Taking the Score(4)

Uh, nope.

“I’m—I’m—I’m very organized.”

He stared. “Organized?”

She arced her gaze over the office, taking in his ugly monstrosity of a desk, the bank of monitors for the floor and private rooms, and the leopard-skin sofa. Probably real leopard, the prick. Not a paper out of place.

“If you need someone to do your books, I have a degree in business.” She didn’t, but the lie had wangled her the job at Score Property. Lying had always been easy, coming from her own family of scumbags.

“We’re all accounted for.” He shifted in his seat as if he was…oh, shit, trying to accommodate a hard-on. He couldn’t possibly be ready for more after he had just had his dick tickling Kelly’s tonsils, could he?

“I can smile more, show more skin, whatever it takes,” she said quickly, working to keep the panic out of her voice. Sex was the currency at Club Girl, so upping her game was imperative. Maybe she could borrow a push-up bra from one of the girls, stuff it with tissues and use them later when she bawled her eyes out.

“By the end of the night, the customers are going to love me.”

Ray knuckle-rapped the desk. “That’s right, Emma. They will.”





Chapter Three

The muddy red stain on the carpet compelled Brody’s focus. A whiskey spill? Dried blood? Some other weird fluid his imagination refused to shape? And Flynn thought this place was classy. If this was what the VIP lounge looked like, Brody shuddered to think what the other areas of the club had to offer. Just one more nod to the tired nature of this entire enterprise: the girls, the decor, the utility of strip clubs in general. Not to get overly philosophical, but was this really supposed to represent the evolution of a capitalist market? Women selling a flash of T & A to drooling apes? He didn’t get it at all, and yet here he was doing his part for the adult entertainment economy.

God bless America.

“You look like you could do with a bit of fun, Brody,” Smythe-Osborne said for what had to be the forty-seventh time tonight. He clinked his glass of Macallan eighteen-year against Brody’s and raised it to his lips. Fifty bucks on the tab right there. Rather than think about how much this client outing was going to cost him, Brody’s gaze attached to the woman doing a zombie corpse dance around a pole that would probably give you an STD if you touched it.

A petri pole.

Christ. How in the hell had this happened?

One minute, Emma was serving oolio or whatever that fancy tea was called in his office as Brody tried to nail Smythe-“call me Nigel, mate”-Osborne on a timeline for the Crown Point development bid. Next, he was bar-crawling through Rush Street, introducing S-O to the seedy underbelly of Chicago nightlife, and had finally ended up in a strip club. But not just any strip club. The one Flynn had recommended.

Brody had opened up his wallet to pay for the client’s $200 steak dinner and found the card along with a brand-new condom. Cherry flavored. Flynn’s sleight of hand was a thing of beauty. Brody had no idea how the asshole managed to get hold of his wallet whenever he damn well pleased. Guy could give Penn & Teller a run for their money.

All night, through each bar he’d hit with S-O, the card had taunted him. Club Girl—Where Fantasies Become Reality. Not especially imaginative, as he doubted anything remotely in the same zip code as fantasy occurred here. Even calling it a “strip club” was wishful. The restrictive Illinois laws prohibited full nudity in the presence of alcohol—or alcohol in the presence of nipples. Whatever, it meant that he was about to get pretty damn drunk, reamed of great wads of cash, and would be lucky if a nipple made an appearance. The girls on stage were wearing those weird pasties that looked like Band-Aids along with boy shorts that weren’t nearly revealing enough.

They also looked miserable. No way in hell was Brody getting a listless lap dance from one of these women.

“So what do you say, Brody?” S-O said, his tongue practically flopping all over the stage. “Lappy for two?”

“All you, Nigel. Think I’ll sit this one out.”

Nigel laughed, a braying donkey sound that stepped on Brody’s last nerve. “Sit this one out. Cracking, mate. Absolutely cracking.” A slight turn of his head was enough to make a skimpily dressed woman materialize.

“You want dance?” Blond and fit, she had an Eastern European accent and the downtrodden look of a woman who grew up on a farm and probably thought mucking out the pig trough would be a more tantalizing prospect. Brody was with her on this.

