Chapter Five

Rio

What the fuck? I stared at Bryn as the reality of this sank in. She was topless. In a strip club. Walking toward our table. Or she had been until she saw me. Holy hell.

“Hello, boys,” another female voice said, but I couldn’t focus on her or anything other than an almost-naked Bryn standing a few feet from me.

Drake was speaking now, but I wasn’t paying attention. Why was Bryn here, dressed like that? She had to work here. In a motherfucking strip club. Was there nothing of the girl I had once known left inside her?

A massive brick wall of a man with dreadlocks and tattoos appeared at her side then, and she swung her gaze up to him. He was touching her back. She wasn’t wearing any damn clothes, and he was touching her. I felt my hands fist at my sides as my blood began to simmer from rage.

What had happened to her over the years? She was nothing like the girl I had known.

Bryn was smiling again and saying something to the man, but he looked our way and didn’t look convinced. Then, his eyes found me watching them, and I met his steady glare head-on. What was she telling him? Was she dating him? He was a damn bouncer at a strip club.

She moved then and began walking toward me—or us. She didn’t look my way again, but I watched her as she walked up to Benji, Drake’s brother, who we were here for, celebrating his graduation from college. Benji lifted his eyes to her—or her tits.

Had she really sunk so damn low that she had no problem with using her body to make money? I was torn between being disgusted with her and being turned on. I hated that I was attracted to her at all. She was just like her sister. Maybe worse.

“I’m Angel,” I heard her say.

Then, Benji said something that I couldn’t make out with the noise, and she laughed. It was an excellent fake laugh. No one else here would know it was fake. No one but me. I had once thought she reminded me of an angel. How ironic that she went by that name now that the girl I’d once known no longer existed.

“Hey, sugar. You look familiar,” Drake said then, and her gaze swung to mine only briefly before she lifted a shoulder and gave him a small laugh.

“I have one of those f-faces,” she replied.

Drake laughed. “No, babe, you don’t. Those tits might have me proposing after a few drinks. Go ahead and start thinking about your answer.”

Unable to handle any more, I stood up abruptly, shoving my chair back as I did so. Bryn’s eyes swung to me. I could see the uncertainty there, and damn it, I wanted to wrap her up and take her out of here. I wasn’t sure what made me angrier. Her working here or my giving a fuck what she did.

“We need to talk,” I said to her.

The other server was there then, standing in front of Bryn. She was smiling at me in a way that was supposed to distract me, I was sure, but she wasn’t a part of our history.

“Ah, the girls on the floor just serve the drinks and food. If you want anything more, we do have a couple dancers here tonight that offer that kind of thing.” She winked at me.

“Bryn,” I said her name, needing her to say something.

“Oh fuck,” Drake said, realizing who she was now that I had said her name.

Bryn touched the other girl’s shoulder and whispered something to her, but the other server didn’t look happy about it. In fact, she was now glaring at me with a warning.

“This way,” Bryn said to me and turned, walking toward the door we had entered through.

I followed her, getting a view of how bare her ass was in the tiny bottoms she was wearing. She might as well be naked. I had guessed Bryn’s body was nice under her conservative clothing, but I had never imagined this. And damn if she wasn’t out, making money with it.

Where had the girl I knew gone? How had she changed so completely?

First, she’d bashed the fuck out of my Jeep, and now, this. It felt like losing someone. As if the girl from my past that I had cared about so deeply had died.

She stopped at the bar and spoke in a whisper to the tattooed bartender-slash-bouncer. He scowled at me, as if he was thinking of tossing me out. Bryn said something to him that made him look at her instead of me, and he shook his head, then pointed toward a red door far away from the entertainment.

When she looked back at me, she said, “Come on,” then started walking in that direction.

She didn’t say more or look back to see if I was following her. Instead, she kept walking until we were through the red door to a much quieter area that was empty. Bryn walked over to yet another door, then glanced back at me.

“W-w-wait here,” she said.

I stood there, battling internally about my reaction to this. Why do I care? She had beaten my Jeep up. I’d fired her from the market. It wasn’t as if I had kept up with her after that. I hadn’t wanted to see her. Now, she was here, serving drinks, naked, and I suddenly gave a shit.

Bryn emerged, wrapped in a black leather jacket that was too large to be hers, hanging halfway down her thighs. Having her covered up should have calmed me down and helped me focus, but knowing it belonged to a man just made this worse.

