Page 1 of Seduced By the Billionaire
Chapter 1
Ronan
The throbbing bass pulsed in his blood, making his fingers tingle, his head aching with the neon intensity of the lights. But Ronan Duffy didn’t mind. There were few things that got his blood pumping these days.
And nothing got him going like she did.
The woman in front of him bent at the waist and laid her hands on his knees, the heavy pendulums of her breasts swinging near his face. She tossed her hair back, split ends brushing his chin. She reeked of strawberries and desperation, the musk of cigarettes and sweat and body spray.
She smiled, revealing wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Late twenties, maybe thirty—but a hard-lived thirty. “I’m Desire. Do you want a dance, baby?”
She was pretty enough, with a narrow waist and thick hips, but Ronan shook his head. “No thanks. I’ve had all the excitement I can handle tonight.”
He tucked a bill into her G-string anyway, carefully keeping his eyes away from the bar. He didn’t need to look at her—the one he was here for. He could picture every plane of her face, the sultry curve of her hips, the way her long, toned legs flexed just-so, when she walked across the club.
That was why he always chose this seat. The light caught her best from this angle. Sometimes, he imagined she was watching him, too, peeking from behind those thick lashes, hazel eyes glittering when she caught sight of him.
Keyword: imagined.
But even if it wasn’t imaginary, he’d never do anything about it. No woman wanted a stalker. And that might be precisely what he was.
The woman—Desire—glanced down at the fifty in her thong, smiled at him again, then trailed her fingers over the stubble on his jaw. “If you change your mind…” Then she was off to the next table, the next sticky chair, the next leering asshole.
Ronan leaned back, fingers laced behind his head. The Velvet Cage contained neither velvet nor cages, just pink vinyl seating surrounding an open stage, a long bar area to the right, a door at the far back that led to a dressing room and the owner’s office.
Sometimes, the owner leaned against the jamb just outside the swinging door, watching the main room with beady, snakelike eyes. One day, Ronan would give that man what was coming to him. But Waylon Pierce was a paranoid fuck who never did anything illegal while the public was watching. Even the women who worked here seemed unaware of his criminal activities.
But Ronan felt the man’s guilt in his blood. The man had a criminal history: statutory rape as a younger man, two arrests for sex with underage prostitutes in his thirties. In Ronan’s experience, men like Waylon abused more than they were ever arrested for. He couldn’t prove it—yet—but his gut was rarely wrong.
He reached for the particleboard table and pulled his glass to his lips—whiskey. Nothing like the Macallan M his brother drank, but cheap liquor made him feel more connected to those he’d vowed to protect.
No one here knew that, of course. People in clubs like this stayed away from cops.
His brother turned up his nose at the mere idea of Ronan having a blue-collar job. The Duffys were part-owners of a multi-billion-dollar media conglomerate, but that wasn’t work, no matter what his brother said. “Children of a now-dead billionaire mogul” or “The bastard heirs to O’Connor Media” were closer to the truth.
They didn’t even share the O’Connor name—Duffy, after their mother. When the press ran stories about the “Billionaire Brothers,” they weren’t talking about his father’s second family with his stripper mistress.
Ronan took another slow sip, gazing at the stage. Three women twirled around the poles, all of them topless, one with tassels like bullseyes in the center of each breast, one with glitter on her chest. All of legal age, two in their later twenties.
But one of them was right on the cusp—nineteen? Though it wasn’t illegal, he didn’t like that one bit. He also didn’t like that he could gauge their desperation by how hard they tweaked their nipples for the crowd.
Lots of desperation tonight. Good thing he’d hit the ATM. If his mother had had help, she might not have ended up with his father. Sure, he and his siblings wouldn’t exist without Charles O’Connor… but there were worse things than non-existence.
Ronan and his siblings were never even allowed to engage with his father’s rich-ass society until his father’s legitimate children turned on him. Suddenly, their side of the family had become useful—dear old Dad had thought it beneficial to stack the Duffy voting shares in his favor.
The other men around the stage shifted, shouted, reached out their hands, their sweaty dollar bills, skin flashing in the neon lights—pink, then green, then pink again. Hungry eyes—greedy. As if any of these women thought that the man of their dreams might be the one shoving singles between her ass cheeks.
He knew better. The men who frequented these establishments were losers. That wasn’t self-deprecation—some things were just true, and Ronan knew he was as fucked up as any of them.
The dark-haired woman on the stage gyrated around the silver pole, her blue panties glittering. She caught his eye and touched the tip of her tongue to her top lip, then dropped to her knees. Crawling toward his chair.
She knew he belonged here in the sweaty trenches. No posh ballrooms. No tuxedos. No ten-thousand-dollar bottles of whiskey. Just glistening flesh, choking on too-sweet perfume and acrid smoke, the burn of alcohol heating his blood.
The woman stretched herself across the stage before him like a buffet of skin and glitter. Ronan leaned forward and tucked two tightly folded bills into her G-string. The woman blew him a kiss, then made a move to slide off the front of the stage—presumably into his lap—but Ronan waved her away. She was new, like the woman who’d just propositioned him. The others were well aware that he never bought lap dances.
But none of these women knew he was the one who snuck thousands of dollars into their lockers. They also didn’t know that three women in the last six months had left with him after their shifts, never to return.
Some things were better off kept secret.
