by Aiden Bates
“You’re not wrong,” I admitted. “But that must be true of more than half the Alphas in this place tonight. We don’t exactly come here because we’re virginal priests.”
“Loaded,” he suggested, bringing his other knee onto the chair to straddle my thigh. “You’ve got plenty of cash and you want everyone to know it.”
I gritted my teeth as he lowered himself onto my thigh, grinding the bulge of his own cock beneath the thin metallic fabric of his thong up the length of my leg. We were two thin layers of fabric away from being skin on burning hot skin. It made my heart pound. Made my jaw ache.
“Cheap shot,” I teased. “I flashed cash to get your attention—and it worked. Says more about you than it does about me.”
“Mm. Well then. Looks like I’m not the only mind-reader in the room tonight.” He moved his shoulder sensually toward my face, and I tilted my head back to breathe him in.
Christ. I’d expected him to smell good, but not that good. His scent was a golden wheat field on a hot summer morning. Like backwoods and pine, the cool, clear trickling water of a crick after a gentle rain. Kieran smelled like things I’d only seen on the television, in landscape shots used by marketing departments to make the viewer feel things they’d never experience for real—but as I breathed him in, it all felt more real than I could’ve dreamed of. Like I’d been yanked out of the club and dropped into the Texan countryside that Kieran called home.
“You didn’t tell me you were a mind-reader,” I finally said, closing my eyes as I exhaled my breath.
“All dancers are.”
“Interesting.” It wasn’t—he was teasing me, and I was letting him. It bought me time—time to keep feeling his body against me. Time to keep breathing in his scent. “What am I thinking about right now then?”
“Hmm. That’s a tricky one.” When I opened my eyes again, he was grinning. “Judging by the hard-on you’re sporting right now, I’d say you’re thinking about pinning me up against that wall over there and having your wicked way with me.”
I raised an eyebrow. His ESP had about a six-minute delay.
“It’s hardly mind-reading if you’re making your judgments based on physical cues,” I pointed out.
His gaze sharpened as he leaned into me again, his breath hot on my neck this time. “Considering that you strike me as the type who does most of your thinking with your dick anyway—”
Abruptly, he pressed himself against me, grinding the stiffening length of his cock against my own through my slacks. I let out a moan that betrayed me immediately—I’d called him unoriginal when he called me horny, but I hadn’t called him wrong.
“I’m just reading the head that gets the most blood flow, handsome,” he finished, a special kind of delight tinging his Southern purr.
“Duncan,” I corrected him. If I was going to get what I wanted from him, he was going to have to start thinking of me as something more than just handsome, rich and horny. “Duncan Rourke.”
“Well, Duncan Rourke. If you’re so unimpressed by my abilities to read you…why don’t you try this on for size?” He reared back, looking me over as his tongue flicked out over his lips. “Let’s see—you’re a New York boy. Born and raised.”
“True,” I admitted, giving him a little nod.
“Manhattan,” he said with confidence, his shoulders shifting back as his chest puffed out. “The only time you cross the bridges is if you’re headed to the airport.”
“False,” I told him, enjoying the way his face fell as he realized he’d been wrong.
“You went to an Ivy league school,” he started again, narrowing his eyes as he shifted gears.
“True.”
“On Daddy’s dime, of course.”
“False.” I smirked. “You’re only really half a psychic, at this rate. Maybe I should only pay your half your fee.”
“Oh, I earn my fees, Mr. Rourke.” He shifted on top of me, straddling both my thighs now as he wrapped his arms around my neck. “You work on Wall Street. Big business. Dollars in, dollars out, all day long.”
“True.” I arched against him as his fingertips brushed against the back of my neck, tracing my hairline.
“Taking money from poor, hardworking people and using it to line the pockets of your rich, over-fed shareholders,” he said, smug as he raised his knuckles to my cheek and brushed them down toward my jawline.
