Hard as You Can (6 page)

Shane bit out a curse under his breath. The pun wasn’t lost on him as the door clanked shut.

O
n a short break, Crystal leaned into the dressing-room mirror and tilted her face into the light. The swelling had gone down, so between her makeup and the dim lights of the club, the customers didn’t seem to be noticing that she’d been struck. Bruno was too damn strategic to use his fists on her face, but he had no qualms about using an open palm, nor about taking out his frustrations on the rest of her body.

And last night, having lost Church’s prisoner
and
the guys who’d stolen him, he’d had frustration to spare.

Of course, he’d apologized, wrapped her in his coat, and escorted her home afterward. Normally, she drove herself crazy worrying about Jenna when she slept over at one of her college friend’s apartments, but last night she’d been grateful into her very marrow that her sister hadn’t been home to see what Bruno had done. Again.

When the abuse first started, Crystal had fallen for his apologies and made excuses for him. After all, he’d saved her from far worse. Now, she recognized the apologies as the reprieve they were, smiled and made nice, and bided her time.

Thanks to a merit scholarship that covered her tuition and a bunch of summer classes the past couple years, Jenna was on track to graduate from college in December. So they only had about eight months until Crystal could put her escape plan into action.

Where
to escape to Crystal still hadn’t decided, but the anonymity of New York City’s teeming crowds looked really good. Maybe Crystal could find a job in the Garment District working for a big-name designer, and one day she’d have the resources and contacts to design her own collection . . .

“Hey, there,” Brandy said, pulling Crystal from her fantasies and slipping into the space next to her. A cleavage-revealing white robe around her shoulders, the raven-haired woman had a beautiful, lithe body and a serious meth addiction, and had worked at Confessions longer than Crystal although as a dancer, not a waitress. “You doing okay?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Crystal said, chancing a smile at her.

Brandy’s gaze landed on her left cheekbone, and her expression faltered for just a moment. “Yeah? That’s good,” she said, her voice less successful at hiding what she’d seen.

“Is it that obvious?” Crystal grabbed her compact as she turned back to the mirror.

“No, not really. The fluorescent lights in here show every damn thing.” Brandy fished through her cosmetics bag. “I know just what to do. Look here.”

Embarrassment heating her cheeks, Crystal turned in her chair and faced the woman, who couldn’t be more than a few years older than her. They were friendly but not exactly friends. To Crystal, friends were people you could trust implicitly. Around here, it just wasn’t safe to give anyone that kind of power.

“Your skin is so pretty and so fair,” she said, holding back the loose curls on the side of Crystal’s face. “I always wanted red hair.” She stroked a brush over Crystal’s cheek.

“Why? Your hair is gorgeous and mysterious.”

She shifted the brush to Crystal’s other cheek. “And yours is rare and unique.” Her hand sagged into her lap. “What happened?”

Crystal pursed her lips and shrugged. Brandy knew what’d happened.
Everyone
around here knew what had happened when she showed up with a mark on her skin. And they all looked the other way.

“You’re too good for this place, Crystal. You know that, right?”

She gave a half laugh. “We’re all too good for this place.”

Brandy shook her head. “I’m being serious.” When Crystal didn’t say anything, the woman continued. “You’re talented and smart. What were you studying to be in college?”

“How did you—”

“God, girl, your father was
so
proud of you, he wouldn’t shut up about it. ‘First in the family,’ he’d say.”

“Oh,” Crystal said. Once, she would’ve glowed to hear such a thing about her father, but after she’d learned what he was into, it had gotten a lot harder to keep idolizing the man who had failed her and Jenna so spectacularly. It shouldn’t surprise her that Brandy had known her father. Lots of people around here had. His position as one of the Apostles meant that he’d been well-known and well respected.

But then his imprisonment and death and the revelation about his indebtedness to Church put an end to college for her before the end of her sophomore year.

Now, school felt so long ago it was as if Brandy spoke of another person. What life would be like if getting along with her college roommate was her biggest problem. God, how naïve she’d been. About the world. About her father. About everything.

