ago.
Yet thinking of a young Mary Margaret had his mind swinging immediately to another young, vulnerable girl. Someone else whose family should have taken care of her, but didn’t. Bridget Moore, born Bridget Chambers, should have lived a more charmed life than even a mafia princess. Chambers certainly seemed to dote on the daughter he’d been parading around the Valentine’s Day gala. So what had caused him, initially, to turn his back on his eldest?
Or had it been the opposite and
“But afraid of who?” Grif muttered, earning a concerned glance from the beggar slumped against the coffee shop’s brick wall. Her estranged father, or the cop who’d bookended her illicit career?
“Let’s find out,” he told the beggar, who just nodded as Grif flicked away the cigarette and flagged down a cab.
Bridget Moore was closing shop as the cab pulled up, and her shoulders sagged as she turned toward it, like she already knew she wouldn’t like what spilled from inside. Frown deepening when she saw Grif, she pocketed her keys and began walking away. Grif overpaid the driver and rushed to catch up. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t need to talk,” Bridget said, not slowing.
“People are dying,” Grif told her.
“People are always dying.”
“You can stop it.”
“Sure,” she scoffed, showing him her cool, disbelieving gaze. “And then I’ll stop time itself.”
“Look, Bridget,” he said, not letting up as her pace quickened. “We know who you are. We know your father is controlling the most powerful men in this town using blackmail and a lot of high-class hookers.” When she only walked faster, Grif stopped and shoved his hands into his pockets. “What we don’t know is how he’s controlling you.”
Bridget whirled, finger pointed like a weapon. “Nobody controls me!”
Grif lifted his chin. “Prove it.”
Defiance and fury popped into her eyes, but she drew her hands together and twisted. There were words building up inside of her like a storm, but something was still keeping them bottled up.
“I believe you when you say you’re not tricking anymore,” Grif told her, advancing slowly, giving her time to think it through. Her eyes darted from side to side, making sure no one had heard, but she didn’t bolt. “I also believe you’re your own woman and you make decisions for yourself these days. But you know what it’s like to be bulldozed. You can stop that from happening to others.”
Now she scoffed. “And I don’t believe that.”
“Because you’ve tried to stop it before.”
She shook her head, refusing to confirm it. “There’s too much money involved. Too much power. And I ain’t got any of it.”
“You got me,” he said, tilting his head as he shoved his hands deep into his pockets.
She huffed again, though her eyes softened. “And?”
“And I’m willing to listen to your story.”
Biting her lower lip so that lipstick stained her top teeth, she looked away and rolled back on her heels, as if rocking herself. Finally she looked back at Grif and crossed her arms. “How much you willing to pay for my time?”
“You get paid for every minute in your day?”
“You wanna know my story, Shaw? Here’s the Cliff Notes version. I was the original Daddy’s little girl. And when I was fourteen, Daddy decided that my use, my purpose in this world, was to provide sex for his friends and power for himself. He made me into an object and a commodity, so do me a favor and don’t judge me now if I happen to do it so fucking well.”
Grif thought, then reached into his pocket for a hundred. “I got a bill.”
She jerked her head at the bar. “And a drink.”
So Bridget and Grif left dusk outside and embraced the canned, smoky dimness of the neighborhood bar. It was perfect for their needs. People looked up at their entry, then quickly away, all complicit in not truly seeing each other. A bored but efficient server threw down coasters and took their drink orders, and they listened to a couple at the bar competing with the television for attention until she returned, and left again.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” Bridget started, stirring the ice in her glass.
“She’s not… that,” Grif muttered, then glanced at his own glass. “And we had a… disagreement.”
Bridget looked amused at that. “Let me guess. Your disagreement was about her not being your girlfriend.” She laughed when he tossed her a bland look, and pointed her glass at him as she raised it for a sip. “Oh, I read the two of you like the world’s oldest, most unoriginal book the moment you stepped in my salon. She’s half in love with you, but you’re what’s popularly known as the strong, silent type.”
“Well, I’m not very popular right now,” Grif said, stirring his own drink a little too hard.
“Just stubborn and sullen, then,” Bridget said, setting her drink down. “And you’ve ended up exactly where you wanted to be because of it. Alone.”
“This analysis part of the hundred-dollar charge, or you just throwing it in for free?”
Bridget snorted at that.
“You got it wrong, chickie. Fact is, Kit Craig would have been better off if I’d never entered her life.”
“You’re probably right,” Bridget agreed, offering up a toast he didn’t meet. “But you’re here now, and you sound like you’re trying to justify your actions.”
“Look who’s talking,” he said, toasting her.
“I got good reason for staying silent.”
“Tell me.”
Bridget looked down, fiddled with her straw, then tilted her gaze over at him. “You like women.”
Grif lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “What’s not to like?”
“Yeah, you like them,” she said, nodding on a half-smile. “I can tell. After a while you can dissect a guy’s insides like a pinned frog-this one has mommy issues, this one’s a user, this one’s just an asshole.” Huffing, she shook her head. “My father doesn’t like women. It’s a testament to his entitled nature, and what he would call his ‘extreme bad luck’ that he’s surrounded by them.”
“Marrying multiple wives is bad luck?”
She glanced over at Grif with a small smile. “Would you call it good?”
He thought back to his conversation with Kit on the dance floor. “I’d call it excessive.”
Bridget leaned on her elbows. “For my father it was expected. His father’s side is an extremely traditional Mormon family. There’s a branch of Mormonism that has never given up polygamy.”
“Was there also a family tradition of pimping out their daughters?” Grif asked lightly.
Bridget’s gaze flashed, but when she saw there was no bite or meanness to the words, softened again. Shaking her head, she sipped. “No. That was Caleb Chambers’s own personal touch. He pretty much ignored me when I was a child. Seen and not heard, that was his motto. Left my mother alone to rear us.” Gaze far away, she frowned. “Left
“So the other wives came, the other children, too, and then I hit my teens. That’s when he suddenly took an interest in me, and oh, it was heady.” Bridget smiled bitterly at the memory. “Daddy wanted to hang out with me? Read me bedtime stories? Sit and stroke my hair and shoulders as we talked about everything and nothing at the same time?”
She sighed with the memory, but then her face darkened. “The night I had my period he came into my room, said my mother had told him it was a special day, and that he had a present for me. He gave me a beautiful silk dress, pure white. He said I was a woman now, and a woman had a duty to obey her father and honor her family.”
“And so he honorably passed you around to his friends?”
“And waste a chance to benefit from the transaction?” She jerked her head, and paused to sip, more deeply this time. “No way. No, instead he held the first of many dinner parties, where I made a guest appearance in my
