Limbo (18 page)

‘He needs a castle,’ Katie announced. ‘My friend Rebecca, her fish Waldo has a castle on the bottom of his tank.’

‘I agree,’ Joy said. ‘Why don’t you and I go pick one out tomorrow? The shop opens at ten.’

Katie’s eyes lit up again. ‘Could I?’

‘Sure,’ Joy nodded. ‘If your dad says it’s okay.’

‘Yes!’ she whispered excitedly, doing a fist pump. ‘I’m going to ring Rebecca and ask her which one she thinks I should get.’

‘Okay,’ Joy said. She doubted there were many choices but if it kept the sparkle in Katie’s eyes she was good with that.

Both women watched the ten-year-old practically levitate across the office and out the door.

Eve grinned. ‘It’s nice to see her excited about something. She’s way too serious.’

Joy nodded. ‘She’s a great kid.’

‘Yes she is.’

There was so much affection in Eve’s voice, Joy wondered again about her relationship with Dash.

‘I take it you’re responsible for the hair?’ Joy asked.

‘Hell yes,’ Eve smiled. ‘Dash has never really mastered the whole girl hair thing.’

Joy snorted. ‘I don’t think Dash has mastered the whole man hair thing.’

Eve laughed and Joy suddenly knew what people meant by a tinkly laugh. The woman was gorgeous,
nice
and had a freaking
tinkly laugh
.

Eve was more woman than she’d ever met. And the worst part was, she
really
liked her.

Joy glanced at Eve, who was looking at her with speculative eyes. ‘What?’ she asked, suddenly wary.

Eve’s shoulders lifted into a shrug, which Joy half expected to be accompanied by something musical as well. ‘I think you’re good for Dash.’

‘
Whoa
. What?’

‘I think you’d make a great couple.’

‘A couple?’ Joy gave a harsh laugh. ‘Oh no. We’re not a couple.’

‘Hmm. Really? Hmm. I thought I got a…vibe off the two of you.’

‘A vibe?’

‘Yeah, you know…a sexual thing.’

‘No,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘No sexual thing.’

Which was technically true. It had been over three years and there must be some kind of statute of limitations on a one-night stand, right? Some time limit where you can reset the clock as if it had never happened?

Eve raised that perfectly arched eyebrow at her again and Joy blushed. After all the embarrassments and humiliations Chris had put her through she didn’t think she had any blush left in her.

‘And I’m not looking to be
in
a couple either,’ she added hastily.

‘What? Never?’

Joy nodded. ‘Pretty much.’

She was happy to stay single for the rest of her life and just use men for sex. Or find a really freaking good vibrator.

‘Well…’ Eve tipped her head from side to side inspecting Joy from head to toe, which was fairly intimidating seeing as how she was a double-D goddess.
And
a Madam. ‘That’s a shame. Dash needs someone buying his fish presents and taking his daughter shopping. I think you may just be what the doctor ordered, Joy Valentine.’

Joy glanced at Eve nervously. She wasn’t coming across as jealous or possessive so maybe she’d been wrong about Eve and Dash’s relationship.

Eve smiled and her perfect mouth formed a perfect bow.
Of course
. ‘He needs someone looking out for him.’

Joy blinked at the strange statement. Dash was possibly the most self-sufficient man she’d ever met. He didn’t come across as needing anyone. Not like Chris had. Chris had needed other people and their approval almost as much as he’d needed cocaine. ‘I think Dash is more than capable of looking after himself.’

‘I meant…emotionally.’ Eve sipped her coffee before placing it on the desk. ‘He’s a good guy, Joy. A
really
good guy.’

‘I know.’

‘It got him into a lot of trouble.’

Joy got the feeling that Eve knew a lot about what had happened with Dash and his job. ‘You know about that?’

‘Sure. Dash and I go back a
long
way.’

A long way? Joy had assumed they’d only become acquainted since they’d been neighbours but, from Eve’s emphasis, it had obviously been much longer. ‘How long?’

‘He was a new constable when I first started working on the streets. I was his first ever arrest.’

‘How’d that go?’

She shrugged. ‘I knew my pimp would be very unhappy so I was desperate to talk him out of it and he was desperate to impress his C.O. And nervous as hell.’

‘Nervous?’

Eve laughed her tinkly laugh. ‘Oh yes, he was so nervous he could barely put the cuffs on.’