“I hadn’t decided,” she lied. But she just couldn’t sully her dreams of becoming a clothing designer by giving voice to them in this place, especially given how she’d bastardized those dreams by occasionally making costumes for the dancers. Now it just sounded stupid. Childish. Impossible.

Brandy stroked more blush on Crystal’s cheeks. “Well, I’m sure it was going to be something great.” She grabbed a tube from her bag. “Let’s do this, too,” she said, rubbing some red lipstick on a sterile applicator.

Crystal turned back to the mirror and smoothed the bold color onto her lips.

“It’s way more than you usually wear, but you can totally pull it off, and it hides the mark,” Brandy said, echoing Crystal’s own thoughts. The rouge and lip color made the rest of her skin paler by comparison, but Brandy was right. The color on her face now looked intentional, hiding the redness by highlighting it.

“That is better. Thanks,” she said, glancing at her cell phone. Break time was over. “I guess I better get back out there before someone comes looking for me.”

“Hang tough, hon,” Brandy said, giving her hand a squeeze. “You have more of your father’s strength in you than you know.”

Crystal nodded and bolted for the door, suddenly feeling as if the walls were closing in on her. People around here didn’t often talk about her father. His arrest, conviction, and death provided an unwelcome reminder of where this life could take them if they weren’t careful. For her, his arrest and later death had been just the beginning of everything she’d lost, including her ability to trust. Because if you couldn’t count on your own father to tell the truth and protect you, who could you count on? She’d had no idea what he’d been into until his arrest.

Back on the floor, Crystal switched off with Amber to cover the section in the back corner of the club. Monday nights were always on the quiet side, and for that she was grateful. She moved between the tables, taking orders, delivering drinks, and offering flirtatious conversation. Just another role to play. But as this one earned her money, she always gave it her all.

“Welcome to Confessions. What can I get for you this evening?” she said to the man sitting by himself in the next-to-last booth.

He lifted his gaze to her. And all the air sucked out of the room.

Steel gray eyes.

Pretty Boy.

She gasped and took an unthinking step backward.
Oh, God. What is he doing here?
Crystal forced herself to ease her posture. If she called any attention to herself right now, things could get bad. For both of them.

“I’ll have a beer, please. Whatever’s on tap. And Crystal?”

She almost asked how he knew her name, but then she remembered telling him when they’d spoken last night, when she thought she was helping someone who belonged here.

“Just breathe.”

She turned away, her brain sorting through a variety of choices. Tell. Run. Avoid. All of which were fraught with potentially negative consequences for her. If she told them she recognized this man from last night, it would reveal that she hadn’t told them everything she’d seen. Namely, the man’s face.

The man’s exquisitely handsome face. Chiseled jaw. Playful, full lips.

God, what was wrong with her? If he didn’t get his sexy ass out of here, they were going to be in deep shit.

Walker filled her order, chitchatting with her the whole time. His chatter helped calm her nerves.
Just be cool. Nobody knows anything. Nobody sees anything. Just act natural.
As her panic receded, anger rushed in. She’d helped him. She’d risked herself. Enough was enough. He had no freaking right to put her in any more danger than she was already in. She scrawled a note on a napkin and returned to the man’s booth with his beer.

“Here you go, sir.” She placed the napkin down first, waited until she was sure he saw her message—
Leave now and don’t come back,
then set the glass on top of it. “Will there be anything else?” She let every bit of the rage brewing inside her shine from her gaze.

It didn’t seem to faze him. “I’d like to talk to you, darlin’.”

She pasted a smile on her face and pretended the hint of Southern in his accent didn’t make her go warm. “Well, I wouldn’t like to talk to you.” She turned on her heel—

And he caught her hand in his and reeled her in against his side.

Crystal gasped at the contact, and her chest went tight with a growing panic borne of an old, horrible experience. Then her brain registered that he wasn’t hurting her, and he wasn’t trying anything else, and she managed to beat back her anxiety enough to hold it together.

He was damn lucky she was a waitress and not a dancer, because the club had a hands-off policy toward the latter. At least out on the floor. But the waitresses, her included, tolerated a pat on the ass or a hand on her thigh because flirting brought bigger tips. Every time.

