Page 7 of Drive Me Crazy
“A firefighter, eh? Just like Nathan.”
I nodded. Nathan was the reason I’d done it. He’d always been more of a saint than a man, and he’d dragged me along to meet Chief Karl when I’d have rather been sitting at home playing Xbox and waiting until nightfall so I could find the next party. He’d saved eighteen-year-old me.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, not sure exactly how to phrase my appreciation. “You’ve been good to her.”
He nodded but crossed his big arms over his chest, and I realized she already had at least one protector in town, and he’d been doing a far better job of being her friend than I was.
“It’s recently come to my attention that not everyone in this town has treated her with the respect she deserves.” My eyes were drawn to her across the room. Her mouth moved to the lyrics of the pop music playing over the speaker, and she moved her head with the rhythm. She looked like a regular, carefree twenty-two-year-old, and I knew right then I’d do anything to keep that look on her face.
“She deserves so much more,” I said more to myself than to John. He smiled when I lifted my eyes from Naomi to meet his. “Let her know I’ll be in the truck waiting for her.”
CHAPTER SIX
Naomi
Grady had beenquiet on the drive home. John had liked him. Had told me he was “one of the good ones.” Whatever that meant. Something shifted between us today. He seemed less stiff, less determined. I was under no illusion that he’d changed his mind about me, but had he decided I was a lost cause? I wasn’t sure I was ready for him to give up on me. The truth was that I had no idea if I was screwing up my life. Being a cam girl was fun and it was lucrative. I was making far more money than any of my friends. I could handle the upturned noses around town. They hadn’t so much as looked my way for the first eighteen years of my life, so being seen through the eyes of disgust was better than not being seen at all.
“Are you coming by tonight?” I asked when he’d pulled the truck up to the curb in front of my house.
“We had a deal,” I continued after he’d met my eyes and held it for a moment not saying anything.
“Your deal is bull shit.”
“Because?”
“Because…” he started and placed both hands on the steering wheel in front of him, wrapping his hands around the black leather and squeezing until his knuckles turned white. “I can’t be objective about what you’re doing when all I can think about is fucking you.”
My jaw went slack.
“Oh come on, you can’t be surprised by that. Every guy we saw today wanted to fuck you.”
“Princess Peach,” I whispered. “They want to fuck Princess Peach, not me.”
He nodded slowly.
“So, now what?”
I wasn’t sure what I was asking. Was he done trying to protect me? Had he given up? Would he disappear from my life now?
“I’ll be by at eight.”
“You will?”
“Yes, you’re right. We have a deal. Surely I can suffer through a few more nights of this if it means you’ll stop doing it.”
I felt the frown pull the corners of my mouth down. Suffer through? Was watching me really such a terrible task for him? Men paid me to watch through a computer screen and he was getting an up close and personal viewing, and he wassuffering?
With a little extra determination, I jumped down from the truck, new clothes in tow, and forced a big smile. “Great, don’t be late.”
Suffer through. That phrase ran in a loop in my head, each time it fueled my desire to show him just how much I could make him suffer. He might not like me or even respect me, but I knew damn well I could turn him on, and if that was what I had to do to prove a point, I’d make sure no woman could ever compare to the show I was going to put on for him tonight.
Usual preparations fora work night honestly didn’t vary much from a regular night of a twenty-two-year-old. I showered, I put on makeup, I picked out my outfit and then proceeded to obsess over those decisions up until the final moment I walked out the door. The difference — besides the outright provocative costumes I wore — was that, instead of going to the bar or a club to hang out with friends and wait for guys to approach us, I walked across the hall, opened my computer, and let the men come to me.
I tugged at the zipper of my jumpsuit, pulling it up so that my cleavage was completely covered. I was showing far less skin than usual, but I wanted tonight to be different. I considered it fate that among John’s new inventory had been a racecar driver jumpsuit. It fit my curves perfectly and seemed appropriate after Grady’s car comment.
It was clear that last night I’d made a wardrobe mistake. I’d dressed up like a schoolgirl when that’s exactly how he saw me — as a child. Young, naïve, off limits. Tonight, I was going to show him I wasn’t a child anymore. And I was going to prove to him that not only was I able to take care of myself, I was as much a woman as any of the women he’d been with.
Grady’s reputation wasn’t that of a womanizer, but as far as I knew, he hadn’t dated anyone seriously. Whether by design or not, he kept his relationships casual. Ironically, he’d slept with far more people than I had, but because men paid to see me naked and because I was a woman — because let’s be honest cam guys don’t get near the bad rap that cam girls do — I was the whore.
