Heaven's Ballroom

by Aiden Bates

  “It was acceptable,” I lied. It’d been more than acceptable—but Ace Winston hardly needed his ego stroked as well as his cock. “I might even consider letting you do it again sometime.”

  “I can settle for that,” he said, grunting in agreement. “You have plans for today, or should I just do the dishes before I carry you off to bed again?”

  “I need a shower,” I admitted. “Then…hmm. As much as I am considering the idea of falling back into bed with you, a man who I know next to nothing about…Yeah, unfortunately I actually need to figure out a way to get safely to work.”

  He frowned, his brow lowering in exactly the way I’d hoped. “Something wrong with your commute?”

  I fought back a triumphant smile. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just…yeah, one of the other dancers at the club has this rampant fucking stalker. Anders has already had to switch apartments just to keep the bastard from harassing him at home, but now the guy has been hanging around outside the club, creeping on the employees, making everyone uncomfortable…”

  Ace’s eyebrows shot up in innocent surprise. As if Foster and I hadn’t already clocked him doing the exact same thing. “Christ. What a prick. Doesn’t the club have security for that kind of thing?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh, we try. But a couple of bouncers aren’t much defense against crazy, you know?”

  Another deep grunt, strong and protective. “I’m sorry to hear that. They ought to be taking better care of you there. You know, if you don’t feel safe…”

  I waved his words away. “It’s fine. Iraq didn’t kill me, I doubt some half-crazed Alpha will succeed where it failed.”

  “Still.” Ace crossed his arms over his chest and set his jaw. “Why don’t you let me walk you to work? Get you inside, make sure no one lays hands on my Omega.”

  “Your Omega?” I laughed teasingly, tracing another slice of bacon against my lower lip. “One night together and you already think you own me, huh?”

  “I own your ass, at the very least. As for the rest of you…” He shrugged, grinning. “Give me time. Like you said—you barely even know me yet.”

  “And you think once I do, I’ll just fall so head over heels for you that I won’t be able to resist your manly charms?”

  “Something like that,” Ace agreed. “Finish your breakfast. Shower. I’ll clean up the fucking warzone I made of your kitchen and get you off to work safe. Least I can do after what a good lay you were last night.”

  “Mm. Yeah, maybe you’re right. Least you can do.” I polished off the rest of the eggs and handed him the plate. “Maybe you’ll earn yourself a second chance with me yet.”

  Another flash of his perfectly straight teeth. “Oh, I’m banking on it.”

  In the shower, I had to restrain myself from bursting out into fucking song. I’d been a Marine, not some kind of slick undercover intelligence man—but even so, I couldn’t have carried out my mission more perfectly if I’d tried. Not only had I convinced Ace to get me inside the Ballroom for phase two of Foster’s devious plan—I’d made Ace think it was his idea.

  The water flowed over my body, steamy and hot as it washed away the sweat and sex of the night before. Really, it was a shame that we knew Ace was up to no good with the club—he had been a fantastic lay, after all. Maybe even the kind that I could see becoming a repeat offender. But unfortunately for Ace, I was already onto him. Whatever shit he was trying to pull with the Ballroom, it was only a matter of time before I had the whole of his own schemes laid out on the table before me like—well, just like a home-cooked breakfast.

  He might’ve been handsome. Might’ve been charming. Just as good in bed as he was on the dance floor, and I didn’t doubt that whatever job he was doing, he was very good at doing it.

  But Ace Winston wasn’t up against some naive Omega who would fall prey to his charms just because he fucked like a wild animal, winked and growled like a wolf. Ace Winston was up against me—and no matter how good he might’ve been, I could rest assured in the knowledge that I was better.

  I knew it. Foster knew too. It was only a matter of time before Ace and whoever he was working for figured it out for themselves, too.

  Hook, line, and sinker. It was going to be a very good day.

  7

  Ace

  It was going to be such a good day.

  At some point, I’d assumed the job I’d been tasked to do would start getting harder—but in fact, it was just getting easier all the time. I’d absolved myself of the guilt I’d felt the night before by cooking Noah breakfast, only to find that watching him eat it was just as enjoyable as doing anything else with him: very.

