or pay for a cab. I’d have to walk through the city until I could find someone to help me.

Instinctively, I knew I had to be careful. I could get myself out of this situation, but I would have to play it smart.

I would have to play it bold too.

Rob had started kissing my neck, his tongue ravishing me. I threw my head back and pretended to enjoy it. Spurred on by my enthusiasm, he moved down lower, kissing the part of my cleavage that was revealed by my low-cut dress. He put a hand on my neck in a faintly threatening, dominant way, and I shut my eyes.

It was weird. The night before, when I’d gone back to his apartment, this was what I’d wanted. I’d wanted him to be passionate, to be dominant, to want me. I’d gone willingly, and I’d have allowed him to pleasure himself in whatever way he desired.

Now, all I wanted was to get out of there. My feelings for him had turned from openness and willingness, to fear, and even disgust. It was strange how quickly things could turn around. If he’d only been willing to accept me for the person I’d been yesterday, if he’d only been willing to respect me, and act compassionately and with care for my feelings, things would have been completely different.

I reached down to my legs, where Rob and Duke’s hands were slowly inching higher and higher up my dress, and I took them both in my hands. Still pretending I was enjoying Rob’s kisses on my neck, I moved their hands up under my dress until they reached my panties.

They thought they’d won me over. They thought they were going to have a threesome with me. They thought I was going to let them both use me and fuck me like a whore.

I’m not judgmental. I’ll be honest. I’ve had fantasies about being fucked by two men at once. In fact, being in a club like that, dressed like that, with two rich, attractive men like that, was pretty much one of my biggest sexual fantasies. But this was all wrong. Every last detail of it was wrong. Fantasies are about pleasure, and naughtiness, and wild, secret desires. They are not about being manipulated, about being treated like an object, about being pressured into doing something you don’t want to do.

This wasn’t a fantasy. This was a nightmare.

Chapter 17

Grant

I
DO A LOT OF JOBS
that I don’t have to do. I do them for the pleasure of it. It’s fun taking all that money from large corporations who don’t even know what to do with it. Think about it? There’s a lot of theft that goes on in this country that is totally legal.

What goes through your mind every time you pay your cell phone bill? Do you even know what the average cell phone bill is in this country now? Seventy-one dollars. That’s seventy-one dollars that every man, woman and child in this country is sending to big corporations at the end of every month.

How much is your cable bill? Let me guess. Close to a hundred a month? That’s another hundred every household is sending to the men in the corporate offices.

Car insurance is another hundred a month. Don’t get me started on health insurance. Then there’s gas. Home heating. Home insurance. Home internet. Electricity. Subscription services. Credit cards. Bank fees. The list goes on and on.

I’m not even talking about taxes, mind you. Uncle Sam pays for a lot of things we need. Sure, tax money gets wasted, but that’s a debate for another day. What I’m talking about is the money that we all are pretty much forced to hand over to the country’s largest corporations, every single month, whether we want to or not. Petroleum, insurance, utilities, communications, banking, entertainment, call it what you want, but everyone has to pay it. There’s no choice. Try telling your kids you’re not going to have electricity, or heat, or internet, or cell phones. Try telling your boss you’re not opening a bank account, or having a credit card. It’s just not an option. You need those things to live in the modern world.

You have to pay those bills.

You’re forced to pay them.

And what do you pay them with? Let’s start by looking at the minimum wage. Where I live, in California, it’s nine bucks an hour. Nine bucks. That means, by the time you clock off from your shift on the first working day of the week, setting aside deductions, you haven’t even paid for your cell phone. People on minimum wage in my state work one and half days a month for their cell phone. Can you even believe that? Does it make sense? They spend another day and a half on their cable bill. More on their car insurance, gas, bank charges, credit card interest, utilities, and on and on. It’s a wonder there’s anything left for rent, or food, or even the things you actually like.

Now, I’m not pretending I’m some sort of Robin Hood. I’m not trying to make myself out as some sort of savior. What I do is against the law. I’m a criminal, and one day I could get caught. And I won’t fight the cops if they come. They put their lives on the line for the greater good, and I couldn’t fight them for it. But I can live with that. I can live with what I do, because I feel like it needs to be done. I steal from corporations, and I put the money back in the pockets of ordinary folks.

