Homeless by day. A well-dressed young woman hanging out by night. And—when the pressure inside started to scare her—a tourist finding escape amid the cacophony of lights and loud noises and frenetic energy of one of the Strip casinos. This was Francesca’s life.
There was nothing traditional about it, perhaps, but during that next week the routine of it all took on a sense of normalcy. If nothing else, losing herself in this illusion of a life in the glittery city was making it a little easier to run from the pain that haunted her. She had a home—her bed at the Lucky Seven. A friend—the bartender at Guido’s. A job—her search for Autumn. And a hobby—nickel video machines. She had purpose.
And that was enough.
In deference to the heat, she’d started a tear in each of the legs of her daytime jeans, ripping them off so that she now had ragged shorts—with a hole in the back just below her waist. Everything else about her daily outfit was the same. A T-shirt she’d torn at the midriff allowed her shoulders protection from the sun while giving her a bit of “air-conditioning.” Looking at the toes of her multistained and ripped, once-white tennis shoes on Wednesday afternoon, she decided she rather liked them. They had character. And were comfortable. They were her friends.
Okay, not a thought she’d share with anyone. But true just the same. They felt like home.
As did the dirty beige fingerless gloves. They might make her palms sweat, but they offered an odd kind of protection.
Protection from what, she had no idea. But if she sat there long enough, she’d figure it out.
She always did.
It was part of what had made her so successful in her former life. Her ability to get inside a story, inside the people, and depict things that most people would never have seen on their own.
A couple of girls sauntered down the street from the north—the direction in which both her pregnant “friends” had gone. They weren’t at all pregnant. Just young, pretty, wearing too much makeup and clothes that were too obvious in their flashiness. Even for Las Vegas. It was painful to see these young girls trying so hard.
For the wrong things.
The girls crossed the street. Looked at Francesca. And then looked again. When one of them smiled at her, she stood up.
From her experience the past week, most people looked away when they saw a homeless person.
“You hungry?” the shorter of the two asked, chomping on a wad of gum.
It was the same question the pregnant girl had asked her the week before.
“A little,” Francesca said, rattling her almost empty McDonald’s cup.
The girls each dropped in some change.
Francesca hated to take it. “Business has been slow,” she said, imitating the careless shrug and half smile she’d witnessed the other night when she’d passed a homeless woman on the Strip.
In appreciation of the inadvertent lesson, she’d dropped a twenty in the woman’s cracked casino cup.
“You new to town?” the taller girl asked. They were both blond—whether naturally or not she couldn’t tell—both slender, and both promising real beauty if they’d take some of the crap off their faces. And neither seemed to be disgusted by Francesca’s seemingly unwashed, unkempt state.
She shrugged again. Living in a foreign culture, she tried not to say too much. She didn’t know how much information homeless people offered. Especially homeless runaways, which was how she’d prefer to appear. “I’m hoping to find a friend of mine,” she said. “She told me to look her up when I got to town but she moved. She used to live right there.” She aimed a shoulder at the motel-turned-apartment building next door and then pulled out Autumn’s photo—the one with pink hair and the lip ring. “You wouldn’t have seen her, would you?”
With bent heads the girls studied the photo. Glanced at each other and then at Francesca. “Joy’s a friend of yours?” the shorter of the two asked.
Joy? Francesca nodded, her heart beating so frantically she could hardly breathe. Didn’t even try to speak.
They knew Autumn. After all this time, she was standing with two girls who knew her baby sister! They’d seen her. They’d know if she was okay. What she was doing…
“Well…” The two girls exchanged another glance and Francesca fought the urge to grab them and shake the information out of them.
“We know where she works.”
Oh, God. Okay. Steady. “Where?”
The taller girl nodded up the street. “Place called Biamonte Industries.”
“B-i-a-m-o-n-t-e?” She spelled it out, confirming the information. It was hard to concentrate. To slow down enough to remember that she was a homeless person who didn’t care about much of anything.
The girls nodded. And told her the place was just a couple of blocks up the street.
“What’s she do there?”
Does she look healthy? Happy? Normal?
“We don’t know,” the shorter one said. “She hasn’t told us.” The girl didn’t sound too happy about that.
Or all that fond of Autumn, either.
Francesca frowned, nervous energy causing her to jiggle her cup of coins—until she saw the girls staring and forced herself to stop. “Doesn’t sound like…Joy.”
“We used to hang out with her some,” the tall girl said. She seemed the more cautious but also more compassionate of the two. “One day she and another friend of ours showed up bragging ’cause they got these new jobs.”
