Read Burn 2 for Free Online Page B

like a comfort fuck. Besides, she is paying him. And with Abby gone, he’d best find a way to pay his own legal bills after he has borrowed a chunk of money from Billy Dee.
    “OK,” he concedes.
    “Good.” She gets up abruptly. “Let’s go to my place.”

 
F IRST
     
    “I don’t want to talk,” Abby says to her father. She is on her feet and all her senses are on alert. Her fists are clenched and she is ready to fight for her life if she has to.
    Her father suddenly looks lined and old. His shoulders slump and his huge body takes on a weary cast.
    “I don’t want to fight, Abby. I don’t want to hurt you. I have never hurt you intentionally, and I never will.”
    Her whole body is shaking. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore.”
    “Abby . . . what you saw . . . ”
    “I saw enough! I don’t want to be your daughter anymore! I want it in legal writing.”
    “Your grandfather – ”
    “Left me my own money, so I don’t need yours.”
    Maybe she doesn’t even need the money. It’s blood money. She will make her own way without their damned, blood-tainted money, thank you very much.
    Then she thinks of Devon and she knows it isn’ t that easy to just walk away from all that money.
    “That money was made the old-fashioned way,” her father insists. “Through your grandfather’s sweat and tears, and with mine.”
    “Yes, but he had a head start, and so did you.”
    “It was necessary. When we left the old country, we had nowhere to go.”
    Abby shakes her head vehemently. “It isn’t where you chose to go, Dad. It’s what you chose to do after you came here. You and Granddad both – for goodness knows how long.”
    Can one divorce their own family? She will have to ask Pat Chalmers about that.
    “Abby.” Her father’s tone is sad.
    But she cannot forget what she saw. What she found out. That was the day she made up her mind to run away.
    That was the day she tried to burn the house down.
     
    *
     
    Abigail Holt was an eighteen-year-old in a family that was anything but normal.
    The Holts were extremely rich, for one. In their sprawling Lousiana lands which surrounded and infringed upon the bayou, they planted sugarcane and owned the sugar refining factories to package them for import to other states. Sugar was a government controlled item by both price and production, and the Holts were one of the privileged families to be in the sugar consortium, which comprises of only a handful of companies.
    Abby grew up on the bayou, where the weather can get so warm and sultry that she is reduced to wearing only shorts and flip-flops in the summer. Living in and around the swamps, she learned to avoid waters that looked like they have alligators in them, to always look out for snakes which liked to sun themselves on warm decks, and to always put on a mosquito screen before going outdoors.
    The Holts lived in a big plantation-style home outside New Orleans in one of the little towns that dot the low-lying landscape. Abby’s particular town was called Cat’s Creek. Her family gave jobs to most of the people in Cat’s Creek. Their sugar refineries provided employment, and the entire town of Cat’s Creek grew around these refineries – eateries, boarding houses, grocery stores, launderettes.
    The Holts owned so many properties in Cat’s Creek and New Orleans that Abby didn’t even know the half of them.
    But she knew this one.
    It was a snug little log cabin built on stilts by the bayou. The bayou’s water was murky, and the cabin had a dock which extended out into the shallows of it. The humidity was as thick as the molasses Hattie, her housekeeper, used to flavor their Cajun-style dishes.
    Abby liked to visit this unoccupied house now and again. It belonged to her grandfather, who sometimes kept his guests up here for a ‘bayou experience’. Sometimes, Abby came here to push the boat out onto the bayou, where she would engage in a little spot of fishing and being by