“Sure, love,” Nigel said. “Lay it on me.”

“You like private room? Can do all nude. And touch.” She ran her hands down her hips, previewing what Nigel could do if he was willing to pony up the green. Likely Brody’s green.

“Let’s start out here and see how the night goes. Got a bird for my friend?”

“Yes. I get friend.” Following her gaze to the bar, Brody found a number of women lined up like a horseflesh market in Lubbock. “You choose?”

He shook his head and laughed off the offer. “I’m just here for immoral support.”

But his eyes were already straying back to the lineup because something—someone—had caught his eye.

A pair of stellar toned legs that traveled miles and joined a perfectly heart-shaped ass peeking out of shiny red shorts. She wore one of those tops that tied around her neck, also red, that had him dreaming of unknotting the bow and peeling it down. Dark waves of lush hair around her shoulders and touchable porcelain skin completed the fantasy. And she had…hot damn, a tattoo. He couldn’t quite make it out, but it was something vibrant and animalistic along her spine, snaking into the border of her shorts, trailing a path his hand itched to follow. He had still only seen her from the back, but if her breasts were anywhere near as perfect as the rest of her, sign him up.

The rest of the Club Girl harem stood face front, displaying their wares, but this hot little number refused to follow suit. A nonconformist stripper. He liked that.

Was he drunk enough to do this? Just a little harmless fun. See if his dick worked around a half-naked bad girl instead of the fully clothed good girl back at his office. Get his mind off Ms. Strickland for a few minutes.

“I want her,” he said to the blonde. “Lady in red.”

…

As soon as Ray had demanded she up the payments on Daisy’s debt by upping the sex quotient, Emma had balked. Give lap dances to the sweaty, leering assholes who wouldn’t know a “touching on hips only” rule if it slapped them with a flogger? N to the O. But when Ray made it clear with a look that Daisy might not make it ’til dawn with her face unscarred, she had reassessed her options—and made a plan.

Emma wasn’t a complete ogre, but no way could she compete with the other dancers. They were fake-tanned with legs up to their fake-lashed eyeballs and surgically enhanced where it counted. In the opposing corner, there was Emma. So pale it would take a week in the sun to go from blue to white, her petite-sized jeans usually in need of further hemming, and most definitely all natural in the boob department. Which would have been awesome if there was anything to cup. Granted, she wasn’t pancaking it, but she wasn’t giving those grasping eyes much to work with, either.

There was an excellent chance she could survive this night without anyone requesting her as-yet-untested lap dance services. Piece of cake.

But as the night wore on and Emma shrank closer to the bar, trying to become one with the wood—and not the woodies of the clientele—she was struck by two conclusions: no one had asked her for a lap dance. Mission accomplished. But as she was no longer serving tables, she was earning no tips and her debt to Ray plunged deeper and deeper.

Not such a great plan after all.

Close to one in the morning and a new wave of clients had stumbled in, raucous, drunk, possibly desperate enough to overlook her obvious shortcomings in the exotic dancer department. If one of them asked for a little gyrating, dry-humping action, then she would close her eyes, hold her breath, and think of the double chocolate cupcakes she couldn’t afford.

“You ready to work?” Katarina leaned in where Emma stood at the bar. “I have customer for you.”

“Someone picked me?” She shuddered to think what kind of man would choose her when the full complement of Club Girl was available for their dirty dancing needs. Some freak who liked ’em pasty.

“Yes. Lap dance in VIP section.”

Oh, God, the only thing worse than a lap dance in front of a crowd of handsy customers was a close-to-private lap dance in the roped-off VIP lounge. Technically the clients weren’t supposed to touch beyond a light grip of the dancer’s hips, but everyone knew that it didn’t stop there. And those guys could always afford the private rooms, so if it went well—double shudder—then it could escalate quickly. In the privacy of the seedy rooms, a dancer was expected to strip and make it worth the premium fee. A hundred and fifty dollars before tip for a private show lasting ten minutes.

More than the going rate for a high-priced street hooker.

But it would go some way to making a dent in that debt. All she had to do was take off the sparkly halter lent to her by Katerina. Maybe her hot pants…