Francesca’s heart pulled as it occurred to her that these two girls might be runaways, too. They didn’t look down and out, but…
God, don’t let them make their living walking Las Vegas Boulevard dressed like that at three in the morning.
With cell phones glued to their ears.
“We all asked, but they refused to tell us what they were doing,” the shorter one said, flicking her hair, still chomping.
Francesca had seen the slew of young prostitutes who coursed the Boulevard long after they should’ve been in bed each night, all on cell phones, no doubt making “business calls” and accepting assignations. A couple of different nights since she’d come to town, after Guido’s closed and before she could reasonably hope to sleep, she’d been on the Strip. An hour or two at a casino usually calmed her. And then she’d driven herself crazy wondering if her sister was out there, among those girls.
“But suddenly they have these new clothes, a place to live. They’re really making it, you know?” The taller girl reminded Francesca of a friend she’d had in high school. Sweet. Too pretty for her own good. And permanently bewildered by a life that had hurt her in ways young girls aren’t supposed to be hurt.
Looking from one to the other, keeping her face neutral, Francesca nodded.
“So one day when they left for work, I followed them,” the shorter one said, gazing up the street, past Francesca, as though there was something more interesting there. “They went into Biamonte.”
“We’ve been going back every week for a year and a half,” the taller girl said, “applying for jobs, but so far, nothing.”
“Did you ask for Joy?”
“Yeah, but the receptionist just plays dumb,” said the girl Francesca liked the least. “Joy probably told her to.”
Francesca doubted that. She hadn’t seen her sister in two years, granted, but Autumn had never been one to hide behind others. If she had a problem with these two, she’d have handled it face-to-face.
“You said you’ve been applying for a year and a half?” she asked the taller, less blatantly sexy girl.
“Yeah, ’bout that.”
“So she’s been working there a long time.”
“Yeah, and she didn’t mention it to you, either, huh?” This short girl was really getting on Francesca’s nerves.
Francesca gravitated a little closer to the taller girl, wishing she had her alone. She might have an ally there. “You guys seen her lately?” she asked.
The girl shook her head. “Not since February. March, maybe.”
Disappointment stung, but maybe not as sharply as it had when Guido’s hadn’t turned up any recent evidence.
Besides, she still had Biamonte to infiltrate. And she wasn’t a novice at getting information, the way these two were.
“You have any idea where she went?” she asked, careful to sound discouraged—not excited.
As the shorter girl turned to follow the progress of a middle-aged businessman across the street, the other one shook her head. “She did this once before.” She shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Dropped out of sight for months and then suddenly turned up again. Never said where she’d been.”
“Did she seem…different?” It was only when both girls sent her an odd glance that she realized she was sounding more like a reporter—or a desperate older sister—than a homeless friend.
“Nah,” the smaller one said.
“She did have a new hangout that she turned us on to, though.”
“Where? Maybe I can find her there.”
The gum-chewer shook her head. “I doubt it. I haven’t been there in a couple weeks, but she hadn’t been in for a lot longer than that.” A cell phone in her purse started to ring, and she quickly dug inside, pushing the button to answer her phone before she had it fully to her ear.
“It’s a place called Guido’s if you want to check it out, anyway,” the other girl offered, half paying attention to her friend’s call. “If she’s not around, maybe someone there has seen her.”
Guido’s again. To a journalist, a repeated source was nothing but good news. Validation that she was on the right track.
“Is it far?” she asked with hesitation. “I don’t have cab fare.”
“You can walk it, easy.” The compassion in the taller girl’s smile touched Francesca. As her friend hung up and told her they had to go, the girl rattled off directions.
“You can always check at Biamonte, too,” the friendlier girl said as her companion pulled her away. “They’re closed for today, but they’ll be open at seven in the morning.”
“Thanks,” Francesca said, walking beside her. “Maybe we’ll meet up again sometime,” she said. “At Guido’s or something.”
“Sure,” the girl said. Her friend nodded, as well, but her attention was clearly elsewhere. They were heading toward the Strip.
“Mind telling me your names?” she called as she slowed. “In case I find Joy? I can tell her I met you.”
“I’m Molly.” The tall girl turned toward Francesca, walking backward for a moment. “She’s Sunshine.”
An unlikely name for the frosty girl. The girls turned onto the Boulevard, their movement changing from hurried to suggestive, and Francesca revised the thought. If she were a young girl allowing strange men to do whatever they wanted to her naked body, she’d put up a cold front, too.
