“Thank God.”
His eyes flick to me, and it’s clear I’m getting on his last nerve. “Eat if you want, then we’ll show you where you can get washed up.”
“Fine.”
He nods and disappears out the door.
A combination of my caffeine headache and my growling stomach draws me off the cot, and I drain the coffee, then pull the wrapper off the food to find an Egg McMuffin, which I devour. I’m just licking my fingers when the door clicks open again. I brace myself for Cooper, but it’s a woman in her late twenties with long dark hair pulled back in a sleek bun. And she’s pregnant, a definite baby bump under her blue top.
“If you want to shower, I’ll take you to the bathroom,” she says.
I round up my trash and she takes it as I follow her out the door.
“I’m Special Agent Nichols,” she tells me as she leads me up the hall. “If you need anything, I’m your gal.”
“I need to wake up from this nightmare,” I grumble.
She glances over her shoulder at me. “Can’t help you there.”
“Where’s Cooper?” I ask.
“He’s with the team in Evidence.”
The team. Is Harrison in there?
Harrison doesn’t exist, I remind myself, acid rising in my throat. The guy I wanted was a figment of my imagination. Fake.
Every door we pass has a card scan on it, and when Nichols scans her card and opens a door for me, it’s into a small bathroom, complete with a stall shower. “There’s a shampoo and soap dispenser in the shower, and a towel, fresh toothbrush, toothpaste, and a comb for you there,” she says with a nod at the shelf over the sink. “Take your time and knock when you’re done. I’ll be right here.” She closes the door and I hear it latch behind me.
I pull open the glass door and start the shower, then shuck off my jumpsuit. The water is super hot when I step in, but I don’t turn it down. I stand here for a long time as it scalds my skin, thawing me a little. Once I’ve shampooed, washed, and dried off, I climb back into the same jumpsuit I just took off.
I try tugging the comb through my thick hair for a few minutes before giving up and peeling the plastic wrapper off the toothbrush. I look at my pink face in the mirror as I brush. Without my stage makeup, I look younger. Really young. And scared. I pull my eyes away from the mirror as my face crumples and spit into the sink. I’m not going to cry.
But as I brace my hands on the sink, I do. Tears trickle over my lashes and into the basin.
I rest on my elbows and let them flow for a minute to get them out of my system, then take a few deep, calming breaths and drag my sleeve under my eyes. I move to the door without looking back into the mirror. When I knock and the door opens, my heart stalls and an electric jolt zings up my spine.
I didn’t expect Blake.
I lower my face. He’s never seen me without my layers of stage makeup, and I feel suddenly too exposed without a mask to hide behind. Vulnerable. “Where’s Agent Nichols?”
“Elsewhere,” he says, his tone as flat as his expression. Without a word, he leads me to a room and scans his ID, then pushes open the door.
Sitting at a table is a gray-haired woman in a charcoal business suit. She looks up and sees me, and her voice is a deep purr as she says, “I’ve got to go, but I’ll check back later,” into her phone. She tucks it into a briefcase on the table next to her and pulls out a file, then stands and holds out her hand. “I’m Yvonne Grantham, your court appointed lawyer. You must be Samantha.”
“Sam,” I say, shaking her hand.
She gives Blake a narrow-eyed look. “You can leave.”
My bunched insides relax, and I immediately know I can trust her.
Blake splits a glance between us. “We’ve got some questions for her,” he says through a tight jaw, obviously not happy with his dismissal.
She gives him a hard look. “They’ll have to wait until I figure out if you’ve even got a case against my client, Agent.”
His icy gaze cuts through her as he steps into the hall and closes the door.
“This is highly unusual,” Yvonne says, sliding into a chair and indicating I should do the same. “I wasn’t able to find another case of the DEA arresting someone on solicitation charges. They usually leave that to the local police.”
“He set me up. I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say, flicking a hand at the door.
“Him?” she says, her eyes widening. “He’s your arresting agent?”
I nod. “He came into Benny’s the night I started and sat at my stage, then he hired me for privates that night and the next. He got all touchy and told me—”
“Back up,” she says, jotting notes on a pad. “What do you mean, ‘he got all touchy’?”
I squirm a little in my chair. “He said he wanted to touch me . . . and I sort of let him.”
“At any point in all this . . . touching, did he identify himself as a federal agent?”
“No, never,” I say, shaking my head adamantly. “At least, not until he pulled out his badge and arrested me.”
“So, let’s talk about that,” she says, her eyes lifting from her pad to my face. “They haven’t disclosed if there are tapes yet, so tell me, what exactly happened?”
A jolt of fresh panic freezes me in my seat. “Tapes?”
She nods. “It’s unlikely your arresting agent wore a wire because they can’t try you in federal court for solicitation, and California has a two-party consent law. If they taped you without your knowledge, that would be grounds for dismissal, and they know that. But the Feds don’t always give a rat’s ass about state law, so it’s possible.”
I picture Blake’s body as his shirt fell open: ink over sculpted perfection. “I didn’t see any wire.”
“It would have been concealed under his clothing.” She’s riffling through some papers in her briefcase and stops at the look on my face, which I’m sure is somewhere between mortification and chagrin. “How far did this go, Sam?” she asks warily.
“Um . . . just . . . not too far, but I saw his chest. There was nothing on it.”
Her lips press into a line. “So tell me in as much detail as you can exactly what happened.”
I take a deep breath. “He hired me for a private dance, and . . .” Shit. “We’d been flirting for a few days and all, and I told him I wanted to go back to his hotel with him.”
“Did you ever ask for money in exchange for sex acts?” she asks, unfazed by my admission.
“No!” My fingers dig into my knees. “I mean . . . he didn’t agree to go back to his hotel because he said someone else was staying in his room with him. And then, somehow, we ended up kissing and I sort of started taking off his clothes—”
Her eyes flick to me again. “Right there in Benny’s?”
My face is burning. “Yes. In the VIP room. But I never asked for money.”
“How do private dances work? There’s a fee involved?”
“Yeah.” I swallow. “Two hundred for a half hour. He bought an hour.”
So, I guess I did ask for money. I hang my head and my face pulls into a grimace.
“And, did he ask you for sex?”
My stomach tightens, and I swear I’m going to be sick. “Not in so many words, but he kissed me . . . and I could tell he wanted it . . . if you know what I mean.”
The pen in her hand stops moving, and she levels me in her severe gaze. “You were clear that he’d paid for your services.”
“Yes.”
“And to the best of your knowledge, was he clear those services did not include sex acts?”
Panic starts to cloud my brain, twisting my thoughts into a jumble. “I told him he wasn’t allowed to touch me. There was a three feet rule.”
She jots another note. “At any point would you have given him reason to believe it was okay to break this ‘three feet rule’?”