The Billionaire's Command (The Silver Cross Club) (3 page)

She always said that like it was a title. The President. The Dalai Lama. The Owner.

“Poppy, calm down,” I said. “It’s not like this is the first time he’s ever been here. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“You just jinxed it!” she shrieked.

That was it. “I’m out,” I said to Tempest, and bailed. I had just hit my Dealing With Poppy limit, and it wasn’t even 4:00.

I really needed a Coke.

It turned out that Poppy had totally rearranged the schedule and I wouldn’t go on stage that night until 5:30, which meant that I had plenty of time to sit around in my robe, paint my toenails, and listen to Scarlet talk about the hot grad student she had just started dating. He studied plasma physics, whatever that was. It sounded complicated.

“Does he wear one of those jackets with the elbow patches?” I asked.

Scarlet grinned. “That’s a stereotype.”

“Stereotypes exist for a reason,” I said. “You should bring him by.”

“Absolutely not. He thinks I’m a nurse,” Scarlet said. “I work nights in the NICU.”

“Baby girl, you should quit lying to your boyfriends,” I said.

“He’s not a boyfriend, so who cares? I’ll get sick of him in a few weeks and then I’ll never see him again,” she said. “It’s a white lie. I don’t have to explain my job to him, and he doesn’t have to get all worked up about other men looking at me. And at least I’m not a nun, like
some people
.”

“I’m not a nun,” I said. “I’d have to get one of those little hats. I don’t like wearing hats.”

“It’s called a wimple,” Scarlet said, because of course she would know something like that.

“
Whatever
,” I said. I took another sip of my Coke. “You think the owner’s out there right now?”

She shrugged. “Why don’t you go check, if you’re so curious?”

I probably should have been out there working the floor, chatting up clients and finding a lonely man with a fat wallet and an empty lap; but it was Friday, I had already met my goal for the week, and I was tired. Stripping seemed glamorous until you were in the thick of it, and then it was just dull. The men were all the same. Different faces, but the same empty yearning in all of them, and the same wandering hands.

“I don’t feel like it,” I said, like a sulky child. “Go get me another soda.”

She laughed at me. “Nope. How does my hair look?”

“Fine,” I said, still sulky.

“I have to go dance,” she said, standing. “Are you doing Schoenemann’s party later?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Germaine didn’t say anything about it.”

“Lucky,” she said. “God, he’s such a creep. He doesn’t even tip well! Not worth it.” She tipped her head to one side and examined me. “What the hell happened to your knees, anyway? Are you planning to go out on stage with those Band-Aids stuck all over the place? The clients are going to think you’ve got leprosy.”

“I don’t have leprosy,” I said. “I just fell on the sidewalk. It’s not a big deal.”

“It looks tacky,” she said. “You should tell Poppy you can’t dance tonight.”

I smirked at her. “Girl, if I’m doing it right, nobody’s going to be looking at my knees. You need lessons from me on getting them to look at your tits?”

“Trust me, they’re looking,” she said. She blew me a kiss, and then flipped me the bird as she walked out of the room.

Alone, I fluffed my wig and checked the time. Twenty minutes to go: time to get dressed.

Stripping was about the tease. If you went out there buck-ass naked, there was no mystery, and the mystery was what kept the clients watching. I didn’t think I was performing great art, or anything like that, but there sort of was
an
art to it: shimmy just so, wiggle a little, look back over your shoulder, blow a kiss.

I would never admit it out loud, but I loved being on stage. I loved feeling the energy of all those men looking at me,
wanting
me, seeing me—for those few minutes—as the most precious thing in the world. It was a rush. And the money didn’t hurt. When I sauntered around the floor afterward, and they tucked hundred dollar bills into my g-string, I felt like a queen.

I took that night’s outfit from my bag: a corset elaborately decorated with sequins, ribbons, and feathers; a matching g-string; thigh-high stockings; black Victorian-style boots that buttoned up the side; and, to top it all off, a long, sheer open robe. I had gotten really into burlesque in the last few months, and stopped pole dancing almost entirely. I’d done pole for a long time, but it started to feel too ordinary. Most of the girls did it. I wanted to do something different, and so I spent a while going to burlesque shows and watching what those girls did, and coming to work early to practice. I had to cough up a bit of money on the new costumes and accessories, but it had been a worthwhile investment. The clients loved it. My tips were better than ever, and I was determined to milk it as much as possible before the other girls caught on and started doing the same thing. For now, they just thought I had developed a weird interest in feathers, but I knew that wouldn’t last.

We were all friends, or at least friendly, or at least mostly; but I wasn’t dumb enough to forget that we lived in a dog-eat-dog world. I wanted to be the one doing the eating, instead of the one that got eaten.

I’d had the corset custom-made with a zipper on the side, so that it was easy to put on—and easy to remove. The difference between me and most burlesque dancers was that I would be fully nude by the end of my dance, and I didn’t want to spend any time fumbling around with my costume on stage. I zipped up the corset, and sat again to pull on my stockings and boots. Then I retouched my lipstick, and critically examined my reflection in the mirror. I looked perfect. Nothing was out of place.

I checked the clock again. Go time.

I left the seraglio and strolled down the hall toward the main floor, my robe trailing on the floor behind me. Scarlet was just finishing her routine, kneeling on the stage with a client’s face buried in her tits. I stopped at the edge of the floor and waited. It was impolite to deliberately take attention away from the dancer on stage. If the clients near me glanced in my direction, well—that wasn’t anything I could control.