I caught his wrist before he could go any further. “False,” I growled, suddenly all too aware that he’d touched a nerve. “You couldn’t be more wrong, Kieran.”
He paused, drawing back as I said his name. “Who told you to call me that?”
I shrugged, enjoying the brief upper hand I had on him. “Maybe I heard one of the other dancers call out to you across the room. Maybe I asked up at the bar. Either way…I did my research before I asked you back here with me tonight.”
“Research,” he repeated, snorting. “You don’t know anything about me, Mr. Rourke.”
“And I won’t pretend to,” I promised him. “But I know enough to know that I’d like to learn more.”
“Goodness.” A strange smile was playing on his lips—like I’d finally managed to shock him. “You’re nosier than I thought you’d be.”
“You’ve been thinking about me all wrong, then.” I turned his wrist beneath my grip, pulling his knuckles to my lips. The kiss I pressed against them was gentle, just slightly wet. I wanted him to feel that kiss—and then, in its absence, I wanted him to crave more kisses just like it until his molars ached. “Maybe you’d like to give me a chance to set the record straight?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Dinner, drinks. There’s a nice Italian place not far from here. And after that, who knows where the night might take us?”
His eyes narrowed again as he looked down at me. Basking in the room’s golden glow, he looked like a young god—Apollo staring down at an errant worshipper, still trying to decide whether to react with pleasure or scorn.
For a moment, I was sure he was going to take me up on it. He liked the look of me, even if he had everything else about me all wrong. We had chemistry—he must have felt it, just as much as I was feeling it as I waited beneath him. He was the kind of Omega who liked a good time—and there was nothing I liked more than a good time.
We would’ve been good together. Fucking glorious. Like fireworks exploding over the city skyline all night long.
“I don’t think so,” he said, a smug smile on his lips while he said it. “Your time’s up, Mr. Rourke. My fee?”
He held his hand out. I watched his fingertips while I withdrew my wallet, placing a thousand dollars in his hand.
Had I gotten what I wanted? No, not yet. But I wasn’t about to let Kieran walk away from our little encounter with the assumption that Duncan Rourke was anything close to cheap.
“Your paycheck will miss you, Mr. Rourke,” he breathed against my ear, picking himself up off my lap and walking out the door. “Enjoy the champagne.”
But as he left, it wasn’t the money I found myself missing.
It was him.
3
Kieran
When I caught Noah’s eyes as I slipped backstage after my shift, I could already tell what was coming.
I didn’t like it, but at least I knew I was walking into a minefield instead of going in blind.
“How’d it go?” Noah asked, casting me side-eyes as he cooed the question in the most obnoxious way possible.
“Like two clown cars colliding into each other at top speeds,” I groaned, grabbing a towel and working it over my chest. “It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been such a disaster.”
Noah cringed. “That bad, huh?”
“It wasn’t…ugh. Not bad. Just…not like I expected.” It was a fact that was even more annoying to me than Noah’s line of questioning: I hadn’t been entirely able to pin Duncan Rourke down. “He was more clever than I gave him credit for initially.”
“But he paid
in cash, right?”
I nodded, flashing the stack of bills. “I just shouldn’t have mistaken his flashiness for a lack of intelligence, I guess. I went in there thinking I could beat his wit with a handful of quarters stuffed in a tube sock only to find that he had a fucking katana.”
“On him? Really?” Noah stroked his jawline. “I figured the bulge in his pants was his meat sword, not a real one.”
I stared at Noah for a moment, then threw my dirty towel at his face. “It was a metaphor, dumbass. I’m trying to say…I’m just not used to losing, I guess.”
Noah tossed the towel back at me with a laugh. “Kieran, sorry, what the fuck are you talking about? It was a lap dance. He gave you what you wanted—money—you gave him what he wanted—an up-close view of you shaking your ass. There aren’t winners and losers in a simple transaction like that.”
