Final Justice Read Online Free

he also had a gentle side, holding her after they made love like she was so precious she might break.
    Over and over she wished she could have met Luke instead of Rudy, but Luke had been in the Army, not the Air Force, and he had never been stationed at Patrick Air Force Base on the east coast of Florida. There was no way they could have met at the Sputnik Lounge at Cocoa Beach where she worked as a cocktail waitress. She went there from Tennessee, running away at sixteen, because, after dodging her stepfather's groping hands for years, he had finally crawled in her bed one night and forced her to put her mouth on his thing. When she told her mother, she was accused of lying and got a beating with a belt. Emma Jean realized then things would only get worse and hit the road.
    Broke and desperate, she swiped a purse from an older girl on the bus so she could use her driver's license to get the job at the lounge. All she had to do was keep her thumb over the name while the bookkeeper copied down her birth date.
    The tips were good. She shared the rent on a trailer with two other girls, and life would have been just fine if the customers had kept their hands to themselves. Eddie, her boss, said that if she wanted to keep her job, she'd better grow up and see that's how it was. Things were getting pretty miserable when Rudy came along. Eddie was giving her a hard time, saying he knew she was using a false ID, that she was nowhere near twenty-one, and if she wasn't nice to him, he would turn her in. She was trying to keep him at bay till she could find another job, but then one night, a drunk customer ran his hand up her miniskirt and squeezed her crotch. It made her so mad she smacked him over the head with the tray of cocktails she was carrying. The customer jumped up and grabbed her and started hitting her. That's when Eddie came in yelling she was fired, and right in the middle of it all, Rudy suddenly appeared to come to her rescue and whisk her away.
    Over burgers at an all-night cafe, he told her he'd had an eye on her for the last few nights he'd been coming to the lounge. He said she reminded him of Sandra Dee with her blond hair and blue eyes, but he had held off trying to make a date with her till he could figure out what kind of girl she was. He didn't want somebody cheap, and he won her heart when he confided that his mother had always told him not to date a girl unless she was the kind he might want to marry one day. Emma Jean thought that was sweet. She thought he was sweet, and cute too, even though something about his eyes scared her sometimes.
    His discharge was coming up, so there hadn't been time for much of a courtship, but Emma Jean didn't mind. He said he loved her and wanted her to be his wife and take her home with him to a little Alabama town called Hampton. They got married only two weeks after they met, and Emma Jean still shuddered to think of their wedding night when all the trouble began.
    They had left Florida in Rudy's beat-up Ford pickup truck right after the early morning ceremony at the courthouse in Titusville. Less than an hour up the road Rudy said he couldn't wait any longer to really make her his wife. In the time they had known each other, they hadn't gone beyond tongue-kissing and heavy petting because he said he wanted things to be right. Emma Jean had only felt a teeny bit guilty to let him think she was a virgin, thinking of that time with Johnny Grice back in the ninth grade, a mistake she had tried to put out of her mind.
    When they stopped at a seedy-looking motel, the man at the desk grinned nastily at Rudy for wanting a room in the middle of the day. He made Rudy so mad he yanked the marriage certificate from his pocket and yelled at the man that they were man and wife and, if he didn't wipe that silly smirk off his face, he'd do it for him.
    Emma Jean was so embarrassed. Once they were out of the office, she said that she wished they'd waited till night. Rudy told her to shut up,