“He didn’t want any of the other girls. He came back two other nights after that, always tipping heavily and asking me to have a drink with him. On the third night, I said no, went to my dressing room and started taking off my makeup. I was the last girl to leave. The others were all in a rush to go out that night and I was just going home to study so I took my time. At one point, I had this feeling I wasn’t alone and I turned around and there he was—Alexander,” she qualified. “Just standing there.”
His gaze narrowed. “How did he get past the bouncers?”
She grimaced. “I found out later he’d bribed Bruno, my manager, to make them look the other way. I don’t know what Alexander had on Bruno to make him do that—Bruno was a big gambler, he owed people a lot of money so maybe that was it. Anyway,” she said, waving a hand, “I was shocked, totally thrown. I told him to get out. He completely ignored me.”
“Then what?” Jared growled.
“He propositioned me.”
“What do you mean propositioned you?”
“He offered me fifty thousand dollars to sleep with him.”
A dangerous glimmer entered his eyes. “For one night?”
“Yes.”
“What happened when you turned him down?”
Her fingers tightened around her glass. “He told me everyone has a price. To name mine. I told him to get the hell out again and this time he did.”
“And that was it?”
“He came back two more nights to see if I’d changed my mind. I never saw him after that.”
“Jesus—Bailey—” He stood up and paced to the fire. Raked his hands through his hair. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you?” She gave him a disbelieving look. “You, the man who just wrote a manifesto about how women belong in the bedroom, not the boardroom? You have to be joking.”
“Oh for God’s sake, you know that doesn’t apply to you.” He gave his head a shake. “What did he say to you on the yacht? You looked shaken.”
“He realized that nobody knows. That I’ve hidden my past.”
“And?”
She shook her head. “You interrupted us then.”
His gaze sharpened on her face. “You can’t run away from the past forever. It always catches up with you.”
Her mouth twisted. “So I should just tell everyone I was a stripper? Get it out of the way? I have worked my entire life to put my past behind me, Jared. I’m not ashamed of what I did. But others will judge me. ‘Jared Stone’s chief marketing officer—former stripper.’ How do you think that will go over?”
He was silent. Because she was right.
“He still wants you,” he muttered after a long moment. “He wants to win. That much is clear.”
Bailey felt her past close like a noose around her neck. Finally it had caught up with her. She’d always thought it might. But did it have to be now? Right at the moment she’d thought she just might rise above it?
Tears of frustration singed the back of her eyes. She drained the rest of her wine and set the glass on the ground. “I am now a liability,” she said quietly. “You need to take me out of this presentation, Jared. Eliminate me from the equation. You know it and I know it.”
Blue eyes tangled with darker blue. The flicker in his was almost indiscernible, but she didn’t miss it. The acknowledgment that she was right.
“Pull me out,” she repeated dully, getting to her feet. “It’s the right thing to do.”
And then she walked away before she bawled her eyes out.
Jared watched Bailey go, so dumbstruck by what she’d just told him he was actually incapable of pursuing. She’d been a high-end stripper in Vegas. She had taken her clothes off for total strangers every night, pocketed scads of money and put herself through school with it.
The idea of Bailey putting herself on display like that, letting men drool over her like that, was so far-fetched it was almost laughable. He would have laughed if he wasn’t so appalled. Here he’d been picturing her selling shoes at the local mall to put herself through school. Making cappuccinos at the local café…instead she’d been balling up the cash men shoved in her G-string to survive and sacrificing her innocence along with it.
Dear God. And then there was the image of Bailey dancing in expensive lingerie on a stage that wouldn’t leave his head…how many men had gotten off seeing her like that? And why did that idea torture him?
He went for the whiskey then, because quite honestly, he didn’t know what else to do. A sixteen-year-old Lagavulin he found in the lounge would do the trick. Might help wipe from his head the look on Bailey’s face when he’d tossed that file into the fire and forced her hand.