I furrowed my brow as I grabbed my robe off its hook, shrugging it on and slipping my G-string off beneath its fluffy navy fabric. By all accounts, Noah was right. There shouldn’t have been winners and losers—I should’ve just been another dancer to him, and he should’ve been just another client for me.
“With him, there are,” I finally said, blinking at the weight of that realization.
“And you lost?”
I nodded, just as confused by the whole of the encounter as Noah must have been. “I’m pretty sure I did, yeah. And I’m still not sure how the bastard managed it.”
“If you ask me, it sounds like you have a C-R-U-S-H.”
I scowled at him. “I do not.”
“Winners, losers…the little way you keep scoffing every time you talk about him…” Noah shrugged, his blue eyes sparkling with a cruel kind of delight. “I mean, if you ask me, buddy, it sounds a lot like you caught feelings. But that’s just my opinion—you’re the one with a psych degree.”
“I didn’t catch feelings,” I insisted. “I don’t do that.”
“And yet, we’re still talking about him.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingertips and blew out a frustrated breath. “I couldn’t have talked to him for more than ten minutes, Noah. I barely know the guy.”
Noah grinned. “That’s chemistry for you. You gonna see him again?”
I ran my fingers through my hair, hating that Noah even had reason to ask that question. Duncan had asked me out for dinner. Drinks. Maybe more. If it hadn’t been for whatever it was that I’d felt between us—I wasn’t going to call it chemistry, no matter how much Noah insisted on it—I probably would’ve taken Duncan up on it, too. Working at the Ballroom was a good way to meet the kind of men I liked to know. Brief encounters. One night only, then we never had to hear from each other again. Men like Duncan Rourke normally filled my need for physicality without worrying about developing some idiotic emotional connection that I didn’t even want.
But Duncan Rourke wasn’t the kind of man that I’d thought.
“Hopefully not,” I said, and meant it, too. “I don’t do chemistry. Sounds too messy. Complicated. I’m a soft sciences only kind of guy, remember?”
“Your science might be soft, but as for the rest of you…” Noah nodded to my crotch, where my cock was still impossibly stiff, pitching a sizable tent in the folds of my robe. “You can say what you want, man. You might not do chemistry, but chemistry sure as hell looks like it’s doing you.”
I scowled, throwing my towel over my shoulder and brushing past Noah on my way to the showers. “You know, if you were half as good with dancing as you are with your fucking words, you’d be making two grand per lap dance too.”
Noah only beamed. “Yeah, but then who’d be left to call you on your bullshit?”
“It’s not bullshit,” I grumbled under my breath as I stalked away—too quietly for Noah to hear me and develop some kind of snappy comeback for.
Duncan Rourke was an irregular blip on an otherwise normal pulse, as far as I was concerned. Had he gotten to me? The fact that I was still thinking about him after I’d taken his money and walked away told me that much. But come morning, would I still be thinking about him? The scruffy shadow on the underside of his jaw? The deep brown of his eyes as he rolled my name off his tongue?
I sure as hell didn’t intend to. As I turned on the shower, I let the steam and the searing hot water wash the night off of me—and Duncan Rourke’s heavy, focused gaze along with it.
That should have been the end of it.
But of course, that just wasn’t my luck.
The next day at the club, I swung in early to check on the line-up and ensure we’d have enough troops. Over the last year, we’d lost two of our best dancers—Riley to a brooding, blue-eyed finance man, and Damon to a green-eyed playboy in an Armani suit. Their Instagram feeds were all babies and brunch now.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t still tempted to call one of them in for the evening when I realized that Ben had missed dress rehearsal and was probably not coming back.
“Fuck,” I groaned, pouring myself into a barstool and waving Christian, our best bartender, over to fill up a glass for me.
He brightened as he saw me, holding up a finger for me to wait a moment before ducking beneath the counter. “Just the man I’ve been waiting to see. Looks like you’ve got a secret admirer, Kieran.”