I break into these corporations, I take a fraction of the money they’re sucking up from poor, working folk every month, and I spread it back out among the people. Sometimes it gets complicated. Sometimes the people I give the money to end up wasting it. Sometimes innocent people who work for these big corporations end up getting affected by my actions. But for the most part, no one, not even the corporations themselves, ever miss the money I take.

It’s something I believe in, and I was taught it by a man I loved more than I even loved my own parents, Lacey’s father.

The job I was working on at the moment involved a lot of surveillance. I’d been working on it for months. There’s a financial company based in San Francisco that makes millions of dollars every month giving payday loans to poor people. It’s the worst kind of business you can imagine. They find the very poorest people in the city, the people who can’t even make it from paycheck to paycheck, and they give them an advance on their paycheck in exchange for a fee. These are people who can’t afford this type of service. The company is literally taking food out of children’s mouths.

They also happen to deal a lot in cash. So my job, was to find out exactly where they take the cash, how long they store it, how much they accumulate, and then, at exactly the moment when the safe is at it’s fullest, steal all the money. There would be millions of dollars in the safe, and because it’s cash, the company couldn’t even claim the loss on their insurance. You can’t insure cash, not the way these guys deal with it.

I hadn’t decided yet what I’d do with the money, but there was a school meals program in the Bay Area that I knew could use a helping hand. There was also a housing association for women who were escaping abusive situations and needed a place to stay with their kids. Those both seemed like they could do something better with the money than the loan sharks would. An anonymous cash donation, some meals in children’s bellies, some housing for vulnerable women and their kids, if that’s wrong, then I don’t understand morals.

But in order to pull off the job properly, without having to hurt the guards, I would have to know as much as possible about the company’s security measures. So I was sitting in the street outside their warehouse in an unmarked, white van, with cameras, infrared goggles, and radio listening devices all hooked up to recorders in the back. It was boring work, hours of listening to security guards talking about sports and what they were going to eat for breakfast after their shift, but it was important.

And then my cell phone vibrated. It was a text message, from an unknown number.

It read, “Club Viper. Help.”

That’s all it said, and immediately I had one single, all-encompassing thought.

Lacey.

Chapter 18

Grant

I
KNEW EXACTLY WHAT KIND
of guy hung out at Club Viper. And when I saw that text message, instinctively I knew it was Lacey, on that cursed date with some dickhead from the Internet. What had she said his name was? Rob? Rob something?

If that cocksucker so much as laid a finger on her, I’d break his hand. I’d break his arms. I’d break his legs. I’d break every fucking bone in his body.

How had I been so stupid? If she was in danger, it was my fault. It was all my fault. I was in a surveillance van. If anyone could have scoped out her date and made sure he wasn’t some freak, it was me. I owed her. She’d given me so much in my life. Not just our night of passion, but over the years, she’d given me so much more than I ever deserved. She was the reason I’d been able to push through my bad habits and become the man I was. Everything was because of her. And I hadn’t checked out this Rob guy to make sure he was safe.

I tore through the streets at breakneck speed. The van wasn’t built for it, and behind me, the surveillance equipment flew all over the place. I didn’t care. I rounded the corner and pulled to a skidding halt outside the club as if being chased by a fleet of police cars. The crowd waiting outside the club all turned to look.

I stormed out of the van and approached the door. Luckily for the security guard, he recognized me. I know I said slime balls frequented Club Viper, but I wasn’t exactly a stranger to the place myself. I’ll admit it, I sometimes like to party.

“Grant,” the guard said, stepping out of my way.

“You see a blonde come in here with a douchebag named Rob?” I said.

I was about to pull my wallet from my pants. No one knows this but I have a picture of Lacey in there, in a tight compartment at the back, behind my credit cards. I look at it sometimes when I think of her.

“They came in,” he said, “but the girl already left.”

“What?”

“She left about twenty minutes ago. Went that way.” He pointed down the street. “She looked like a million bucks.”

“Who did she leave with?”

“She was alone?”

“Alone? In a neighborhood like this?”

“If I’d known she was a friend of yours, Grant.”

“She’s more than a friend.”

The guard looked at me helplessly.

“Fuck. Did she at least get a cab or something?”

“She walked.”

“In heels and a short dress?”

The guard nodded.