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“Oh! Are you a club girl, too?”
Leo takes that moment to step in, placing his arm around my waist. “Old Lady,” he corrects.
The moment Andrea clicked to what Leo was saying, I watched the bubbly smile on her face drop. She tried to recover, forcing her lips to turn back up, but I’d already caught the pain in her features.
“Oh,” she said softly, her eyes moving to Leo. “I didn’t realize you had an Old Lady.”
I felt her sadness, the crush she had on him now completely obvious.
Clearing my throat, I answered, “It’s very new.”
I heard someone call out her name, and she grasped the distraction, letting out a relieved breath. “It was nice to meet you,” she murmured, her eyes taking one last glance at Leo before turning swiftly and vanishing through the crowd.
I frowned. “What was that about?” I asked, tilting my head to look up at Leo’s face.
He squeezed my waist and flicked his head toward the exit, indicating he wanted to talk in private. I shot Harmony and Del a soft smile before following him outside. The large undercover decking had bench seats running along either side, and a few picnic tables spread throughout. I followed him to a table, sitting opposite and waiting for him to speak.
“She used to go by Andie, we have some history. Not much, but enough to make it awkward.”
“Okay…”
“Harmony got into some trouble with a dangerous guy. His name was Daniel Ashley. He helped traffic women.”
My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh, wow.”
He nodded. “She was taken, and when we went looking for her, she wasn’t there. But Andie was. The club took her in, supported her for a while. She’d been through some bad shit with this guy.” His brow creased in anger and frustration. “She was so young, barely eighteen. I wanted to be there for her, help her through the nightmares and scars she had. But she kept seeing it as something more.”
“And you didn’t?”
He shook his head, running a hand over his beard. “She reminded me so much of Meyah. I couldn’t help but want to protect her. I didn’t think she would see it the way she did, and I was clueless. Didn’t even fucking notice how her feelings for me were changing.”
My heart felt for the young girl. I’d been that age once too. When a man shows you attention and you’re hurting, you latch on to them. Sometimes you’re so blind that you start seeing things that aren’t there.
“So one night she came looking for me and found me with one of the club girls. Next morning, she was gone.”
“She was hurt.”
He nodded. “So Harm calls me a month or so ago and is like, guess who just showed up here, new persona, new look, new attitude. It was like she’d wiped her old self away, and the quiet, shy broken girl I’d met was now a sex kitten, wanting to be a club girl.”
I could tell by the roughness of his voice that he hated the idea—he’d cared for her. Not in the way she wanted, but more like family.
“After what happened to her… why would she do that?”
He snorted out a harsh laugh. “Harm thinks she did it, knowing that at some point I’d come here and either fuck her like the other girls or pull her to the side and claim her or some shit, knowing that I’d hate to see her like this.”
“And what happened when you saw her?”
He shrugged. “Neither. Told her that being a club girl wasn’t going to fix her issues. She’d been abused, and she never told me, but I suspected Daniel Ashley had used her body, too.”
“Why would she want this then?” I asked in awe.
She’d been treated like dirt, used and hurt. And yet here she was, letting herself be used all over again. I was confident in my sexuality. I loved sex, I enjoyed it and had no problem sharing my body with consent. But after the pain she seemed to have endured, I couldn’t understand why she’d want to relive that, over and over.
I had no doubt the men treated her well, just like the boys from Athens did with their girls. But she knew they only wanted one thing.
Or did she?
“You think she wants someone to save her?”
He nodded. “I think she realizes it happened once. I came in, protected her, treated her good because I felt for her, and hated that she’d been through that shit.”
“And she thinks by letting herself be used again, a knight in shining armor is going to come in like before and rescue her,” I said, my mind reeling at the idea of how she must be feeling inside.
“You need to get her out of here, Leo. If this is how her mind is working, she’s sitting on the edge of a cliff, and it won’t take too much to push her off,” I told him, reaching out and pulling his large hand into mine.
“Working on it, baby,” he told me, lacing his fingers through mine. “Working on it.”
