So she waited.
Wednesday rolled around again, and as Nadia exited the changing room after primping for another night on the job, the shift in the air told her the boss was in for the night. The entire atmosphere felt different whenever that man was in the building: a little ominous, yet a little safer.
Nadia glanced over to the right where her boss’s two grim, hulky guards were blocking off the stairway leading up to the boss’s office.
Before heading over to the guards, she inconspicuously scanned the club for New Girl, her eyes finding her a minute later.
More like a customer than a dancer, she was sitting coolly unconcerned at a high-table, and one of the strippers was giving her a slow, sexy lap dance, while she stuck dollar bills into the stripper’s thong. But New Girl’s eyes weren’t on the stripper. No, they were watching the guards over at the stairway. Hard.
Abruptly, that gaze shifted across the crowd so fast and latched onto Nadia’s, that Nadia stiffened, suddenly intimidated.
Those green eyes, they held something. A threat.
New Girl knew Nadia had been watching her.Hell. She knew.
With her threatening eyes still on Nadia’s, New Girl palmed the stripper’s throat and roughly yanked her head back, then she brought her mouth to the side of the stripper’s neck and licked it, then sucked on it, her other hand drifting up to squeeze the stripper’s breast.
The unexpected effect that viscerally unfurled inside Nadia had her questioning her sexuality. She shouldn’t have been turned on by New Girl. But she was. She bewilderingly was.
Swallowing hard, Nadia resumed her jaunt to the stairway, her steps quicker.
The guards knew her role there so they nodded respectfully when she got up to them, but didn’t give her pass.
“I’ve got word for him,” she told them.
One of the guards, whom she knew as Ronnie, held up a hand in a ‘hang on’ signal then took out his cell and hit a number…
“Nadia’s got word, boss…yeah…no…’kay.”
Ronnie hung up and moved aside to grant her pass, and she went ahead and navigated her way to the boss’s office. The door was ajar but she knocked anyway.
“Come, Nadia.”
Nadia went in.
Sitting in his office chair behind his modern glass desk, flipping through a mess of photos scattered across a large manila envelope, the owner was a torturous sight to the female eyes. Too damn good-looking to be doing—whatever it was he did that was so bad he needed bodyguards. She never asked questions. And she knew she was better off not knowing the gore. She just did what was expected of her and collected her lump sum every fortnight.
Tall and lean, the man behind the desk wasn’t packing with muscles, but just enough to fit his body type. Dirty blond hair that didn’t have one particular style to it. Sometimes he trimmed it in a rocker’s style, sometimes he let it grow out in limp, loose waves like a surfer, and sometimes he trimmed it like an Ivy League gentleman. Whichever way he wore that lovely hair, it worked for him. Nadia was sure that, even on his worse day, he looked a lot better than every other man she’d ever come across in her entire life. He was just that undeniably, irresistibly mouth-watering.
With dark eyes and lips that didn’t smile, Nadia often wondered what it would be like to have sex with a man so sexily fierce. With her open body language, she’d made it obvious, loud and clear, that she desired him since the moment he hired her. But the man wasn’t interested. In her or anyone.
Cool and detached, never screwing around, never messing with the dancers.
“Hey, boss—”
“What do you have for me?” he asked without looking up from the photos in front of him.
That familiar tone told her to get on with it. “There’s a new stripper. Been working here for over a week now. She goes by the stage name ‘Blood’ and—”
“Blood? Really?” his smooth voice asked, accompanied by a light chuckle. “Does she make money with that name?”
Momentarily taken aback, it took Nadia a minute to respond, because she’d never heard this man do anything even remotely close tochucklingbefore. “Lots. Without even working for it. She’s…flawless.”
“Hmm…” he hummed, clasping his hands above the scattered photos on his desk and raising his head to give her his undivided attention. “Well, if she’s so ‘flawless’, why’re you reporting her to me?”
“Because I think—no, Iknowshe’s dangerous.”
Slowly, his lips tipped up in a breath-stealing smile, as if ‘dangerous’ was his all-time favorite word. And this time Nadia wasn’t just taken aback, but dumbstruck that this man actuallysmiled. He must be in an extremely good mood tonight.
