Taking Jana (Paradise South #2) by Rissa Brahm Read Free Book Online Page B

to Family Emergency.’
    She walked back through the kitchen, which reeked because, in addition to the floors, the damn garbage had been skipped. She decided then that she’d find the papers she needed to run preliminary numbers and get the hell out of there, out of the entire building for that matter. The option to sleep in her childhood bedroom upstairs was out too, since the ventilation from the kitchen was building-wide . And Jana’s old bedroom had the benefit of being directly above the kitchen, closest to the stench.
    She got to the back office door and before even messing with the keys, she pulled out a small container of menthol vapor balm from her purse. A nurse comes prepared with the minimum essentials. She dabbed some under her nose to be able to function in there for even a few minutes.
    Not having been in the back office too often when she was younger, she had no immediate recollection of the key, so she tried the rest of the bunch. The eleventh key clicked.
    Just the sight of the closet-sized hole of an office with all the stacks and samples and catalogs and broken knobs and parts made her crumble to the grease-slicked floor and sob. She gasped between every few outpours, but covered her mouth with her shirt as a pseudo-filter , knowing the poisonous sewage-like air of the thirty-year -old commercial kitchen was killing her slowly with each and every intake.
    After all the years she’d worked to escape the potential of becoming her parents in that restaurant, and then the fight to save them, then her escape from the strip club scene…after all that, now she was being stuffed back into a dark black hopeless box, one she didn’t think she’d ever have the strength to climb out of in the first place.
    Three years in at The Wet Spot, Newark, then four more at the Manhattan sister club during her nursing school stint. God, she’d been gyrating eye-candy by night, at the mercy of horrid, horny men and boys, while by day, a nursing student, busting ass on organic chemistry and pharmacology when she should have been sleeping. Why hadn’t she drowned her nursing dream in the Hudson years ago? She could have kept dancing at The Wet Spot for Christ’s sake, eventually worn down enough to take an offer from one of her many creepy regulars, as a mistress or hell, as a dutiful wife. Why not dive right into a loveless, fuck-filled marriage of comfort and ease? And when her tits started to sag, she’d be traded in for a younger, tighter version of the shell of a woman she’d once been, but she’d still have the ease and comfort, right? She’d even have it better than her mother by this time.
    God, why had she put herself through any of the upward struggles? She’d gotten into her dream school, then for a taste of the energy surge at one of the best hospitals in the entire fucking world, to have her family take it away from her, snatch it the fuck away. Again!
    The floor safe, covered with dust, dented at the top edge, stared at her. She laughed out loud through her salty, pathetic tears. The undoubtedly empty safe, except for maybe twenty dollars of coin rolls, doubled as a printer stand and a “refrigerator” magnet door, with vendors’ phone numbers haphazardly stuck onto its rust-splotched surface.
    God, she’d probably need to help her mother replenish the coins tomorrow. Because Ilana back at MMU Hospital had probably already snagged her week’s shifts. And because why wouldn’t a skilled, trained nurse need to go to a Fort Lee, New Jersey bank to get twenty bucks of dime and quarter rolls for an already dead restaurant? And the joke of the century: She’d have to come up with ten-thousand percent more than that for her father’s hospital bills.
    She pushed herself up off the floor. Her tears had slowed. The odor of the place was making her gag while the mint balm made her upper lip tingle and not much else. She dusted off her backside, wiped her face, and fully entered the dingy broom closet of an