Neck & Neck (10 page)

She turned off Seventh Street Road onto Dixie Highway, no longer surprised at how busy the area remained even at five in the morning, even on a Sunday. Some people were just heading home from a night out on the town—or, like Ginny, home from work—while others were up early for predawn shifts at twenty-four-hour places, their days just beginning. She was just happy it was still the weekend; otherwise, she would have had to go home and get Maisy ready for school, then head off for her own class at Jeffer son Community College. After working weeknight shifts, Ginny didn’t get to go to bed until almost ten a.m., then she got up at three to meet Maisy’s school bus and start her day all over again.

It wasn’t the greatest way to live, on five hours of sleep a day, doing her best to catch up on her nights off, but that was the way things were for Ginny Collins right now. She was halfway through her social work degree, having taken two classes a semester, including summer, for the last three years. In three more, she’d have her BS. She smiled every time she thought about it. Originally, she’d feared she would be graduating from JCC the same year Maisy graduated from high school. But now it looked as if she’d be able to start her new career while Maisy was still a junior. She’d make a lot less as a social worker than she was making now at Minxxx, but she’d earn something that was infinitely more valuable than money. And by then, there would be enough in Maisy’s college fund to cover five years at Centre College, which was where Ginny was determined her daughter would go—the best damned college in the state, and one of the best damned colleges in the country.

As she let herself into her tiny house on Southern Parkway that was nestled less than a block from Iroquois Park, she tried to be as quiet as she could. But, just as it did every single morning when she entered, the kitchen linoleum squeaked under her first step. Then her second. Then her third. She glanced into the spare room off the kitchen to see Hazel sleeping soundly on the daybed, her glasses folded on the end table near her head, a fat paperback open on her chest. Ginny turned her head sideways to see the title and wasn’t surprised to discover it was a grisly true crime book.

She smiled. The white-haired, blue-eyed, apple-cheeked Hazel Lenski looked and acted like the epitome of a cookie-baking, muffler-knitting, sock-darning granny. She was the kindest, happiest, sweetest person Ginny had ever met. Not that that was saying a whole lot, since Ginny hadn’t met that many people in her life who rose above the pond scum level. But even if she’d grown up in Mayberry RFD, as she’d so often pretended she did when she was a little girl watching old reruns of the show, she’d still feel the same way about Hazel.

That wasn’t why Ginny trusted her watching Maisy, however. She trusted her with Maisy because Hazel Lenski was a retired sharpshooter for the Detroit SWAT team. And because, before that, she’d been a prison matron, at a time when Hollywood was turning out movies like
Women in Cages
and
Barbed Wire Dolls
, which Hazel said were so true-to-life, it was scary. More than even that, though, Ginny trusted Hazel Lenski with Maisy because she’d done a hell of a job raising Ginny, once Ginny had allowed herself to be raised.

Hazel opened her eyes before Ginny even had a chance to turn around, instantly alert. Then she levered herself up on the daybed and smiled. “How was work?” she whispered to avoid waking Maisy, whose room was only a few steps down the hall.

“Fine,” Ginny replied automatically. Also automatic was the additional lie, “But it was as boring as ever.”

Well, except for the part where a gorgeous billionaire hinted that he would be willing to pay me an outrageous amount of money to do something a lot of women would have happily done for free
, she added to herself.
But other than that, it was as boring as ever
.

No, she immediately corrected herself. It hadn’t been Ginny that Russell Mulholland had made that thinly veiled offer to. A man like Russell Mulholland would never look twice at someone like Ginny Collins. But then, that was the way with most men.

And that was the way Ginny liked it. She’d been happier in her man-free life than she’d ever been before. She had Maisy, and she had Hazel, and she was supporting all of them now. Her life had a steady rhythm and a give-and-take that suited her. She never would have guessed that she would grow up to be the kind of person who could be relied on to hold everything together, but that was exactly the kind of person she was. Maybe working at Minxxx wasn’t the greatest gig in the world, but the money was great, and the hours suited her. Ginny had been bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan for a long time now, thankyou verymuch. But unlike the song, she’d just as soon forget about any kind of man. A man would just muck things up. Interrupt her rhythm. Take and not give. She was better off alone. Because she wasn’t alone. She had Maisy and Hazel, two people she loved more than anything else in the world.

