Justice for the Damned Read Online Free PDF

punter.’
    ‘Aren’t you? You’ve paid for me.’
    ‘I didn’t pay to fuck you, I paid so you wouldn’t have to fuck any other men tonight.’
    ‘Well you shouldn’t have bothered. I’d rather be turning tricks. At least the punters are only fucking with my body, not my head.’
    Reece heaved a sigh. Generally he was good at reading people, but he was confused by the mixed messages he got from Staci. It wasn’t simply that she blew hot and cold. There seemed to be an almost schizophrenic split to her character. Sometimes she was as hard as the gritstone edges that delineated the southern border of Yorkshire, impervious to insults. Other times she would blow up or collapse into tears at the slightest thing. It was difficult to say which version of her he found more attractive. Or why he found her attractive in more than a passing-fancy kind of way at all. He’d been around prostitutes long enough to know they were nothing but trouble. She should have made him want to run away as fast as he could. But instead she made him want to risk everything for the chance to be with her. The power she had over him already was frightening. He was afraid that if he told her how it hurt like a physical ache to be apart from her, how he wanted to keep her and everything she loved safe from and uncorrupted by this squalid world they inhabited, then he would lose what little control he had left of his emotions. And he wasn’t sure he was ready for that to happen, not while she was still under Wayne’s thumb.
    ‘I want to be with you and everything that comes with you, Staci,’ said Reece. ‘You believe that, don’t you?’
    Staci looked at him with that searching gaze again. There was something almost pathetic about the puppyish roundness of his eyes. The harshness faded from her features but the shutters behind her eyes remained closed. With a slight nod, she slid his suit jacket off his bearish shoulders, loosened his tie and lifted it over his head. He caught hold of one of her small hands and tried to kiss it, but she slipped free of his grasp and expertly unbuttoned his shirt and trousers. He shuddered as her fingers, then her lips, traced the outline of the taut muscles of his chest. He lifted her head and kissed her. She allowed him to do so for a moment, before gently but firmly pushing him onto his back and straddling him.
    As always with Reece, Staci was the one in control. That was how he liked it. He hadn’t said so. She just knew. Years of screwing for a living had made her finely attuned to reading a man’s desires. They’d also left her unsure of what she wanted from a man. Physically, he was the kind of man she’d always been attracted to – dark, roughly handsome, powerfully built. The attraction was psychological too – at least partly so. In public, he gave off an air of brooding strength that made her feel safe. In private, there was a vulnerability, a neediness about him that she was less comfortable with. Amelia’s father had been the same. His love and need had been all-consuming until the birth of their daughter. No longer able to get the attention he desired from Staci, he’d sought what he needed elsewhere. The memory made her wonder whether what Reece felt for her was real and lasting or just a passing infatuation.
    They made love slowly, both forgetting – if only for the briefest of moments – the things that prevented them from giving themselves to each other completely. Then they lay with her head in the crook of his shoulder, sharing a cigarette.
    Staci reached under the bed and took out a little black notebook and biro. Inside the book was a list of numbers that gradually decreased as she turned the pages. She subtracted her own takings for the night plus the five hundred quid Reece had given her from the previous number on the list and wrote down the new tally.
    ‘So how much do you owe him now?’ asked Reece.
    ‘Fourteen thousand, three hundred and fifty quid.’
    Reece’s voice