‘I assume he figured it out.’

‘Eventually,’ she grinned.

‘And you didn’t manage to talk him out of it?’

‘Nope. And that’s when I knew he was one of the good guys.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘Because I offered him a free blow job for him turning a blind eye.’

Joy blanched at Eve’s matter-of-fact statement. ‘
Really?’

‘Of course,’ she said dismissively. ‘Frankly it would have made a nice change to open my mouth for a halfway decent-looking guy with a hot body.’

Joy squirmed a little at Eve’s frankness. She’d thought she’d lived a lot, seen a lot in her relatively short years, but clearly she’d never make a good street walker. ‘But he said no?’

She nodded. ‘He said no.’

Joy felt a certain relief. And admiration. Eve in her forties was exceedingly well put together. Seventeen years ago she must have been a knockout. ‘He was a cop. He was supposed to say no, right?’

‘Sure.’ Eve nodded and her glossy blonde hair moved in that slinky, sexy way hair moved in shampoo commercials. What the hell did she wash it with? Fairy dust? ‘But some of them didn’t.’

Disgust rose hot and bilious in Joy’s throat at the mere thought. She couldn’t even begin to imagine that kind of life. It had been hard enough trying to make it in the music industry as a woman with certain executive types who preferred the casting-couch method of talent-spotting to the ‘sitting in smoky bars and listening’ method.

Maybe she
should
have fucked a few of them? Gotten down on her knees for them. How had Eve put it? Opened her mouth? Maybe she could have gotten that solo career she’d always craved.

Trouble was
she
liked to be the one that said who and when and where when it came to sex. And how. And to have that choice taken from her? She was pretty damn sure she would have bitten down hard on anything that had been shoved anywhere in the vicinity of her mouth.

Maybe she just hadn’t wanted it bad enough.

‘So you just…let them get away with it?’ Joy asked.

‘Of course,’ Eve shrugged. ‘They’re cops. They hold all the power.’

Joy was surprised at Eve’s easy acceptance of it. Didn’t that make her mad as hell? Or was she just numb to it after all these years? ‘If you don’t mind me asking…how did you even…get into it? I mean…I know this is stereotyping but you don’t look like any of the hookers I’ve seen on
Law and Order
.’

Eve’s laughter tinkled around them. ‘I wasn’t always so…together,’ she said. ‘I was a runaway from an abusive home. I was living on a friend’s couch then a…bunch of unfortunate circumstances all combined and I found myself on the street with no money and no place to stay.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Not quite eighteen.’

Joy thought back to herself at eighteen. She’d been busking for a living, moving from town to town. It hadn’t been an easy life but she’d always seemed to scrape by with enough money from her gigs and her savings to put a roof over her head and some food in her belly.

‘I befriended this woman, Courtney, who was a bit older than me. She introduced me to Kurt. Kurt was one of those brooding bad-boy types, you know the one?’ Eve asked.

‘Yep.’ Joy nodded. Hell yeah, she knew the one.

‘I fell for him big time. And he took such
good care of me.
’ Eve’s perfect bow mouth twisted into a cynical line as sarcasm dripped from her lips.

‘Oh really?’

Eve smiled. ‘Oh yes. He put a roof over my head and gave me three squares a day
and
introduced me to pot. At that point I was so grateful to be off the street I would have done anything for him. The streets were scary and dangerous. I was almost raped one night. I was living on my wits and down to my last nerve. Hooking was easy compared to that. The first few times were hard then I just,’ she shrugged, ‘found a place to go to in my head.’

‘Where was that?’ Joy asked. Where could you possibly go to while a man you didn’t know and probably didn’t even like used your body?

‘I don’t know. Different places each time. Being stoned seventy-five percent of the time helped. And I was lucky in a lot of ways. Kurt was pretty decent as far as pimps went and I never really had a john get rough with me. A lot of girls weren’t so lucky.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Joy said.

She’d always felt she’d been hard done by growing up as the freak from the funeral parlour. But at least she’d been loved and provided for even if it had felt restrictive and chafing to her artistic soul.

Eve shook her head. ‘Don’t be. I got out and came through the other side relatively unscathed and for better or worse it’s made me the person I am today. I’m stronger and I know what I want. And I’m not afraid to go and get it.’

‘Is that why you opened Eve’s?’

