“Ya deaf or something? I told you to fuck off.” The stripling—Ryan—had waved his hand to catch Danbur’s attention, but his rapidly shrinking cock belied his show of belligerence.
“Three.” Danbur held Ryan’s gaze, observing the unsubtle tells that shouted the youth’s intentions. This would be laughably easy.
He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. “Two.”
Ryan charged, arms swinging wildly.
“Watch out, Dan!”
The worried little voice came from somewhere behind Danbur. Gods. How much had Sera seen?
Danbur popped Ryan on the chin with his fisted right hand. He’d pulled the punch of course, but even so it laid the youth out cold on the mud-brown carpet.
The young woman shrieked loud enough to wake the dead and scrambled from the bed, abruptly oblivious to her nudity. She rushed to Ryan’s side and knelt to pat his face. When he didn’t respond, she uttered a keening moan. And then she hissed at Danbur. “Bastard! I told you not to hurt him! I’m calling the cops. Get the phone, Sera. Now! Or you’ll be real sorry!”
Danbur felt small hands gripping his thigh and glanced down to see Sera peeping out from behind him. He rested his hand atop her head, wondering how to deal with this new complication.
“You’ll be in real big trouble if I tell Mommy you’n Ryan were having S-E-X in her bed, Liza,” Sera said to the young woman.
Pieces of the puzzle slipped into place.
Danbur fixed his gaze on the young woman—Liza. “You are not Sera’s mother.”
“God, no,” Liza said, and at the same time Sera shrieked, “No way!”
Liza glared at him. Or perhaps she was glaring at Sera. There appeared to be little love lost between the two. “I’m calling the cops,” Liza said. “You punched Ryan out! He’s hurt!”
Danbur remained silent. What more was there to say? He had indeed punched the young man, and doubtless Ryan would suffer a bruised chin and an aching head when he awoke. Danbur couldn’t find it in himself to care.
“Ryan tried to hurt Dan first, so serves him right,” Sera said. “You shouldn’t have let him come over, Liza. You know my mom wouldn’t like him being here. And she’d be real mad at you having S-E-X in her bed. And you just sat there and laughed when Ryan was mean to me. I hate him and I hate you, too. So there!”
There was a world of emotional hurt in that impassioned little speech. Danbur squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sera, enough. ’Tis not seemly for you to speak of such matters.” He stroked her hair, hoping to convey that he understood she was lashing out because she felt hurt and betrayed.
Apparently Liza had no care for anyone save the pathetic specimen of manhood she chosen to give herself to. She ignored Sera to bat at Ryan’s face again, trying to bring him around.
“He will awake soon,” Danbur said. “I merely tapped him on the chin. In the meantime, I suggest you clothe yourself.”
“And I suggest you go fuck yourself, asshole.”
He captured her defiant gaze and held it. “Do not provoke me, Liza. Your behavior suggests you are both an unsuitable guardian and a person of questionable morals. And I believe any….” He cast about for the word she’d threatened him with—some sort of governing authority, he guessed. Ah yes. “I believe any cops informed of your actions this night would agree with me. ’Tis my belief you would prefer to end this encounter with some scrap of dignity remaining. And I also believe you would not wish further trouble upon Ryan. Yes?”
Her cheeks flushed with mottled patches of red but she nodded.
He jerked his chin at items of clothing piled on the floor beside the bed. And did her the undeserved courtesy of turning his back to give her a modicum of privacy while she dressed.
When Danbur turned around again she’d clothed herself in tight leggings that left nothing to the imagination, and a short, midriff-baring top that resembled an undergarment. Her idea of appropriate clothing did nothing to increase his estimation of her. “Pick up Ryan’s clothes, also,” he told her, pointing to the remaining items.
She scowled but did as she was bid, stuffing them into a bag.
“Stay here, Sera,” he instructed. “I will escort your guardian and her wretched excuse for a companion from the premises, and return momentarily.”
“No way,” Sera said. “I’m coming, too, in case Ryan wakes up and does something dumb again. Then I can be your witness and stuff.”
