“What happened?” he asked soothingly. “I could hear you screaming from downstairs.”
“Nightmare,” she murmured into his sweater. “I’m sorry I disturbed you. I used to have them as a teenager, but I thought they were gone. I hadn’t had one in years until Joan died. This is the second time it’s happened since. I think maybe they were triggered because I’m alone again.”
She’s not alone. She has me.
He tried to curb the fierce longing to make her understand that she wasn’t without somebody who cared just because her foster mother was gone now.
“What were you dreaming about?” Evan tried to keep his tone even, but he hated anything that frightened her, even if it was only a dream. “Why were you denying that you were a whore?”
“Long story,” she said anxiously. “The dreams are left over from a long time ago. It’s over.”
“Talk to me, Randi. Please.” Evan intentionally used her nickname, sensing that whatever was bothering her was attached to her childhood and maybe her mother. If her memories were this frightening, he vowed to never again call her by anything other than her nickname. “Tell me about your life before you came to Amesport.”
“My mother did bad things. I did bad things,” Randi told him in a warning voice.
“I don’t give a shit what your mother did. You aren’t your mother, and you were just a kid. Tell me,” Evan cajoled.
“My mother was a hooker.”
Evan could feel Randi’s body shudder as she made the confession.
Randi continued in a rush, “She was a prostitute for as long as I can remember. She was only sixteen when I was born, and I never knew who my father was—probably one of her . . . clients. We had a small apartment near her corner, but I didn’t see her very much. There were quite a few other prostitutes who lived in the same building, worked the same general area, and they took turns visiting me. Sometimes they brought me food. They were kind to me when they didn’t have to be. I wasn’t their kid.”
Evan’s grip tightened in Randi’s hair, his entire body shuddering with anger as he thought about a child growing up in those kinds of conditions. “What happened?”
I have to stay calm. This is about her and not me. She needs me right now.
And damned if he didn’t want her to need him.
“One of the ladies helped me register for school, and I went every day. I don’t remember anything much before early grade school.”
“Did your mother bring her men back to your apartment?”
“No. She’d leave, sometimes before I got home from school, and sometimes she wasn’t home when I left in the morning.”
Evan felt his temper flare even hotter, an unusual occurrence for him. Randi had basically raised herself, with the occasional help of some prostitutes? “How did you end up in Amesport? What were you dreaming about? Something that really happened?”
She nodded slowly against his shoulder. Her voice was unsteady as she continued. “When I was thirteen, my mother left and never came home. They found her body a week later. She was murdered, probably by one of her johns, but they never found the perpetrator.”
Evan’s anger ramped up another notch. “So you were alone?”
“When social services found out I existed, they took me into foster care.”
Confused, he asked, “So you were adopted by the Tylers?”
“No. I was fostered to a family in Southern California. And then I ran away.”
Evan knew there was something missing from her story. “What happened?” He knew she had a reason why she ran away. If she’d had any sense of stability after her chaotic childhood, she wouldn’t have left.
“My foster father knew I was the daughter of a prostitute. He assumed I had the same skills as my mother,” Randi told him quietly.
Evan felt a rage rise inside of him, a fury that he’d never experienced before. “He forced you? You were a child.”
“My mother was a runaway. Some of the ladies start very young, usually a product of broken homes and abuse,” Randi explained patiently. “He tried to shove his dick in my mouth. I had to fight my way out of the house. I left with nothing . . . not that I really had much as far as belongings were concerned anyway.”
“They could have found you another home—”
“I was scared. I thought I was better off taking my chances on the streets than in foster care.”
Evan could understand why. But it did nothing to calm the intensity of his fury for Randi and her previous circumstances as a child. “Tell me how you ended up here.” He didn’t want her to have to relive her past anymore. She might sound like she was over her childhood, but if she was still having nightmares, she was still holding on to some of the pain. If he could find the man who tried to violate her, he’d kill the bastard himself.
“I lived on the streets for a while, homeless. I stopped going to school. I did what I had to do to survive. One day, I was so hungry, so desperate, that I tried to steal a wallet from a tourist. The last thing I wanted to do was sell my body, but I knew I was getting close to going back to the ladies and begging them to take me in. I would have ended up doing whatever I needed to in order to survive.” Randi’s voice was tremulous as she recounted her desperation earlier in her life.
Evan took a deep breath, trying to focus on Randi instead of his own emotions. The thought of Randi coming so close to needing to sell her body to survive nearly made him come undone. “Did you succeed in getting the money you needed?” he asked, not giving a shit if she ripped off a hundred people to survive. She deserved a better life than what she’d been handed as a child . . . a life that sounded like a living hell.