Exposure Read Online Free PDF

office building. The two men then escorted her to an elevator and rode with her in silence to the seventeenth floor. After a delay in the reception area that lasted only the time it took to mutter a few low-voiced words into a telephone on the mahogany desk, she was ushered into an inner sanctum. When the door closed behind her, her guards remained on the other side of it.
    Emma twitched her shoulders and straightened her clothing, swiping at streaky blond bangs with the back of her hand as she looked around the plush office and then out the floor-to-ceiling windows across the room to the spectacular view beyond. Huh. She wasn't scared.
    Her heart slammed up against the wall of her chest when the high-backed forest green leather chair suddenly swiveled around to face her. A middle-aged man, distinguished and rich looking, regarded her soberly. Emma knuckled her hair away from her eyes again, raised her chin, and stared back at him.
    "So," he finally said conversationally, "this is what a car thief looks like."
    Considering how badly she'd wanted to do everything the men in Eddy's shop did, the depth of her hatred for the appellation surprised Emma. But she sucked on her lower lip to disguise its sudden trembling and swaggered around the room, picking up and discarding objets d'art that even she could tell were priceless. Turning one over in her hands, she examined it with the same lack of awe she'd display for a dime-store figurine before finally placing it back on the shelf where she'd found it. She glanced over her shoulder at the man across the room. "I prefer to call it auto liberation."
    "Call it what you like, child," he said mildly. "It still carries five to ten in the penitentiary."
    She had to squeeze hard to prevent her bladder from emptying itself where she stood. But she hadn't played poker with Big Eddy and his cronies for the past couple of years for nothing. She turned to face her adversary fully. "Get serious, cher," she managed to scoff with credible scorn. "I'm fourteen years old, and that makes me a minor. Juvie's don't go to the pen, least not unless they murder someone."
    "I see." The man picked up his desk phone and turned it around to face her. Tapping the receiver with expensively manicured fingertips, he suggested coolly, "In that case I suggest you place a call to your lawyer."
    "Huh?"
    "A big-time professional auto liberator such as yourself surely has a high-dollar mouthpiece on retainer. Don't you?"
    She didn't reply. She simply stared at him with her brave belligerent eyes and trembling lower lip, and he heaved a sigh. "Call your parents," he suggested in a resigned voice.
    She shuffled her feet and rolled her shoulders. "Don't have any," she muttered sulkily.
    "Do you have a guardian?"
    Emma picked up the phone and punched out the numbers to Eddy's garage.
    An hour later a white-faced Eddy was hustling her out of Grant Woodard's office. His grip had her up on her toes and trotting alongside him in order to prevent her arm from being wrenched from its shoulder socket. When the elevator doors slid open Eddy hurled her inside with such force she cannoned into the mirrored back wall. "Hey," she exclaimed indignantly, grabbing at the handrail to keep her balance. Rubbing her bruised arm, she turned to face her brother.
    "A Rolls-Royce." he snarled. He was across the elevator in a flash, looming over her. As the doors swooshed closed he was already bending down to thrust his face aggressively close to hers. "Against everything I've ever wished for you, Emma Terese Robescheaux, you went out and thugged a car.
    And not just a regular, easily turned around Camaro or Jeep, oh no." He swore with creative fluency in Cajun French. "No, you gotta heist yourself a Silver Cloud, Rolls-fuckin'-Royce!"
    "Well y'all always raved on about it so," she yelled back at him, but she was savagely interrupted when he grabbed her shoulders and shook her hard once. And then again. Soon her head was flopping.
    "Hell, yeah, I