He noted the stubbornness infusing her tone. His head ached. His body ached, too, with the kind of bone-deep weariness that invades a man after a day-long battle. He gave in. “Very well. But keep your distance from Liza. I do not trust her.”
From the corner of his eye he glimpsed Liza opening her mouth and then shutting it again with a snap. Good. The girl was learning some sense, at least.
He could no longer think of her as a woman after these events. Children were precious. And no woman he’d yet encountered would allow a child in their care to be treated so. Liza was self-absorbed, morally corrupt and cruel. She was undeserving of his respect. He did not know whether she could be redeemed and nor did he care. Whatever the future held, his most pressing priority was to see Sera safely removed from her influence as soon as humanly possible. He could only thank the gods she was not Sera’s mother. That would have been a fine nest of sand-vipers.
He bent, grasped Ryan’s wrists, and slung the stripling facedown over his shoulder. “After you,” he said to Liza, not trusting her at his back.
“Wh-where’re you taking him,” she asked, her voice pitched high with strain and worry.
“Away from here.” He decided it prudent not to inform the girl he intended to locate the front entrance of this abode and toss Ryan out on his arse. She would learn his intentions soon enough. And if Ryan didn’t happen to bounce when he hit the ground, it would be no concern of Danbur’s.
“Put him in Liza’s car. She can drive him home.” Sera sounded rather delighted by the turn of events. “And I won’t tell my mom about you and Ryan having S-E-X if you promise you’ll never babysit me again. Or anyone else I know, either. Okay, Liza?”
The older girl stopped dead and swiveled to face them, her face a twisted mask. “You little b—”
“You are in no position to make threats, Liza,” Danbur interrupted. “You are in the wrong here, not Sera.”
“But I haven’t been paid,” she whined. “And I need the money!”
“Perhaps you should have thought about that before you invited this piece of scum into Sera’s home and broke the trust her mother placed in you.”
She absorbed the expression on his face, swallowed and turned away.
Scuttling so quickly she was on the brink of running, Liza headed down a flight of stairs at the end of the short corridor. Danbur increased his stride to keep up with her. Beside him, Sera’s glee was so palpable he could almost see it.
Little fiend. Pride bloomed in his chest and he bit back a grin… which quickly faded as he recalled Sera’s misery when she had told him of Ryan’s cruel taunts. He should have dragged the idiot boy from the room by his hair. After gelding him with a blunt instrument.
Once downstairs, Liza tugged open a sturdy door and then they were outside. More stairs, leading to a pathway running parallel to a wide expanse of dense black road. Danbur had travelled paved roadways before, but none as smooth and even and perfectly formed as this.
Multi-story buildings of a similar construction and configuration to Sera’s abode dotted the area. Evenly spaced sturdy poles, strung with black ropes of some sort, stood like sentinels guarding the buildings on the opposite side. Jutting from the poles were oddly constructed lanterns, which threw out such bright, uniform pools of illumination that it took Danbur a moment to realize it was a moonless night. And then he was confronted by another miracle, a… a… conveyance the likes he’d never laid eyes upon before. It was so alien that he could barely comprehend what he was seeing.
This must
be the— What had Sera called it again?
Car.
Liza fished something shiny and metallic from her bag, and poked it at the conveyance. She fiddled with a latch of some sort, and then a door swung open. “Put him in the backseat,” she said, and climbed into the front of the conveyance, tossing her bag on a seat next to her.
Danbur glanced at Sera for assistance.
In answer, Sera darted forward and opened a rear door, swinging it wide.
Danbur bent his knees, leaned inside the car, and none-too-gently dumped Ryan’s limp form onto the seat. When he straightened, Sera slammed the door shut and tugged him away. “Liza’s real mad,” she said. “She might do something real stupid, like try’n run you over with the car.”
“She is welcome to try,” he said, but allowed Sera to lead him back toward the house.
A roar split the air. Danbur glanced over his shoulder to see bright lights issuing from the conveyance. To his amazement, the car lurched into motion and rolled away at a speed a stable-master would envy. And Liza seemed to be in charge of directing it.
