“I find that hard to believe,” Byron mumbled before shutting up again.
“Even though I was so young, I’d been living with trauma all through my teenage years. Impressionable years, or so they call them. I never dated — hell, I’d never even kissed a guy at that point. I was shy and didn’t know what to think about all of the attention I was getting from this man. So when he asked me out on a date, I just nodded yes. I couldn’t even get words to come from my mouth.”
Byron felt thwarted when McKenzie closed her eyes briefly. When her eyes were open, he could read her expressions like a book, and he didn’t want to be shut out right now.
She continued before he had to prompt her. “We went on several dates over the next two months, and I fell irrevocably in love with the man. Well, irrevocably isn’t quite the word, but that’s the way it seemed. He always walked me to my door, kissed me goodnight, and never tried to push it further than that. We would talk about sex, and at first, I was terrified to even consider it, but then the kisses grew a little longer, and I began feeling things inside me I never thought I would feel — sensations I thought only existed in romance novels. So I told him I wanted to try…you know…soon.” The words seemed to burn her as she spoke them.
“One night he took me to his house, or what I thought was his house. It was on the outskirts of town, big, expensive — the kind of place where real artwork hung on the walls, not just prints,” she said with a bitter laugh.
“McKenzie…” Byron was beginning to feel bad about forcing her to take this stroll down the ugliest possible memory lane.
She continued anyway and he didn’t stop her. “We sat down and he poured some wine, very good wine…” Another pause. And this time there were tears in her eyes again when she looked at him. “And then everything went black. When I woke up, I was in a big, horrible bed, lying…naked beside a man I didn’t know. My entire body hurt, and I was bruised all over. I was terrified. I slipped from his bed, found my clothes on the floor, threw them on, then quickly ran from the house. Nathan was waiting outside in his car.
“I thought we were dating, but it turns out that he was really just a pimp, a guy who made a lot of money at his job. He found inexperienced young women — of course, they had to be virgins — and he wined and dined them, made sure they were a perfect fit, a girl without ties, a girl who no one would ever believe if she cried ‘rape,’ and then he matched them with a john who would pay a lot of money for a night of…‘pleasure.’”
“Crap, McKenzie…” He should stop this, but he didn’t.
“The man I’d been dating wasn’t really dating me,” she said. “He was prepping me to be his next call-girl. When it was the first time for a virgin woman, he always got paid a lot of money, and then, after that first time, some of the girls stayed on with him. He paid them more than they’d make in their pathetic restaurant jobs, and his clients were…how do I put this?” She took a deep breath. “Men with a certain tastes, but men who could pay a lot for their twisted lifestyles.”
“Like the men you catered to at Relinquish Control,” Byron said. What the hell? Why would she have opened a place that provided services like that if she’d been through such a traumatizing experience? As if she could read his mind, she addressed that next.
“I took the blood money I had earned from him and I ran far away. It took me a couple of years, but I saved every dime, made a few very good investments, and then I got the idea for Relinquish Control. Not to take power away from women, but to give it back to them. My girls had nothing, and I saved them from the streets. I took the control away from the men who make women’s lives hell. Those men had to come to me, and they had to sign a contract, and my girls’ safety was ensured. I had pictures of the men, their ID, everything to identify them if one of my girls disappeared. The man who raped me got away with it. Nathan Guilder got away with it. I wasn’t letting other men get away with anything.”
“You can’t stop it from happening,” Byron told her.
“No. You’re right. I can’t stop it, but I saved a lot of girls. My escorts weren’t naïve, inexperienced little things. They were experienced and they chose to better their lives. None of them stayed more than two years. They saved their money, then moved on. Exactly like I did,” she said, lifting her chin, challenging him to call her a whore again.
“I…I…” Byron was at a complete loss for words.
“It’s fine, Byron. I get it. You assume that I’m a whore, that if I make my living a certain way, it’s because I’m insatiable. And to add to that, I didn’t make it exactly hard for you to get me into your bed,” she said, a humorless laugh escaping her lips.
“You were fourteen when you basically lost your sister, your mother and your father. I’m sorry if I’ve been harsh on you,” Byron told her.
He didn’t know what to think. He knew in his gut that she was telling the truth. But just because she’d been through hell didn’t mean that she was innocent. It just meant that she was a real person. That was something he could no longer ignore.
“I needed to make a lot of money. My sister’s care wasn’t cheap,” she said, laughing humorlessly again.
“Why didn’t you just let her go? By the time you opened the doors to Relinquish, she’d been in a coma for about ten years.”
She looked at him like he was a monster before replying. “You never give up on the people you love,” she told him sternly.
“No, but you can also forgive yourself for mistakes you made as a kid, and for making a mistake with this Nathan guy.”
“That’s really easy for you to say, Byron. You were born into wealth and privilege. Life hasn’t continually kicked you back down every time you tried to stand up again. In this world, you’re either a winner or a loser. After being attacked, I was determined never to be taken again, never to show weakness again, and especially never to be fooled again,” she said.
He read the message loud and clear. She wouldn’t play his games.
“Everything isn’t always as it appears to be,” he told her.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“We all have our pasts, and we all have our secrets.”
“I’m sure your secrets are about the maid forgetting to pack your lunch,” she said, instantly putting her armor into place.