new, wholesome dress. Then he proceeded to auction off my virginity.”
Grif’s stomach turned.
Bridget didn’t look at him, her voice hollowed of emotion. “He was pleased afterward. Pleased with me for shutting up and taking it. Pleased with himself for thinking up what would become his most successful, long-term business plan to date.” Bridget’s jaw clenched as she stared into her glass. “The next time he came in my room, he told me I was a good girl and I’d made him proud. He left without touching me. He never bothered with me again.”
“And your mother? Did she know?”
Bridget scoffed, and the anger he expected her to show for her father now flared. “My mother was the first wife of
Grif hesitated, not knowing what the situation called for, finally giving in to impulse and instinct. Gently, he closed his hand over hers. “Except it wasn’t.”
Bridget was fighting the instinct to jerk away. He could see it in the startled look she gave him, but ultimately she gave his palm an almost imperceptible squeeze before sliding hers away. “I put it behind me as best as I could. Bundled up the white dress and shoved it in the back of my closet. I tried to forget, pretend that it’d happened to someone else, somewhere else.
“And then one day, I was walking home from school, and a car sidled up next to me. It was fancy-long and sleek and black-with crystal bottles inside and plush velvet seats. The back window rolled down and suddenly there, in my real world, was the man who’d bought me. He said he’d been thinking about me a lot since our night together, that he liked me, and did I want a ride?
“Of course I knew what he really wanted, and what would happen if I got into that long, dark car. And then I thought, it had already happened anyway, and everyone had walked away with something-that rich man, my father, even my mother because her ignoring it enabled her lifestyle-everyone but me.”
Grif frowned, but gave a short nod. “So you got in.”
Her mouth pursed sourly. “After I told him what I wanted in return. He agreed, and we began having what he called our weekly ‘dates.’ He was fifty-nine. I was fourteen.”
“So fast-forward five years,” Grif prompted, because she was a bit unsteady now, and he didn’t want her to stop. But it seemed Bridget didn’t want to stop either, and she took a fortifying gulp, signaling to the waitress for another as she slammed down her glass.
Shifting to stare directly into Grif’s eyes, she studied his reaction as she spoke. “Fast-forward five years and I wasn’t just getting into limousines on suburban streets. I’d graduated to casino bars. And I dressed how I wanted. I was less discreet than before. My whole family would gather for Sunday dinner and I would drop innuendos and hints that my father would stew over and my mother would carefully ignore. Nineteen years old.”
“Nineteen years young,” Grif corrected, as the waitress arrived.
“Yes. But older than ever before.” Then, inexplicably, she shuddered. “That’s when Schmidt got into it. My father sent him to bust me, I think to scare me straight. He laid into me hard, said I’d do jail time, said he would see to it personally because I needed to get off the streets. He said I was… tainted.”
She looked into her fresh drink, winced, then threw it back. Grif found that now he could say nothing.
“So I went home, and I thought about it like he told me to. I considered going back to school, getting my degree, maybe even cooking school. I was good at that.” A wistful smile passed over her face only to be replaced a second later with a frown. “But then I got to thinking about Chambers-I stopped calling him Dad by then-getting rich off my flesh, and how he thought he could just roll me with this crooked cop. Once again, he told me to take it, and then just assumed that I would.
“Then I thought about Schmidt, and how that fucking pig didn’t know me from Adam, but for some reason he was acting like I was the most important thing on his to-do list. That’s how I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“How to get back at my father.” Bridget lifted her chin, her face masked with the same stubborn look she’d shot him in the parking lot. “I reconnected with our old buddy from the limo, the man who wanted me so badly he outbid them all. He had since, unsurprisingly, turned into one of my father’s best clients. This time I was the one who drove up in the fancy ride. I told him I’d been thinking about him. That I liked him. That I wanted to take him for a little ride. He got all nostalgic on me, right in the golf course parking lot. He went on and on about our first ‘dates.’ ” Narrowing her eyes, she mimicked him. “ ‘Remember when you were young and fresh and tight’ and so on.”
She shook her head in disgust, then smirked. “What I remembered was to turn on the video recorder so I could send copies of what he really did on his golf outings to his wife, his business partners, the world at large. I made sure my mother got a copy delivered straight to her doorstep so she couldn’t ignore what she’d allowed me to become. I did the same at Chambers’s offices and had it queued up for his secretary’s viewing pleasure. By that time I’d learned what I was worth… but I still gave the old bastard that ride for free.”
Grif whistled under his breath. The little girl with no voice and no choice had taken the sexuality that’d been prized and used against her, and turned it into an A-bomb. “And did your father send Schmidt again?”
Bridget’s bravado fell away as she nodded. “But not to arrest me. Instead, he delivered a message that I was to change my name and to cease contact with his family, effective immediately. He said I was free to whore myself to anyone who’d pay, but that I would never talk to him or my mother, my family, again. And I haven’t.”
“But you still know what’s going on in that household.”
“Some.” She shrugged. “But again, I have no money, no power. No one would believe me because what’s my word-a prostitute’s-against a cop’s? A judge’s? A Mormon businessman who owns them all?” She shook her head. “No, I’m no threat to any of them. But,” Bridget added, staring into her drink, narrow-eyed. “I know that it embarrasses him.”
“That you were a hooker?”
“That I was a street hooker. Did you and Craig go to the gala last Saturday? Did you see the girls?”
She shook her head when Grif nodded. “They’re not bad girls. In fact, their very goodness is why Chambers can command such coin. They’re told to be good girls, big girls. They’re given champagne and caviar when they should be enjoying burgers with their friends. They dream of prom dresses but are given Herve Leger instead. It’s both heady and totally disorienting for someone barely graduated from playground politics.
“I can’t believe he’s still getting away with it.” She shook her head again. “Never underestimate the power of tight, young flesh on old, loose wallets.”
“Never underestimate the power of raw blackmail.”
“That, too.” Bridget nodded. “Craig and her friend were on the right track, of course. Chambers annihilates every person he sees as a local up-and-comer, anyone who might threaten his king-of-the-mountain status, and he does it by luring them to his parties. If he’s playing it like he used to, he’s friendly at first, gets them off guard. Then locates a weakness-alcohol, drugs, anything to loosen them up. Before they know it they’re in a darkened corner with one of his ‘girls.’ ”
“And he’s got it on tape.” Must have learned that one from his daughter, Grif thought wryly. “Okay, so why is Schmidt still in the picture? He provide the girls?”
Bridget looked at Grif like he was crazy. “Schmidt works the street, and regular johns can’t score prime, green flesh. But the glitterati don’t want skin that’s been passed around too much. Even among the chosen, a few months go by, the girls’ faces become known, they get a little too familiar with the local councilman, maybe call him by his first name one time too many, and they’re gone. You think Chambers pulls a mind-spin on the men, it’s nothing compared to what happens to the women.”
Grif had to fight not to down the whole of his drink. “And what happens to them?”
“He sells them to Schmidt.”
He stared hard at that. “Sells?”
“Sure. In return for sending out little ‘legal’ reminders to Chambers’s clientele, and making sure the heat is always directed elsewhere, Schmidt gets the castoffs for his own burgeoning illegal brothel. The girls are usually strung out by then, or else they’ve been made to feel like they’ve got no other use. Told no one with real class would want them anyway. And what are they supposed to do, go back and seduce their school’s star quarterback?”
“They could quit and walk away.”