Back at her post, she waited a few more minutes to make sure the girls weren’t coming back and then headed for home to change into her Guido’s garb, trying not to imagine what possible atrocious acts the name Joy was meant to cover up.
“Matteo, I love you so much.” Naked, Autumn laid her head on his tanned shoulder Wednesday evening, shifting her leg to rest between his. The thick dark hair on his thigh tickled her in places he’d just caressed so delicately. Places that were still ultrasensitive from the unbelievably sweet touch of his fingers.
Matteo. Her own special name for him, the Italian version of his American name, Matthew.
“I love you, too, Golden Girl,” he said, his voice husky because she’d touched him in that particular way.
She still couldn’t believe they were doing this. That he’d honored her completely when she’d told him that while she wanted to make love with him, she couldn’t have intercourse because she wanted to be a virgin when she married.
Lying to Matteo killed her. Not that she didn’t want to wait for marriage to have sex with him. She still had dreams of the long white gown, a real church, and God smiling down on her union.
It just wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t have intercourse with him.
His fingers moved slowly up and down her arm as he cradled her against him. “Do you have any idea how often I’ve thanked God that you ran into my garage last February?”
She laughed, burying her face. “It was pouring! I looked like a rat.” Or worse. She’d only been out of the hospital a few days and had been so upset she’d jumped out of Antonio’s car, paying no attention to the weather.
He’d just told her he’d scheduled her next project. Made an appointment for her to see Dr. Bishop.
Matteo lifted her chin, kissed her softly. “You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
He kissed her again. And then again. And somehow, although she’d assumed they were finished, he was making her feel that way again—blasting every other thought from her mind.
“I can’t believe how good it is without really, you know, doing it,” she said a while later.
“You make it good, cara,” he said, chuckling deep in his throat. For being only twenty-one, Matteo was one of the most mature men she’d ever met.
“Sometimes I worry that you’re going to get bored with me, you know, just doing that…” She moved her mouth on his chest, emulating the way she’d moved against him down lower just a few minutes before. “That you’ll go find someone who’s ready to do it all.”
“I don’t want to ‘do it all’ with anyone else.” He mimicked her but with such a loving tone that she smiled along with him. “I want you. And I don’t mind waiting. Our wedding night will be something very, very special.”
Oh, God. She was going to throw up.
Not now. She begged her stomach. She couldn’t get sick in front of Matteo.
“Golden Girl?”
“Yeah?” She thought of cool breezes. Blue skies. A meadow of soft flowing grass.
“I don’t want you to feel you have to do this,” he said, so tenderly she fell in love with him all over again. And started to cry. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved tonight. It was something I’ll never forget. But if this is the only time, I’m really okay with that.”
She struggled not to cry. Because he’d ask questions she couldn’t—shouldn’t—answer. And she wasn’t sure she could trust herself not to answer him.
Soon she wasn’t going to be able to do this with him, even if she wanted to. And not long after that, she wouldn’t even be able to see him.
“I’m going to remember this night forever,” she whispered, knowing that if she tried to talk more loudly he’d realize what an emotional mess she was.
Was this how Cesca felt when she’d had to leave Antonio? Or had her sister already known what it had taken Autumn months to figure out? That Antonio Gillespie wasn’t worth wasting thought on.
She pulled Matteo’s hand onto her stomach and was surprised at how immediately the nausea quieted.
And then his hand slid lower and she wanted to spread her legs for him again. Shocking for a girl who’d grown to detest spreading her legs.
Not that she’d ever done it for this reason.
But she wouldn’t have time.
Pulling away from him would’ve been impossible had she not known the consequences of disobeying the rules. She had to be home at the apartment and resting by ten o’clock every night. And be home napping for an hour every afternoon, as well. Not that anyone really checked, but if they did, and she wasn’t there…
That morning Antonio had stopped by the apartment unexpectedly. She hadn’t even known he was in town. He’d reminded her that she’d agreed to this. Had signed on willingly.
But that had been before she’d met Matteo.
“Oh, my God, Joy!”
“What?” Turning her head, she saw what he was looking at. The moonlight shining on her bare back.
How could she have forgotten? Not once, in all this time, had she forgotten.
She jumped up so quickly her head spun, but she didn’t let the dizziness stop her from grabbing her shirt, pulling it on.
“Hey!” He grabbed her hand, pulled her back down to the mattress. He was up on one elbow, the sheet over his hips.
“What?” She couldn’t look at him.
“There are scars all over your back!”
