“You want a private dance, baby?” I asked the first guy I came close to, sitting alone at a rounded banquette against the wall and nursing a highball. He looked like an average joe, just what I needed after the overheated exchange with Dom. Who passed right behind me as I stood there, passing his palm over both cheeks of my ass, giving one side a good squeeze before moving along. I turned my head to watch his back as he walked on. He didn’t bother looking back at me.
Unfortunately, I noticed that several others were looking at me; they’d seen the exchange, and they were watching us. A couple of the girls looked at me accusingly: my best friend, Asia, with alarm in her eyes; two of the big bad biker dudes; and Mr. Sleazy-Ass Bossman himself, Joey Ronn, who narrowed his eyes with suspicion and pursed his fat lips in distaste.
Uh oh. I guessed the jig was up. They’d caught on that there was something going on between me and Hot Dom. And nobody seemed to like it.
Working girls are not supposed to enjoy the work. But seriously? With a man as smokin’ as Dom, how is a woman supposed to pretend not to like it? If only all the clientele were as hot as he was, this would be every woman’s dream job.
The job really wasn’t that bad most of the time. I got to dance to good music and take the joes to the cleaners for their cash. I didn’t have to whore myself; no happy endings were required by management, and there was a strict hands-off policy for the back rooms. If a guy crossed the line, we only had to hit a button for security to come and enforce the rules.
Plus, I made great money—way more than I could earn doing some lame-ass gig at minimum wage. That’s why I brought Tania into the club, too, so we could double our intake and get ourselves stockpiled with a solid cushion for opening our dream shop and living the life: two sisters making good and doing well, no man necessary, thank you very much. But that was before Tan got in over her head, before Joey the fucking sister-killer took advantage of her.
The way I figured it, Dom was my reward for time served. I should consider myself lucky that Joey Ronn let his biker-brute security force partake in the offerings of us dancers once per shift, and they had to pay or no-go; but if they wanted it, they could get it. It was good for business, all around. Dom got me through a shift better than any cocktail slipped my way from one of the bartenders. If not for him, my patience would have worn too thin, and I’d probably be either in jail or dead. I needed to play my cards right so I could get to Joey without his goon bikers hovering all about, ready to kill or be killed to save his sorry ass.
The irony was that Dom was one of them. FML, right? That the one man who made my day better was one of the brutes who was protecting the bane of my existence.
But that didn’t matter so much. What mattered was that I was figuring out my plan, and I was getting close to having enough put away to live that dream—minus my goddamned stupid sister. I missed her like crazy, but she should have known better than to get messed up in Joey Ronn’s porno scheme. She wasn’t known for her great decision-making skills. But even if she wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, she was still my little sis, and she did not deserve what he did to her. And there was no way I was going to let him just get away with it.
As it was, I still needed more time and more money. So, I needed distraction, and Dom fit the bill perfectly. He was the regular that I was always looking for. The one that brightened the shift, when and if he’d show up. And I was pretty sure he knew it. But now it looked like everyone else knew it, too. This was not a good thing. Fuckity fuck.
“Yo, Sienna, come over here.” Shit. Mr. Ronn called to me, his voice grating with nasal resonance.
He was sitting in a booth in his shiny suit with his hair slicked back, pompadour-style, as if he were the king of some bad ’70s porno palace. Which, I guessed, he kinda was.
Across the table sat another regular who always got the VIP treatment, so he must have been someone important, but I had no idea really who or what he was. Well, I knew a few things: his name was apparently Jonathan Fielding (though I’d bet good money that was made up), and he insisted on us always calling him “Mr. F.” He got some kind of sick kick out of it, but he was the only one in on the joke. He was tall, slim, attractive in that eastern Mediterranean American way, like Turkish or Greek or something, who knew? He had deep-set brown eyes, a shaved head, closely cropped goatee, and wore glasses for that very cool, intelligent, successful air. He definitely had style, and he radiated power and money. A lot of the girls acted like stupid butterflies around him, and he always seemed to bask in his own glory, accepting their attentions like he was a born prince. I could see their attraction to him, but I never felt it myself. There was something off, a shadiness that always made me uncomfortable. Not to mention the cold sneer that he threw around most of the time. My alarm bells rang off the hook every time he came around.