The stage was a square platform in the middle of the room, with tables arranged around it on all four sides. That made it hard to appear on stage unnoticed, and so we all went to the other extreme and played it up as much as possible. The clients enjoyed watching us make our way to the stage, and it seemed like they needed the extra time to make the psychological transition from watching one girl to watching another. That was Scarlet’s theory, anyway. She was a lot smarter than me, so I tended to listen to her.

Scarlet’s song came to a close, and she blew kisses to the men watching her, smiling, and then climbed down off the stage to make her rounds and collect her tips.

I pulled my shoulders back, waiting for the spotlight to find me, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline through my veins.

The Silver Cross didn’t do anything so tacky as announcing the next dancer. Instead, the club’s spotlight came on, and unerringly moved across the floor until I was centered in the pool of light it cast on the carpet. I struck a dramatic pose, head thrown back and one arm raised in the air, and I heard a murmur of appreciation spread through the crowd.

And there it was: I took a step forward, into Sassy’s skin.

Did it make me vain, that I fed on the energy from the crowd?

Maybe.

I didn’t really care, though.

I sauntered forward, the spotlight following me, and made my way to the stage in the silence that preceded the music that wouldn’t start until I stood on the stage.

Who could look away from me, when I was lit like this, and glowing, and ready to perform?

I walked up the short flight of steps onto the stage and made my way to the center. I stopped there and posed again, and the spotlight cut off, and the music cut on.

On stage, I was alive.

I began dancing, swaying my hips and running my hands down my body. I made eye contact with one of the clients sitting near the stage and winked. He leaned toward me, lips parting, and I wanted to laugh. I was powerful. In that one moment, I wasn’t doing it for the money. I was doing it because I
wanted
to. I wanted these men to look at me, and want me.

My dance was a striptease. The robe would stay on; the corset, eventually, would come off, and I would use the robe’s sheer fabric to conceal while revealing, until finally that came off too. I had fifteen minutes, and I didn’t intend to get naked until the very end. They would be desperate for it by the time I finally let one of them take off my g-string.

As I danced, I scanned the audience, wondering which of the men watching me was the owner. Was it the silver-haired gentleman in the double-breasted suit? Was it the middle-aged man ignoring me in favor of his phone? It could have been any of them. Unlike Poppy, I didn’t really care. The owner had never shown any interest in interfering with the day-to-day activities at the club, and so I wasn’t going to waste any mental energy worrying about it.

I turned on my heel to face another section of the room. It was important to keep turning around so that everyone got a good view. I bent my head to find the zipper on my corset and drew the zipper down. The two halves of the corset peeled open, and I drew it off and tossed it onto the stage. The gauzy fabric of my robe slid across my breasts as I made another quarter turn, and I deliberately arched my back to display my nipples.

A man near the stage raised his glass to me.

I winked at him and turned again, hips swaying the whole time, hands at my neck and then at my hips, letting them all imagine that it was their hands touching me, their hands gliding across the warm silk of my skin. I drew the rope open, fully exposing my body, and then pulled it closed again, teasing, giving them just a taste.

I paused for a moment, bending over backwards with my arms above my head. Upside-down, a man sitting toward the back of the room caught my attention, and I straightened again and turned around to get a better look at him.

Holy
shit.

It was the guy from earlier, the one who had bandaged my knees.

I swayed in place, watching him, mesmerized.

He tipped his chin up, and our eyes met.

It shook me to my bones.

It was like wandering through the desert for forty days and forty nights, and suddenly finding water. Like remembering a long-forgotten dream, or waking in the night to distant thunder.

There was something in his eyes, darkly amused, that made me think he’d seen right through me, right down to the soles of my feet.

Rattled, I turned my back to him and kept dancing.

I knew he was there, though. I could feel his eyes on me.

I risked a glance back over my shoulder. He was still watching.

Rule 1: never get involved with the clients.

No matter how attractive they were.

No matter how kind they had been to you.

Had he
followed
me? Did he know I worked at the club, or was it just a weird coincidence?

Either way, I was pretty unsettled.

The music changed, my cue that I needed to wrap things up. Fine with me; I was suddenly eager to get off stage and go back to the safety of the seraglio. I let my robe slither to the floor and spun slowly on one foot, cupping my breasts in both hands, giving the watching men the view they had all been waiting for. Now was ordinarily the time when I stepped off the stage and let a client peel off my g-string, but the man in the dark suit was still watching me, and I didn’t want to linger. I pulled the g-string to the side just enough to give a peek, and then gave a little curtsy as the music ended, blew a kiss to the audience, and left the stage.

As Mercedes took the stage behind me, I made my rounds of the audience, collecting tips and pausing here and there to let a man slide one hand down the curve of my ass. This was usually a prime opportunity to talk someone into a lap dance or a private room, but I wasn’t feeling it. I wanted to go back to the seraglio and gossip with Scarlet some more. Maybe I would take tomorrow off. I had worked for a week and a half straight, and I was feeling a little burned out.

I slowly wove through the tables, moving inevitably closer to the man in the suit at the back of the room. He hadn’t looked away from me, and I had the strange sensation that he was reeling me toward him like a fish on a line. Impossible, of course, but I felt the draw, a steady tug, and I wondered what he would say to me when I finally made my way over to him. What he would do.

My heart beat in a relentless pounding rhythm.

But as soon as I came close enough that he could have touched me or spoken to me, he looked down at his phone and ignored me.

I paused by his table, uncertain, waiting for him to look up again, to give some indication that he knew I was there—but he didn’t, and I had to keep moving or it would get weird.

A man at the next table said, “Are you entertaining clients tonight, sugar?”