"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

her hand on the purse’s leather strap before she realized what she was going for:
those Pall Malls, now open, luring her with an ever-so-tantalizing memory of their
taste.
Fala dropped the purse strap and closed her eyes. Smoking was one of her
many legacies from Preston. Smoking and fingernail biting and the inability to trust.
She thought she’d been hurt by her divorce, but it turned out her only mistake
had been marrying much too young. Her ex-husband had been more of a support
than she had expected during the long years of her post-Preston recovery. Her ex
hadn’t been interested in rekindling the romance, but he had taught her the meaning
of friendship, and it had been a valuable lesson.
It enabled her to work with the Club now, to make choices that benefited
everyone, and to interact on an equal level.
She hadn’t been able to do that at any other job. After Preston, she never
believed her employer would stick around; she always asked why she had to sign a
particular paper or how come she was the only one assigned to a certain task.
Like all those others touched by the hand of Preston Lidner, she ended up
damaged in ways she couldn’t completely comprehend.
At first, the Club had no idea how to proceed. At first, they weren’t even a
club. They didn’t have a name or an organization or a meeting room. They didn’t
even live in the same town.
Fala put them together. She figured a group of women, ten strong, could do
anything they wanted to. The first thing they did, before they even met, was find
more women. In little more than five years, at a minimum of four scams a year,
Preston had ruined the lives of more than twenty sweet young things.
Fala wasn’t sure what they could do. She had envisioned all the sweet young
things finding Preston and making him pay, a kind of all-women’s detective agency.
But it was Tess who figured out what their mission had to be.
Under Preston’s guidance, they had hurt hundreds of families. It became the
mission of the Club to help those families heal.
Soon, though, they realized they couldn’t help the actual families heal. Some
of the hurt was years in the past; people had disappeared, lives had ended. Instead,
Tess said, they had to help others in need, figure out a way to provide transitional
housing, cheap mortgages, and easy credit.
The Club couldn’t do any of that while its own members were having trouble,
and so the first focus became reassembling their own lives. Fala came up with a way
to do that. The women switched apartments with each other—all of them subletting
in different cities, places where they weren’t known, where their faces hadn’t been
plastered all over the nightly news.
They got jobs, then they got education—the real kind, not Pres-ton’s
kind—and then they went to work.
And it would have stayed like that if it weren’t for one thing.
While on a business trip to Las Vegas, Tess and Fala ran into Preston Lidner.
****
Fala made her appointment with Herbert, Steinman, and Wilkes for nine A.M.
She stopped at the pawnshop on her way in, placing a sign on the door, delaying her
opening hour until eleven. Not that anyone would stop, but just in case.
She wanted everything to look legit.
Because she was trying to stay in character as she dressed up, she wore a
black leather mini, her red bustier, and a man’s white dress shirt tied at her waist.
She wore black high-heeled sandals, and painted her toenails red. She pressed on