Two people she’d been lying to for years.

Because as far as Hazel and Maisy were concerned, Ginny worked the night shift at the Ford plant, installing windshield wipers on F150s, and had been for the past five years—ever since going to work in places like Minxxx. There was no way she was going to let either of them know she was a cocktail waitress in a strip club. Not Maisy, because Ginny wanted to set a better example than that for her daughter, and not Hazel, because Hazel would be appalled, given how determined she’d been that Ginny would never enter into the same kind of lifestyle her mother had.

But there was no chance of that. Ginny had a few things her mother had never had the opportunity to find. Self-respect, for one thing. Self-confidence, for another. And the ability to kick anyone’s ass who tried to mess with her. That was due in large part to Hazel, of course. And not just because of the Krav Maga lessons. But Ginny wasn’t about to become like her mother, moving from one loser man to another. And she wouldn’t end up in a missing person file, the way her mother had, either. Something else Ginny had that her mother hadn’t was a love for her daughter that surpassed all else.

“Everything go okay with Maisy tonight?” Ginny asked. Not that she didn’t already know the answer. Things were always okay with Maisy. It was Ginny’s proudest accomplishment, her daughter’s completely ordinary, uneventful existence.

Hazel nodded. “As always. She did her homework—”

“But it wasn’t even a school night,” Ginny interjected.

“I know, but that’s the kind of responsible, self-motivated kid you’re raising, Ginny.” She patted her hand in mock sympathy. “You’re just going to have to accept the fact that Maisy is a good kid.”

Ginny smiled, too. She knew that. But she couldn’t take complete credit for Maisy turning out as well as she had. Hazel’s influence counted for a lot, too. And not just with Maisy.

“Then we watched some Johnny Depp thing,” Hazel continued, “then Maisy downloaded a couple of new tunes for her iPod, and then she went to bed with her earbuds in.” She smiled. “I can’t imagine how that girl can fall asleep listening to all that screaming, but damned if she doesn’t nod right off.”

“Times change, Hazel,” Ginny said. “Music changes with it. We can’t expect Maisy to embrace *NSYNC with the same passion I once did.”

“*NSYNC?” Hazel repeated, aghast. “I was thinking about Joni Mitchell. Now there’s music to put you to sleep.”

Ginny chuckled. “Oh, I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Wait, that’s not what I meant,” Hazel said, at the same time, mirroring Ginny’s laughter. “I just meant music should soothe, not incite.”

“Hmm, I don’t know about that,” Ginny countered. “The music of your generation incited an awful lot of stuff.”

“Something the music of
your
generation could benefit from,” the other woman said smugly, evidently not realizing—or, more likely, not caring—that she’d just done a complete turnabout.

The two women chatted while Ginny started the coffee brewing and set out the accoutrements of Maisy’s breakfast. Since it was Sunday, she’d have time to make waffles, her daughter’s favorite. Ginny’s, too.

It was only when Hazel excused herself to go shower—and while Maisy still slept—that Ginny removed her evening’s take from her purse. The stack of bills was even fatter than usual, thanks to Russell Mulholland and his entourage who had tipped
very
well. This in spite of her telling him to back off, and in spite of turning the table over to another waitress after she’d presented him with that first tab. He’d stayed at Minxxx for another hour after that, and every time Ginny had looked at him, even though she’d done her best
not
to look at him—to no avail, dammit—he’d been sipping his unbelievably expensive cognac and watching her. Every. Single. Time. Then, when she cashed out for the night, Marcus the bartender had presented her with a couple hundred dollars more than she usually made on a Saturday. When she’d questioned it, he’d shown her the tab she’d presented to Mulholland for the three, admittedly way overpriced, drinks she’d taken to the table, and there it was in black and white: he’d tipped her roughly two hundred percent of his bill.