‘Yep. The sex industry isn’t going away. Oldest profession in the world, right? It’s still there. It’ll always be there,’ she said. ‘But this way I get to control a little piece of it like I couldn’t all those years ago. A lot of women that work for me are uni students or even stay-at-home mothers who are after some extra cash to make ends meet. Eve’s makes sex work possible as a career choice — either short or long term — instead of something forced or an option of last resort like it was for me. And I get to make it
safe
for them.’

Joy remembered Dash mentioning something about a murdered prostitute being the catalyst for Eve opening up shop. ‘Dash told me a friend of yours was murdered. I can’t remember her name…’

‘Ginny…Ginny Bardan.’ The perfect cupid’s bow of Eve’s mouth flattened as darkness descended in her eyes. ‘I can’t believe it’s been six years since they found her dead.’ She shook her head and her hair swished in perfect time. ‘I first met her when I was hooking in the Basin. She’d been a street walker on and off for a long time. Dash investigated her death.’

‘Oh.’ Joy blinked. ‘He didn’t say that.’

‘No,’ Eve murmured. ‘He wouldn’t.’

Joy frowned. There was a faraway look in Eve’s eyes. Clearly, there was something deeper behind her words. ‘Why not?’ she asked.

Eve glanced at her for long moments and Joy could see she was caught up in something from a long time ago. Then her gaze seemed to focus again as she roused herself from her reverie.

‘Let’s just say he became a little…obsessive about the case.’

Joy still didn’t get it. ‘Because?’

‘Because…’ Eve pushed her butt off the desk, suddenly businesslike. ‘That’s just the kind of guy he is,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like to see crimes on his watch go unpunished. Which is why he deserves to be happy.’

She was looking at Joy again with that speculative gleam and Joy shook her head. ‘Oh no. I’m
not
the one to make him happy.’

Joy had resoundingly sucked at being happy for the majority of her life. Her mother nagged her about finding a
nice man
and settling down, still clueless that nice man and Joy were the ultimate oxymoron. But her other grandkids were teenagers now and as much as she loved them she wanted a baby to bounce on her knee and knit horrendously old-fashioned jumpers for.

And Joy knew that a lot of other women
would
be out there looking for another guy. Getting back on the horse. But the last horse had kicked her so hard she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to give a man that much power again.

She’d been with men before Chris, and since. Rach, her best friend in the States; would say not enough; her mother would say too many. She’d even liked some of them. But she’d fallen
hard
for Chris Maddox — way too hard. And she wasn’t going back there for anyone.

‘Why not you?’

Joy blinked at the very basic question. It should be easy to answer but it wasn’t. ‘I grew up surrounded by death and depression.
Literally
. Most people have never seen a dead body or been to a funeral. I’ve lost count of how many corpses, how many funerals I’ve been part of.’

Eve tutted completely unsympathetically. ‘Poor you. My stepfather beat up my mother and tried to sell me to his friends when I was fifteen. I fucked sleazy men in their dirty cars or filthy alleys for money. Money that went to my pimp and my pot habit.’ She folded her arms. ‘What else you got?’

A bubble of anger burbled to the top of Joy’s insides.
She hadn’t realised it was a competition
. But she was damned if she was going to let gorgeous, sexy,
together
Eve negate all her shitty life lessons.

‘I spent a decade belting my head against a brick wall trying to make it as a short, shapeless brunette in an industry that loves buxom blondes and
doesn’t
appreciate difference. I spent two years with someone who was perfectly fine with sucking up everything I had to give without returning any of it.’

‘I spent two years with my back against a brick wall giving BJs and hand jobs to men who thought that lack of penetration meant they weren’t cheating on their wives. Unfortunately none of them were Hugh Grant. I once let a man’s girlfriend suck my tits while he wanked himself because that’s what
he
wanted. She cried the entire time.’

Joy sucked in a ragged breath at the horrifying anecdotes and the images they roused in her mind. She conceded defeat. She was never going to win my-life-sucked-more-than-yours against a woman who had sold her body on the streets for two years.

Her life had been a walk in the park compared to Eve’s and she understood that.

What she didn’t understand was how Eve could believe in
happiness
after such depravity. ‘How can you even talk about happiness after going through all that?’

‘Are you kidding? The silver lining, the white knight, the happily ever after
were
my happy places. If you couldn’t dream beyond the Basin, you were never going to escape it.’