Gods save them all….
Before he could close his sagging jaw, movement caught his eye. There. A twitch of the cloth draping a window in the abode to the left.
Friend or foe?
The spy remained concealed inside the building. Danbur’s natural inclination was to leave nothing to chance, and he knew he should march up to the door and interrogate whoever was inside as to their intentions. He could not help but feel grateful when Sera grasped his hand and demanded his attention. The dull throb in his head had escalated to a steady pounding. His eyesight had blurred. Nausea roiled in his belly and his gorge rose in his throat. If he didn’t sit down soon he’d fall on his face.
“You okay, Dan?”
He blinked, wondering how he’d gotten back inside, and ended slumped on a couch that was comfortable as any mattress he’d ever encountered in a pleasure house.
“You don’t look so good,” Sera informed him.
“My head aches.” The admission was a grudging response to the pleating of her brow and the worry shadowing her eyes.
“You stay here. I’m gonna get some stuff Mommy gives me when I’m feeling sick.”
He must have responded in the affirmative, for when he peeled open his eyelids again she was holding out a small bottle with a flat white lid.
“Mommy gives me one pill,” she said. “But that’s just for little kids like me. Bigger kids get two. You’re real big. So maybe you should take three?”
Danbur blinked at the double-image of Sera. He needed to be quickly rid of whatever malaise he was suffering. “Four,” he said firmly, and extended his hand palm up.
He lost time again while Sera disappeared to get him water to “wash them down ’coz they taste yuck”. And when she returned, she held the tumbler to his lips while he swallowed the pills. The water tasted strange. It seemed fresh enough, though—not that he cared at this precise moment. He drained the tumbler’s contents and closed his eyes.
Sera clambered up onto the seat and snuggled into the crook of his arm. He shifted, making more room for her. And his last conscious thought was that when the child’s absentee mother returned, he would treat her to a stern lecture about her lamentable choice of guardian.
~~~
You can do this, Opal told herself sternly. It’s not New York Fashion Week, for God’s sake. And this isn’t Bryant Park or Lincoln Center—it’s an exhibition center in Brooklyn. With tables of diners looking on. You can do this. But the clammy sweat pearling her brow and her lamentably wobbly knees told her she was a liar.
God. What was I thinking?
Panic tightened her throat, and when she turned to the woman behind her, all that escaped from her mouth was a whimper… which was drowned in the explosion of music heralding the start of the main event.
“Here we go!” Desiree tossed her a wide grin, obviously mistaking terror for excitement. And then Desiree’s gaze focused inward, psyching herself up for the coming, uh, ordeal. Opal had known Desiree mere hours but she felt like an old friend already. An outspoken friend with a sixth sense about how best to support you when you needed it most. And if there was ever a time Opal needed a confidence-boosting mini-lecture, it was now. Unfortunately she was on her own.
She turned her focus to the music. Her heartbeat pounded so loudly in her ears it almost drowned out the cue to start. Oh God. Too late to back out now without making a dreadful scene and screwing up the entire show.
Desiree patted her on the butt. “Knock ’em dead, hon!” she mouthed. And when Opal balked, the pat became a firm push that propelled her forward…. And then long-buried instinct took over and she was strutting down the runway as though the camera-flashes weren’t distracting as all hell, her ridiculously high ill-fitting heels didn’t threaten to pitch her on her face, and she wasn’t being jabbed by a pin from a hastily mended seam.
As though it hadn’t been nearly a decade since she’d last strutted a runway and “knocked ’em dead”.
Opal settled into what had once been her signature “walk”. Easy peasy…. So long as she didn’t think too hard about all the reasons why this was a bad idea.
Chill, she lectured the part of herself that wanted to flee back to her motel room. There was no real reason to be worried. No one would recognize her now. She was a different person to the gawky, naïve girl she’d once been. And according to the internet news sites she’d scoured he was still in Dallas, attending some political fundraiser. He hadn’t been to New York in a while—too busy trying to get his mayoral campaign off the ground. She was safe. So….
Get your shit together, Opal! Time to show ’em all what you can do.