She’d halfway expected to turn the tab over and find some sexually suggestive message and the assurance that there was more where that came from, along with a phone number. But there had been nothing. In spite of his watching her all night, he hadn’t tried to get her attention again. He hadn’t approached her. Hadn’t sent any messages via one of the other waitresses or one of the bartenders. At one point, she’d felt almost disappointed by that . . . until she’d mentally smacked herself upside the head and told herself to snap out of it.

She flipped through the stack of bills again, and for one insane moment, thought about how she could have made even more last night. And maybe tonight, too. Hell, maybe even for the whole time Russell Mulholland was in town. It would be for Maisy, right? It would go into her college account. Jeez, Ginny could probably squeeze enough out of the guy over the next couple of weeks for Maisy to go for her doctorate. It wasn’t like it would be any hardship to get horizontal with a guy who looked like that. It wasn’t like sex was any big deal in the first place. Ginny had never enjoyed it, anyway.

Enough, she told herself. If she was going to sell herself out to Mulholland, she might as well be riding one of the poles at Minxxx. The dancers made even more than the waitresses did. But her skills as an actress only went so far. It had taken her years to get into the character she played at work and to get comfortable showing as much skin as she did. Even now, there were some nights, like tonight, when she couldn’t quite hold onto her character, and she let the facade slip. Damn Russell Mulholland and his blue eyes anyway. And when that happened, when she let herself think about how she was dressed and how the men looked at her—and groped her—she came all too close to quitting.

And she couldn’t afford to do that, she told herself as she turned her attention back to the evening’s take. She sorted the bills quickly by denomination, flattening them out as she went. Some guys thought it was funny to stuff their tips in the bottom of a glass that wasn’t quite empty, meaning a few of the bills smelled like rank Bourbon. Ginny didn’t care. Tomorrow morning, she’d take them all to a branch of her bank that was miles away from her usual one to deposit them.

She did her best not to go to the same branch more than a few times a year, and she always went through the drive-thru. Nothing screamed “Working for tips in a bar” like a big ol’ stack of wadded-up, Bourbon-stinking cash, and she didn’t want to risk anyone at her regular branch—or any other—finding out what she did for a living. Beechwood was a chatty, friendly neighborhood, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if one of the tellers said something to Hazel about the piles of fetid money Ginny always brought in to deposit.

She pulled a shoe box from the very back of the closet and tucked the money inside, then returned it to its hiding place and placed a half-dozen other shoe boxes atop it. And, as she always did after handling the money given to her by groping hands—once she washed her own hands, she meant—she estimated what the total amount would buy. Half a semester’s worth of textbooks, she figured. Provided Maisy majored in something other than law or medicine that required prolonged study.

Ginny sighed. Oh, well. If Maisy wanted to major in one of those, Ginny would find a way to pay for it. She always found a way to pay for whatever her daughter needed, be it school uniforms or organic food or orthodontics. Because Maisy Collins wasn’t going to end up like Ginny. She was going to not just know her mother but love her and be close to her. And she’d never have to worry about how many more days they had before the landlord evicted them. And she wouldn’t go to bed hungry. And she wouldn’t have to listen to screaming and the back of a hand in the apartment next door.

Most of all, Maisy would never,
ever
, end up huddled behind a rancid Dumpster in the pouring rain, while at one end of the alley, cops were trying to find the Caucasian female, fourteen to eighteen years old, who’d just tried to break into the bakery, and at the other end, Mikey Malone was looking to bust up the girl who’d just told him she was pregnant with his kid. Never,
ever
would Maisy get that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, wondering how the hell she was going to survive.

MONDAY NIGHT FOUND NATALIE SITTING AT A TWO- seater table in the corner of the Brown Hotel’s sumptuous English Grill, awaiting her porcini mushroom ravioli and sipping a predinner martini. She was still mulling plan B, thinking surely
some
thing would come to her, when who should fold himself into the seat opposite her but Dean Waterman. His appearance didn’t come as a complete surprise, however. She’d had a moment’s warning before she saw him, thanks to the fact that Dean was the only man she knew who would pay five hundred dollars a bottle for cologne he ordered from a tony fragrance shop in Paris. No one, but no one, smelled as cloying and obsequious as Dean.