Red Light Wives. Mary Monroe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ him down. “He was never much of a daddy anyway,” I wailed, trying to hide the pain in my voice with a dry laugh. I blew out a weak breath and hunched my shoulders. “It’s just me and my kids now. I love them, and I want to give them everything they need. That’s why…that’s why I came to see you.”

      “Well, if you a good mama to them kids, you ain’t goin’ to do nothin’ that’ll fuck you up with the cops. And, you’ll behave yourself so I won’t have to get ugly with you.” Clyde yawned and cocked his head to the side, staring at me out of the corner of his eye as he handed me one of the two menus on the table. “All I want you to do is make that money, honey.” He sniffed and gave me a mysterious wink.

      “Uh, what else do you do?” I asked, smiling the same anxious way I’d done during my other interviews. My confidence level was pretty low, so I had to fake my way to the very end. I was ready to lie, kiss ass, act like I was interested, and do whatever else I had to do. “You are nothing like what I expected.”

      “Say what?” he drawled, raising both eyebrows.

      “I mean, don’t men like you have jobs on the side, too? A front job to keep the IRS and the cops off your back? Or do you pay people off?”

      Clyde leaned sideways and glanced around the room before responding. “In the first place, you been watchin’ too many movies. In the second place, let’s get one thing straight right now: I ask all the questions,” he said firmly, giving me a cold, hard look.

      “Okay,” I croaked. I rubbed my nose and gave Clyde a curious look. “How many other girls work for you?”

      “That ain’t none of your business!” he snapped. “Didn’t I just tell you that I was the one to ask all the questions, woman? A nosy woman is a woman lookin’ for trouble.” He grinned, and that kept me from getting too upset over his outburst. As odd as it seemed, there was something charismatic about Clyde. I liked a man who was in control, even if it meant that I was one of the things he controlled. “I pay the cost to be the boss.” I had no idea what he meant by that and I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to explain. “Do you hear me?”

      I nodded and fixed my eyes on the top of the table.

      “Order whatever you want, Rockelle.” He took out a pair of dark glasses and held them up to his eyes and shook his head. “I can see you like to eat.”

      “I’ll just have a small salad. I’m tryin’ to lose a few pounds,” I said, sucking in my stomach.

      Clyde shook his head again and sniffed. “You ain’t got to be losin’ no weight. I got enough bean poles in my garden. You a fine, healthy-lookin’ sister. A lot of men like that. They want to ride a horse that they ain’t got to worry about buckin’.”

      I gasped so hard I hiccupped. “I thought you said I wouldn’t have to sleep with any of these men.”

      Clyde clapped his hands together and laughed, shaking his dark glasses in my face. “Girl, what you do on a date I set up is up to you and that man. I ain’t askin’ you to do nothin’ you don’t want to do.”

      I looked around again then I looked straight in Clyde’s eyes. “Are you telling me that these men pay your women three hundred dollars just to talk?”

      An amused look appeared on Clyde’s face. “I don’t know what my girls do behind closed doors. That’s the beauty of my game. I don’t tell ’em what to do. Like I said, what you and your dates do is up to y’all.” He pursed his lips and gave me a thoughtful look. “I want you to dress with some class. None of them cheap Lycra frocks and none of them tight, see-through blouses.”

      “I don’t own any clothes like that,” I said quickly. “All of my stuff is tame.”

      “I hope it ain’t too tame. I don’t want you goin’ to my clients lookin’ like no old maid librarian. That frock you got on now, that’ll work just fine. Men go for that college-girl look.”

      I nodded.

      “Good,” Clyde said, grunting. “Now that we on the same page, let’s get that waiter over here so we can get us some of that lasagna before them greedy tourists eat everything up.”

      Chapter 3

      LULA HAWKINS

      “I feel like a five-dollar streetwalker,” I mumbled, struggling to sit up in the hospital bed I’d been confined to for the past two days. My hair was long, but so tangled and matted, it looked and felt like a skullcap. My lips were dry and my eyes so red and puffy, putting on makeup had been a waste of my time. I frowned at the lipstick and compact on the stand next to my bed. I had never been in a hospital before in my life.

      The grim-faced doctors and stern nurses swishing in and out of the room dressed in white from head to shoes, looked like sheep. I had given birth to a huge baby, almost ten pounds. Delivering him had been rough, almost splitting my crack in two. I’d been stitched up so tight, I felt like a virgin. And a dumb one, at that.

      “And you look like one of them five-dollar wenches, too.” Agreeing with me was Odessa Hawkins, my best friend for the past six years and my stepsister Verna’s lover. “I told you to leave that lowlife motherfucker alone last year when he disappeared on you for two months. Not to mention all the money he borrowed from you.”

      A lot of people thought that Odessa and I were related, and the way my daddy got around, that was a strong possibility. She and I had the same dark brown skin with a few black freckles across the nose, thin lips, and large slanted brown eyes. Cute, maybe even pretty to some people, but not without a little help from our friends at the cosmetics counter. Every time I looked in Odessa’s face, it was like looking in a mirror.

      “Larry always paid me back—”

      “Girl, don’t you be defendin’ that cheesy-ass bastard to me, ’less you wanna spend another few days stretched out in this hospital bed. I won’t be as gentle with your black ass as Mrs. Larry was. Me and Verna both tried to tell you that that young-ass punk wasn’t good for nothin’ but a good fuck. And if that’s all he was, you didn’t need him. All the money you loaned him, you could have invested in a good vibrator until you found yourself a real man,” Odessa said, growling, hovering over me like a vulture.

      I sighed and glanced around the long, narrow room, looking from one bed to the other. There were ten beds, ten women—five beds, five women on each side of the room facing each other. It was hard to have a private conversation, but none of the other women seemed to be interested in anything Odessa and I had to say. They were too busy nursing their newborn babies and bragging on the telephone about how happy they were.

      As far as I knew, there was only one other Black woman in the maternity ward, and that was Larry’s wife. That bitch from hell. I found out a few hours after our scuffle in the department store parking lot, that her name was Belinda. Odessa knew her from her old neighborhood and had tangled with one of her older sisters over a man. But that was during Odessa’s teen years before she realized women lovers were more to her liking.

      Belinda Holmes was in a private room across the hall. I think that if we both hadn’t been so weak, we probably would have duked it out some more right in the hospital. I had a feeling that she wanted to kick my ass some more, the way she glared at me every time I ran into her in the hallway. But I was through with that weak drama. Larry was not worth it. He had not even checked to see how I was doing, ask about his son, or even acknowledge my presence when СКАЧАТЬ