The French Detective's Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t have sex with him, he hit me. I was stupid. I called him names and told him exactly what I thought of him. He lost his temper.”
    Ciara winced.
    “ Fils de putain ,” CoCo said. The fucking bastard.
    “But that’s not the worst part.”
    “ Chérie , what could possibly be worse than that?” Davie asked sympathetically.
    “He said if I didn’t pay him ten thousand euros, he’d tell my father where I am.”
    “Ten thousand euros!” Outrage spurted through Ciara. Over twelve thousand dollars.
    “I will kill him!” Hugo repeated even more vehemently. “It’s what Etienne would have done.”
    “And Etienne is dead,” Ciara snapped, surprising them all. She took a breath and turned back to Sofie. “Where does he expect you to get that kind of money?” There was no way.
    “He doesn’t,” Hugo spat out furiously. “He expects her to fuck him, whenever he calls.”
    “I won’t!” Sofie cried. “I’ll leave Paris! I’ll go to London, or somewhere else. Anywhere else. So he’ll never find me.”
    “No!” Ciara shook her head. “You can’t leave. What about your studies? You’re so close to finishing.”
    Ciara was taking care of all the Orphans financially right now, except for Hugo, paying for the apartment, their food and tuition. She had few rules, but one of them was that each start a course of study that would give them an income and independence when completed.
    When she was a girl, she’d seen a movie once where one of the characters had said, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” That had struck her as very wise. She’d begged her mother to stay in school, but that would have meant feeding her for three more years. And keeping her around. By then her mom had needed every cent she had for drugs. Ciara found herself out on the streets shortly thereafter, but she’d never forgotten that movie, and never stopped wanting to go back to school.
    She was determined her Orphans would all learn how to fish.
    To that end, Hugo had already graduated from his auto mechanics course, and started contributing to the family coffers. Sofie was a talented artist—a painter—but making a living at that was next to impossible, so she was at cosmetic school, with only a year to go.
    Desperation crept into Sophie’s tone as she murmured, “But what else can I do? None of us has that kind of money. You have to steal just to pay our rent!”
    They all stared at each other for a long moment. Ten thousand euros. And Ciara had thought she’d soon be able to give up her life of crime.
    Now she despaired of ever being able to quit. Unless...
    “We should go to the police,” she announced.
    “ What ?” they all exclaimed in a chorus.
    “You’ve got to be kidding!” Ricardo said, leaping up.
    Ciara waved her hands, trying to calm down the explosion of protests. “I met someone tonight. From the DCPJ. He seemed—”
    CoCo and Davie looked horrified. “The police judiciaire ?”
    Hugo looked equally furious. “No!” he insisted. “ Pas le keuf ! Are you that naïve? Beck is a cop, too. There is no way they’ll take our word over one of their own. Just see what happened to Etienne!”
    “But Beck’s in the Paris préfecture . The judiciaire is a completely different division—”
    “Doesn’t matter. They’ll end up investigating us instead, and social services will split us up. And you, you’ll end up in jail!” he said. “Is that what you want?”
    “Of course not.” Ciara jetted out a breath. She saw his point.
    The unfairness of the situation burned at her like acid. The ones who needed the police’s protection most of all, the weak, the young and the oppressed, were often the ones who were most victimized by them. It was the same the world over. It’s what had taken Etienne from her. She was not about to let it happen to the Orphans, too.
    Ciara had liked Jean-Marc, but he was undoubtedly the same as any other