Pretty Boy’s grasp probably looked playful from the outside, so Crystal forced herself to throw her head back and laugh like she was enjoying the attention. And, truth be told, between the unusual gentleness of his grip and the hardness of his muscles where they were pressed together, a flash of heat shot through her. Ridiculous. Dangerous. “You have no idea who you’re playing with,” she whispered, anger at herself mixing with her ire toward him.

“I need your help. And I think I can help you in return.”

She scoffed, leaned in closer, and prepared to let him know just what she thought about
that
—

“What happened to your cheek?” Anger slipped into his expression, sharpening the angles of his otherwise pretty face.

Well, shit.
Not covered as well as she thought, then.

And why the heck would he care?

So, so gently, he stroked his knuckles over her cheekbone.

The tenderness of the gesture sent tingles through her belly. Bruno didn’t always hurt her, but he was almost never gentle, either.

Softness and compassion weren’t traits she was used to from a man. It was so foreign, she almost wasn’t sure how to respond. For a moment, she pressed into the touch, but then her brain restarted, and she jerked away. She tapped her finger on the napkin. “I don’t want to have to tell you again.”

Without waiting for him to reply, she turned and moved to another table that blessedly needed her assistance. She had to keep busy, act normal, laugh, and make the men feel special—and, above all else, avoid the gray-eyed man until he finally got the message. Or her shift ended. Thankfully, she wasn’t closing tonight and only had another hour to go. She could keep it together that long.

It was maybe the slowest hour of Crystal’s life.

Everywhere she moved, she felt the man’s gaze on her. The one time she gave in to the urge to look at him, he appeared absorbed in the dancers onstage, but somehow she knew it was an act.

Maybe it took an actor to know one?

The guy was watching her even when he didn’t appear to be. She would’ve sworn it. Prickles ran over her scalp. Her awareness of him was so intense, it permeated the air all around her. This man was dangerous in all kinds of ways she didn’t want to explore. Couldn’t even if she wanted to. Which she didn’t.

Then, ten minutes before the end of her shift, he threw a few bills on the table, shoved out of the booth, and strode across the club as if he weren’t Jimmy Church’s Number One Most Wanted.

And, God, if she’d thought his face handsome, the head-to-toe view was a total stunner. Tall, built, and all in black, the guy moved with a lethal grace that was quiet and powerful at the same time. She recognized the swagger a lot of the guys in the gang possessed, but his movements weren’t full of the posturing she often witnessed in the men around here. Like he was
so
bad-ass he had no need to prove it.

Crystal forced her gaze away and breathed a sigh of relief.

Thank God he’s gone.

She ignored the niggle of regret that settled into the pit of her stomach and made her way to clear his table and pocket his tip. At least for her troubles, Pretty Boy had left money—she could often keep a bigger portion of cash tips because the shift manager couldn’t track them with specificity, as opposed to the credit-card tips he could account for to the last penny. She wasn’t sure if the guy had been brave or stupid for returning after what he’d pulled the night before. All she knew was she hoped he didn’t ever return.

Niggle.

She groaned as she returned to the dressing room and changed out of the skimpy halter shirt and tiny skirt that just covered her ruined back but left her cleavage, midriff, and legs bare. Stepping into her jeans and flip-flops was like seeing an old friend. When she got out of this job, she might never wear heels again.

Crystal reveled in whatever crisis had kept Bruno away from the club tonight as she made her way out the door, across the parking lot, and into the dull red pickup that had been her father’s. Red, for the hair all three of the Dean women had had in common, not that she could remember much about her mom. She’d died in a car crash when Crystal had been so young her only real memory of the woman was her warm, happy smile. At least she’d managed to hang on to her mother’s sewing machine. Knowing that her mom’s hands had once worked at that needle made Crystal feel close to her every time she sat down to make her or Jenna a piece of clothing—one of Crystal’s few interests that had survived from before.

The engine started on a loud rumble, and Crystal’s hands gripped the wide steering wheel. The truck was so big it made her feel tiny, but a part of Crystal loved the fact that she owned a vehicle large enough to move all the important stuff she and Jenna owned. For when the time came to get away.