“I’m sorry. I know they’re ugly.” If she hadn’t already understood how much this man affected her, she knew now.
She wanted to die more than she ever had before. She’d promised herself Matteo would never see how ugly she was.
“Who did this to you?”
She tried to stand. He held her wrist, not bruising her, but making it very clear he wasn’t going to let her go.
“I have to get home.”
“Not until you tell me who did this to you.”
Turning, she stared at him. “I have to go, Matt. I’ll be in trouble.” It was something he always respected without question.
“In trouble with whom?”
He’d never asked that before. Things were getting way too complicated. “My guardian,” she said, a reply she’d heard Chancey give once. A lie.
“You’re a ward of the state.” He knew she was only seventeen. He was one of the few people in Vegas who knew the truth about that.
It hurt to nod, to confirm another falsehood. But it wasn’t that far from the truth. She was a ward. And in this state.
“I have to go,” she said again. She needed her pants.
“I wasn’t kidding, Joy,” he said now, frowning, his voice firmer than she’d ever heard it—even the one time he’d yelled at his little sister for running into the street to get her ball. “You aren’t going until you tell me who did that to you.”
Autumn wasn’t one to cower. Or to be strong-armed. She yanked against his hold on her. “Let me go!”
He did. And slid his legs off the other side of the bed, pulling on his jeans. Frozen on the bed, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to follow you home and have a talk with this guardian of yours.”
“No!” Not that anyone would be there, but she knew Matt wouldn’t give up. Eventually he’d find out about Antonio or her “project manager” and she couldn’t let that happen. Not ever. She wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. It was one of the major rules. “I told you, they don’t know I’m seeing you.”
“They think you’re too young because you’re still a minor and I’m twenty-one,” he said without his usual affection and understanding.
He was really pissed.
“Right.” She nodded, still sitting there naked. He couldn’t go anywhere as long as she was sitting there without her clothes on.
“Well I think it’s much worse—and punishable by law—to beat a young girl to within an inch of her life.”
Yeah, well, it probably was. In a perfect world.
Head bent, Autumn shuddered. She was only seventeen. Life shouldn’t have to be so complicated. Always, other lives rested on her shoulders. Since the day she was born, lives were at stake.
“They didn’t do it,” she whispered. She could tell him that lie about the barbed wire fence. It had worked before.
“Then tell me who did.” The tenderness was back in his tone—and in his touch as he sat next to her, his hand moving lightly at her neck, rubbing away the tension that was always there. He was naked from the waist up.
“My father.”
His hand stilled. “And that’s why you’re a ward of the state?”
She started to nod. The answer was so simple. “No.”
There were just too many lies.
“He’s a politician. A lawyer, first. Then a judge. And now the attorney general of California. A powerful man who’s far too smart for the world’s good. He knows the law and he knows how to work it. He knows how to intimidate. He’s friends with every powerful, rich person in the state. And he’s charming as hell. Even if I could get someone to listen to me, to believe me over him, they’d be too scared of the retribution that might fall their way if they acted against him.” She could hardly speak. Her throat was tight, her chest was tight. “Apparently my mother tried once, calling the police, and ended up with a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The disease warps your perceptions, and the official story was that she’d tripped on the molding at the top of the stairs, fallen, and somehow convinced herself that my father was angry at her and had punched her with his fist. My father got sympathy votes out of that one and came out looking like a hero for standing by her.”
“So what did she do when he hit you?” His voice was that of a stranger. Cold. Neutral.
His anger almost made her cry again. No one had ever loved her enough to think her father should be punished for his sins. Until now.
“She told me to stay quiet. She promised to keep him away from me.”
“Did she?”
“No.”
He stood. Sat down again. Started to rub her back. Stopped. “Come on, honey, let’s get your pants on.”
She’d forgotten they were still off. Gently he held open her panties, bearing her weight with her hand on his shoulder as she stepped into them. He pulled them up. And then did the same with her jeans.
She shouldn’t let him help her. Autumn had to take care of herself. She knew that. She couldn’t afford to be weak. Or needy.
Still, she let him.
What could it hurt? He’d be gone soon enough.
“I ran away.”
Hands on the button of her jeans, he jerked harder than necessary to pull the sides of the waistband together, his gaze meeting hers.
“You’re a runaway?” It changed things for him. She could see that. Matt was the most straitlaced guy she’d ever known.
“Not anymore.” She had a job. A home. A life. Even a family—of sorts.
“That’s why you’re a ward of the state.”
This time she took the easy answer. The lie.
Autumn nodded.