Read Online The Billionaire's Command (The Silver Cross Club) by Bec Linder - Free Book Online

for me to escape from , other than poverty and a backwoods nowhere life. Well, I wanted a somewhere life. Nursing was my way out.
    And then my dad got sick, partway through my junior year of high school. He worked in the mine until it closed, and smoked like a chimney every day of his life, and it didn’t come as a surprise when he got cancer. But it still changed everything.
    He couldn’t work. He hadn’t really worked for years, not since the mine shut down, but he’d done enough odd jobs to keep us afloat. But he went downhill fast, and was forced to spend most of his time watching television with his oxygen tank nearby, and there was nobody else. My mom was helpless, sweet as a child and dependent on my dad for everything, and my older brother was stationed in Okinawa and couldn’t do much. I had three younger siblings, and someone had to keep food on the table. My mom’s disability checks weren’t enough.
    So I dropped out. Maybe there was some other way, something I could have done to stay in school and still keep a roof over our heads, but I couldn’t think of anything, and I didn’t have anyone to turn to for advice. The guidance counselor was so accustomed to kids dropping out that I didn’t even cross her radar.
    I was seventeen. There were three kinds of legal work in my hometown: Wal-Mart, waitressing, and running the cash register at the gas station. None of them were enough to support five people and pay the mortgage. My illegal options were selling drugs or stripping, and I picked stripping as the less morally repulsive of the two.
    The money was good. Or I thought it was good, at least; it was good to me, then, the half-starved girl I was, hungry for life and experiences. The owner probably knew I wasn’t eighteen, but he didn’t look too closely at the fake documents I gave him, and nobody else cared. I could make a hundred bucks a night, on a good night, and it was like manna from heaven. I bought my sister the first new pair of shoes she’d had in five years, and I almost cried at the expression on her face: ecstatic disbelief, like it was too good to be real.
    You didn’t start stripping because you wanted to. You did it because you couldn’t do anything else.
    The problem with making money was that once I had a little bit of it, I wanted more. There were so many things that I could pay for, if only I could make more money: my one brother’s medication, my other brother’s baseball uniform, a new chest freezer to replace the one that broke. I realized pretty quickly that there was an upper limit on how much money I could make if I stayed in the boonies and worked at a third-rate hole-in-the-wall strip club. It didn’t take long for the shine to wear off, and then I started dreaming of bigger and better things.
    And then my sister got into college, and dreaming turned into planning.
    I didn’t even know that she had applied until she came to me with the acceptance letter: admission to Tech with enough financial aid to cover her tuition, and I was so proud I could have cried.
    “Don’t tell Daddy,” she said, the two of us sitting at the little kitchen table, alone in the house for once—the boys still at school, and our parents gone down the road to the store. “I know I can’t go. I just wanted to—I don’t know. I guess prove to myself that I could do it.”
    “Of course you can go,” I said, even though I’d been counting on her getting a job to help out. “I’ll kick your ass if you don’t. Cece, don’t stay here for the rest of your life.”
    “But you need help,” she said. “You can’t do this alone.”
    “I can do it,” I said stubbornly. “We’ll be fine.”
    She looked down at the letter again. “I can’t afford it anyway. I’d have to buy books, and food, and find a place to live, and—”
    “We’ll make it happen,” I said.
    That was why I moved to New York. Looking back, it was a stupid decision, and I wasn’t prepared, and there were definitely