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I SHOVED THE MAN OUT the door and he turned back to me angrily.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “I was just dancing with her—”
“And I’m just telling you to leave,” I snarled at him. It had been one thing seeing her dancing with that other guy, but as soon as I had seen this one come up to her and start trying to put the moves on her, something had snapped within me and I’d known I’d needed to do something to get in the middle of it. I could see the way she had tensed up at once, as though she wanted him away from her sooner rather than later, and I hadn’t been able to just take my hands off the wheel and let him do whatever he wanted to her.
He had been trying to buy time with her away from the floor, the same way I had when we first met. Maybe there was something of myself that I could see in that guy, and that’s why he annoyed me so much, because I knew there was no way he would back off until he got what he wanted.
“Just leave,” I told him again, but he straightened up and glared at me, suddenly full of righteous anger he should have been aiming at anyone other than me.
“I’m going back in there, and I’m getting what I—”
Before he could get another word out, I swung my fist towards him, the crack as it connected with his jaw enough to make him crumple to the ground like a wet paper bag. He hit the street hard, on his knees, and let out a long, pained groan of discomfort.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” he demanded.
“Don’t come back here,” I told him, and I walked back inside the club, shaking out my hand where a shock of pain was filling my knuckles. I couldn’t believe I had just done that, not really – couldn't believe I had dared take a swing for someone like that, when I could have left it to security and hoped for the best.
But there was something about seeing him with her that rubbed me the wrong way, and I knew I would have been stupid not to do something about it. I was meant to be staying out of trouble, and I knew this guy could press an assault charge if he wanted to, but I doubted he would be stupid enough to see that through. He knew I would just turn it around on him and say that he had been acting inappropriately with one of the members of staff, and there wouldn’t have been anything he could do to disprove it.
I headed back to the office, doing my best to ignore the sight of Nadia as I did so. She was peering at me, I could feel it, but there was no way I wanted to talk to her about what had just happened. I would have had to explain, then, why I had felt the need to intervene with her over anyone else in this place, and I didn’t much feel like coming clean as to why she seemed to hold such a different place inside my head than the rest of the girls here.
I worked the rest of the night, keeping myself busy, hoping that guy wouldn’t come back and cause any more trouble. He struck me as the type who wanted to try and get what he could from the girls here, knowing they couldn’t turn him down. I doubted he had much luck with women outside of this club; maybe this was the only place he knew for sure that he would be able to find someone who would give him the time of day. It was kind of pathetic, when I thought of it like that, but I wasn’t in a place where I could judge our guests. We just had to keep them coming through the door, and make sure they kept believing they had a chance with the women that we had around here.
I got why he had gone for Nadia. There was something about her that stood out from everyone else here, even if I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it yet. I supposed it was something to do with that dance background of hers, the way she carried herself, a certain elegance that seemed to demand this kind of focus and attention nobody else out there could command. Even as I tried to stay focused on work, I found my mind tipping back towards her, the way her body had moved as she danced with that first man.
The way her eyes had stayed on mine, as though she couldn’t imagine looking at anyone else at all.
I couldn’t help but wish it had been me in front of her, dancing up on her, held close by her. When I had hit her up the first time, I had pretended to be a customer, and I had gotten away with doing just that, and God, it had been thrilling having her so close to me. Thrilling in a way I couldn’t quite put into words, though I had long searched for a way to do so. Maybe that was why I was giving her a chance to come back and do more work for me to pay off the debt, even though I knew I should have been going after that money above all else.
The evening wore on, and eventually, I heard things start to quiet outside. I was about to go check how things were looking, but before I could, the door opened, and I found Nadia standing right in front of me.
“I’m done for the night,” she told me. She wasn’t asking for permission to go home, she was telling me, straight-up, that she was done with all of this and wanted to leave. There was no way I was going to be able to argue with her.
“All right,” I replied, closing the book I had been making notes in. “What tips did you make tonight?”