I rolled my eyes as he produced a massive floral arrangement from beneath the bar. Greenery and yellow lilies—they smelled amazing, but I wasn’t buying Christian’s story for a minute.
“Those are for Anders,” I said with certainty. “That boy has more admirers than he knows what to do with.”
“More like stalkers, from the sounds of things.” He plucked a card from within the greenery and handed it to me. “But the card has your name on it. One of your regulars, maybe?”
I laughed. “My regulars know I prefer to be wooed with cash.”
But he was right—there was my name, spelled out in the florist’s cursive on the back of a little cream-colored envelope. The card inside wasn’t signed, but I knew who had sent them as soon as I read the message.
“The champagne was delicious, but not as delicious as you.” I tossed the card back onto the bar like it had done me a bad turn. “Christ. This is the last thing I want to deal with right now.”
And never mind the string of heat that ran across the back of my neck as I caught another whiff of the flowers’ scent. That was embarrassment, not attraction.
Who the hell did Duncan Rourke think he was?
“I’ve always wanted a secret admirer,” Christian mused. “You Omegas have all the luck.”
I rolled my eyes. “Then you haven’t seen the way Carlos looks at you while you’re filling his drink orders. Get me a seltzer with a twist of lime before I go throw these in the trash, okay?”
Christian shook his head, clucking mournfully as he filled up a glass with ice. “I think it’s nice. Alphas don’t send flowers for no reason. Shows that he likes you.”
“All it shows me,” I retorted, taking my drink and hefting the flowers up in the crook of my arm, “Is that he’s too dumb to know how to take no for an answer.”
Still, when I got backstage, I found that I couldn’t quite bring myself to dump the arrangement into the garbage where it belonged. They were pretty, in a way. Smelled nice.
Stupid, but I didn’t mind having them around.
“You can stay,” I told them, crossing my arms as I admired the way they looked in front of my mirror. “For now.”
“I can? You mean it?”
I glanced up in the mirror to see Ben rushing up behind me, struggling to disentangle himself from his own jacket without dropping his gym bag.
“You,” I said, wheeling around, “Missed dress rehearsal. What the hell, Ben?”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry!” He twisted his face up into an expression so melodramatic, it felt more like he was auditioning for a role in a tragedy than actually apologizing—but what the hell. At least it meant we wouldn’t have to rework the opening number.
“I won’t let you down, Kieran, I promise!” he gushed, his crocodile tears immediately evaporating as he ran off to get dressed.
Sighing, I tugged my own t-shirt off and stripped down out of my jeans. I’d left my angel wings in the locker room, massive befeathered things that weighed a ton and looked like they’d been stolen from backstage at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show then refitted to accommodate a broad, muscular chest. I was just finishing strapping them on when Carlos, the club’s head waiter came in, his pencil-thin mustache twitching with delight.
“Big crowd tonight?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You could say that.” His voice was coy—too coy for my liking.
“Ugh. Whatever you’ve got to say, just say it.”
“Well…” Carlos hummed, tucking his hands into his pockets and looking pleased with himself. “I just talked to the gentleman at table twelve…”
“Ughhh,” I groaned again. Duncan Rourke’s table from last night. Somehow, I knew where this was going.
“Mmhmm. Ugh indeed. He had a particular interest in what set you’re performing. Wants to know if you’re doing the cowboy thing tonight, or if you’ll be wearing your firefighter costume tonight instead.”
“Why the fuck does he need to know about my firefighter costume?” I blinked, realizing that I was asking the wrong question. “How does he know about my firefighter costume?”
Carlos shrugged. “He’s been coming in here every night for the last month. Suppose he just wants to know what act his favorite dancer is performing.” He cocked his head back to the mirrors outside the locker room, barely fighting back a self-satisfied smile. “Those flowers out there from him?”
“He’s been coming here for a month?” Suddenly, the fact that he’d known my name last night was vastly overshadowed by the knowledge that I’d been watched.