As she gave attitude for all she was worth, she shucked the last vestiges of disgust that she’d not had the guts to speak up and refuse Annie North’s pleas to do this—even though, “It’s a showcase for Conrad’s daughter Stella and a bunch of other aspiring designers, and there’s no one else we can think of to fill in at such short notice, and we’d have to be blind not to notice your to-die-for figure beneath that overall, and I already know you’ve done some runway modeling before because Sera told me when you brought her ’round that time she had a day off school,” had been a pretty good effort so far as outright begging went. Not to mention it was doubly hard to look a sweet person like Annie in the eye and turn her down flat without giving an explanation. Especially when Annie and Conrad, her husband, had covered the cost of a sitter Saturday morning through Sunday evening. Annie had even gotten on the phone right then and there to confirm availability of the sitter Conrad’s middle daughter regularly used.
Looking back, Annie had seemed determined as a gull winkling a tasty morsel from a clam shell to get Opal out of the house and out of her comfort zone. And she was almost enjoying herself. Except—
No. She couldn’t afford to go there, so she ground the last of her worries over leaving Sera with a stranger beneath her currently so-lethal-they-should-be-illegal heels. Not to mention the shock of answering the door and seeing Liza, the sitter Conrad’s daughter had spoken so highly of, wearing a super-brief super-tight outfit and heavy makeup that made her look like she’d been punched in both eyes.
Opal didn’t make a habit of stooping to snap judgments but Liza’s sullen demeanor and, uh, interesting dress-sense had hardly been the stuff of good first impressions.
She posed at the end of the runway area before pivoting to saunter back. Halfway up she encountered Desiree. The statuesque black woman with the swanlike neck and killer body would be a knockout dressed in a sack, but in the crimson dress with a neckline that few women would be able to pull off without judicious taping, she was outstanding. And boy, she knew how to work it.
Desiree dropped her a saucy wink as she minced past. And Opal felt herself relaxing for the first time since she’d been talked into this gig. She could do this. Hell, she’d once been an old hand at this. And as she flashed sultry eyes at one of t
he diners, damned if she didn’t feel the teensiest bit of pride tingling through her veins at the cat-calls and loud applause trailing in her wake. Seemed she still had a smidgeon of the right stuff.
Once she hit the temporary dressing room she ran for her rack of clothes, hands already busy with her current garment’s fastenings. She shimmied into the next outfit—an emerald green cat-suit—and Stella, the aspiring designer whose creation she now wore, checked her over.
Stella radiated excitement as she gave Opal a nod of approval. “Perfect,” she said. And even though Opal suspected Stella’s “perfect” had been directed at the outfit rather than the wearer, it was hard not to feel buoyed by the compliment.
A breath to center herself and she was on again, slinking down the runway, working it like a pro. The silky material of the cat-suit’s flared legs swished about her thighs. The unaccustomed luxury of the fabric made her feel like a million bucks, and overshadowed even the remembered humiliation of struggling to communicate with stranger after stranger during the journey to the motel and the check-in. Thankfully this morning’s rehearsal hadn’t been quite so stressful as she’d imagined. She had done what she’d been told, when she’d been told, and acquitted herself admirably according to Desiree.
Right now the temporary backstage area was organized chaos, but Opal could get by with a nod or shake of the head. She could do this. She was doing this. And in the middle of another outfit change she realized that despite an exhausting few hours, she felt energized, ready to cope with whatever life threw at her. Not even having her hair catch in the zipper as one of the assistants helped her into another dress could dampen her mood. God. She’d missed this. She hadn’t realized how much until now.
By the time the show ended her feet were about ready to curl up and die, and her calf and back muscles were shrieking. But tired feet and sore muscles were much easier ignore when paired with the camaraderie of the other models and positive feedback from the show’s organizers. And doing it all again tomorrow sure beat cleaning bathrooms and picking up after folks who didn’t have time to pick up after themselves. Opal resolved to extract every last drop of fun she possibly could from this experience.
Opal's Wish: Book Four of The Crystal Warriors Series Page 3