She pulled a bunch of money from a pocket under her dress, and placed it in front of me, not saying a word. It was a decent amount. I reached across the table and took it, tucking it into a drawer under the desk.
“Thank you,” I replied. “Is that all?”
She stared at me.
“Of course it is,” she replied. “You think I’m keeping more from you?”
“You could be,” I replied, and I leaned back in my seat, looked her up and down. In all honesty, there weren’t many places she could be hiding any extra cash if she actually was at all.
She glared at me for a long moment. It had been a long night for her, that much was clear, and I wasn’t surprised she was hardly delighted at the way I was talking to her right now. But still – she reached for her heels, and pulled them off, planting them on the table in front of me.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m showing you that I don’t have any more money on me,” she replied, bluntly. “I’m not a thief.”
“You don’t—”
Before I could stop her, she reached up to her hair, pulled it out of the ponytail it had been in all night, and shook it loose, running her hands through it so it fell over her shoulders. She didn’t take her eyes off me the entire time. I could feel something, as much as I tried to ignore it, warming up inside of me, something heating, slowly, dangerously, towards a conclusion.
She turned around, reached for the zip on the side of her dress, and pulled it down. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, even though I knew I should have.
She pushed the dress away from her body, and I watched as it fell to the floor. Underneath her clothes, she was even more strikingly beautiful than she was before. I knew she would never in a million years have agreed to work as a stripper for this place, but if she had wanted to... damn, she could have made a mint. Her body was strong, lithe, lean, athletic, her legs shapely, her waist and hips curved to that perfectly womanly degree. She glanced over her shoulder at me, her eyes blazing as they locked onto mine once more.
“Good enough?” she asked. I didn’t reply. She looked so furious at me in that moment that I was sure she would have done anything she could to try and make me understand that she hadn’t taken anything from me. I wanted to tell her to stop, but there was a part of me, a far stronger part of me, that needed her to keep going so I could see the entirety of her gorgeous body.
“Fine,” she snapped when I didn’t reply, and she reached behind herself to grab hold of the hooks of her bra – she was about to undo them, when I suddenly came to my senses.
“You don’t need to do that,” I told her. It went against everything in my head to deny her the right to keep going, but I knew there was no way I would be able to look myself in the mirror if I allowed her to strip herself completely down like that. She was just... just so tempting, so delicate and delicious, right there in front of me, that it took a whole lot in the way of restraint to stop myself.
She grabbed her dress and pulled it back on, and I averted my eyes, figuring it was the polite thing to do given that she had pretty much just stripped in my office. I hoped she understood that I trusted her not to go stealing from me – I knew she must have been seriously pissed to pull something like that, but she didn’t need to get naked in front of me to prove that I could trust her.
She turned back to me once she had done up the zip on her side once more, and wrapped her arms around herself protectively.
“What now?” she asked. She was wondering, I could tell, if she had gotten the job or not, and I knew there was no way I could deny it to her.
“Keep dancing, come in here any evening you can,” I replied. “And organize sessions for the girls to teach them. Okay?”
“Okay,” she replied. That was the closest I was going to come to telling her that I wanted to take the deal she had offered me, and she knew it – the relief was written all over her face. And I wanted to make sure she walked out of here more certain than ever that she had made the right choice.
“Come here,” I told her, and she stepped over to the desk, looking nervous.
“What is it?”
I pulled out a thick stack of cash from my desk and pushed it over to her. She frowned.
“What’s this for?”
“Payment for tonight.”
“But I—”
“Take it.”
She didn’t need telling twice. She grabbed the cash and stuffed it into her bra, and raised her eyebrows at me.
“Is that all?”
“Yeah, that’s all,” I replied. “You can go now.”
Finally, she turned to walk out the door – and I watched as she went, unable to keep the image of her half-naked in my office out of my mind as I did so.
It was going to be tough, having her work here, that was for sure. And I had no clue how I was going to be able to keep my hands off of her now that I had her right where I wanted her.