She squared her shoulders and looked directly at me this time. “You c-c-came with a g-g-g-group. We are short-staffed, an-an-and until Demi gets here, I c-c-can’t leave Trix with the entire g-g-g-gr-group. I’ll stay a-a-a-away from you-you-your end of the t-t-table. That’s all I can d-do for now.”

She thought this was about my not wanting her to wait on us. Part of it was because I didn’t want my friends seeing her naked. Knowing they were all going to use her body in their next spank session pissed me the fuck off. And it shouldn’t. That made me even angrier. Bryn wasn’t mine and had never been mine. Even when we had been younger, she’d just been the girl I was fascinated with and determined to protect. But never mine.

“I can’t believe you’re working here,” I said. “What happened to you, Bryn? You take a damn steel pole to my Jeep like an insane person, and now, you’re serving men drinks, topless, with your ass barely covered. Is this how you had the money that you kept leaving with Hazel to give to me?”

Starting six months ago, every two weeks, Hazel would give me an envelope with my name written on the front and five hundred dollars in cash inside. She told me Bryn had dropped it off as payment for the Jeep. After she gave me two thousand, I refused any more, as my deductible had been met. Three months ago, when Bryn had arrived with another envelope, Hazel had given it back to her and relayed the message that she had paid me enough.

Anger flashed in her eyes, and she let out a hard, cynical laugh. A laugh that made me feel as if I were wrong about something when she was the one who was wrong. She was the one doing things that were fucked up.

“It’s been six m-m-months. Six months since you sp-sp-spoke to me. Six months since you fired m-m-me. And you are going to st-st-stand here and ju-ju-judge me because I work at a strip c-club? What d-d-does it matter how I p-p-paid you back?”

If I had been ready to respond to that, I wouldn’t have had time because Bryn didn’t pause but for a second.

“The Shores is a small t-t-town, and there wasn’t an e-e-employer willing to hire me after the incident with your J-J-Jeep. We needed m-m-m-money if we were going to live. I was tired of not having enough. I came here. I don’t have to answer to y-y-you. Now, if you would like me not to serve your table, that is f-f-fine. I didn’t br-br-bring you back here for you to judge me or talk about things. I brought you back here for m-m-my privacy, n-n-n-not yours.”

I hadn’t considered folks in town would hear about my Jeep and not hire Bryn. “Pops would’ve given you a good recommendation if someone had called him,” I said.

“He did,” she replied, looking me in the eyes.

“Then, why didn’t they hire you? It couldn’t have been because of my Jeep.”

She had placed blame at my door, and I didn’t like it. I was going to make it clear that her reasons for working here weren’t because of me.

“They did hire me. I’m here n-n-now. Look, I need to get back on th-the f-f-floor. Trix can’t handle it alone. If you are okay with m-m-me serving your table until another server arrives, then that’s all w-w-we need to di-discuss.”

That was fine with me. We didn’t need to discuss anything. She was nothing to me anymore. She hadn’t been for a long time. She shrugged off the jacket, and her body was bare again. Problem with my damn head was, if she was nothing to me, then why was my need to get her covered up and out of this place so fucking strong?

She was right. I hadn’t spoken to or seen her in six months. Which was hard to do in a small town like The Shores. But the two weeks she had worked with me, I had barely spoken to her then either. She reminded me of a life I wanted to forget. I’d wanted to help her when she needed a job, but I had also wanted to keep her at a distance. But that didn’t mean I wanted to see her working at a place like this. Yes, she had the face of a fucking angel, and seeing her topless, serving men drinks for money, broke the halo that I had once assumed hovered invisibly over her head.

“If I get you another job, one in town, will you quit?” I asked her as she started for the door.

She stopped walking but didn’t look back at me. “I want n-n-n-nothing from you.” Then, she went to the door and opened it, stepping back to wait for me to leave before her.

I stood there and looked at her. She was in there somewhere. The girl I’d once known. The girl I had put on a damn pedestal for years. No matter what life had done to her and how she had changed because of the damage, this was not okay.

But who was I to stop her?

The girl two trailers over that I had wanted to protect and save was in the past. Just like my life back then was not something I thought about. This woman in front of me was what had become of a child who had been abused and neglected. It was too late for me to save her now. The damage had been done. Bryn hadn’t been taken from that world like I had. She was broken in ways that couldn’t be fixed.

Life had changed her, and I needed to accept it.