  But then the real kicker came in—he actually wanted me to come to the Ballroom with him. I didn’t usually consider myself the kind of man who went around shaking the hands of stalkers, but that creep had no idea what a service he’d done me by giving me an excuse to walk Noah to work. Even better, now I knew the first weakness in the Ballroom’s armor—they weren’t keeping their employees safe from the creeps that so often frequented Almega clubs. I couldn’t say that the Backdoor was any better in that regard—Harmon’s business had just as bad of a reputation as any, I supposed—but at least now I knew that Noah might not have even wanted to keep dancing at the Ballroom. It absolved me of my second wave of guilt as I put the last dish away and waited for him by the front door.

  Harmon wanted me to win Noah over for business purposes, sure. But if Noah was already one foot out the door with his gig at the Ballroom—it made my conscience a little lighter and my job a lot easier to boot.

  “I ever told you how good you look in sweatpants?” I asked, watching the way they seemed to fall perfectly over his bulge with every step toward me he took.

  “You don’t have to tell me, sweetheart. It’s written all over your face.” He cupped his hand against my cheek, gently patting my perpetually scruffy face twice before he slipped out the door ahead of me.

  “Guess you’re not the kind of Omega who doesn’t know how to take a compliment.” I leaned against the wall outside while Noah locked the door behind him.

  “When you get as many as I do, you end up with plenty of practice.” He looked me up and down, blue eyes glimmering. “You don’t look so bad in a rumpled designer suit either, handsome. You should tell your dry cleaner to skip the steam cleaning next time.”

  “I don’t think the boys at work would appreciate that quite as much as you do,” I countered, feeling my brain return to a sudden state of sharpness once again. It would have been so easy to get lost in stupid banter with Noah and let something slip about what I really did for a living—I needed to keep my wits about me and set my story straight.

  “And where’s work?” he asked, taking the bait as we headed down the stairs.

  “Hayward Financial. It’s all numbers and meetings—boring stuff, I’m afraid.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “They let you talk to clients with a scruffy face like that? I thought you wolves on Wall Street were supposed to be the clean-cut types.”

  Damn—I needed to stop underestimating Noah, obviously. I normally didn’t bother to shave my scruff clean. It’d only be back come evening, even thicker and bristlier than before. “I do database management,” I said, thinking fast. “Not as flashy as those Jordan Belfort types, but it requires a lot more thinking on my feet.”

  “If you think half as well on your feet as you do off them, you must be a force to be reckoned with.” Noah shot me a sly smile as he pushed out of his building’s door and onto the street.

  “I’ve got a good head for numbers.” I chuckled at his innuendo—he never held back reminding me how clever he was with words.

  “Good head for a lot of things, from the sound of it.”

  “You don’t have to play coy with me, you know. You can just say it—we both know how good my head is.”

  “Mm.” Noah closed his eyes, so obviously remembering the way my lips had felt on his cock last night. “True. Maybe even good eno
ugh for a second date, now that I’m thinking about it.”

  “If you’re still thinking in maybes, maybe I haven’t proved myself as well as I thought.” I inclined my head to the alleyway to our left—empty, with plenty of little alcoves that Noah and I could slip into. “Need a reminder of my talents before we get you to work?”

  He laughed, throwing his head back and grinning genuinely. “As much as I would like that…unfortunately, I’m already late enough as is.”

  “Yeah, can’t have that. Let’s get going then—ah, fuck!” I hissed as he slipped his hand into mine unexpectedly, running his fingers over the burn I’d taken from the hot frying pan during my assault of Noah’s kitchen.

  “Aww. Sorry.” Noah turned my hand over in his, glancing down at the raw pink burn on my palm. “I didn’t realize you were hurt.”

  “It’s nothing,” I promised. “Believe me, I’ve had worse.”

  Our eyes met, and he knew it was true. He’d seen me with my shirt off last night—which meant that he’d seen my tattoos and the scars, just like I’d seen his. We hadn’t talked about them. Maybe we never would. The puckered skin and ragged lines on both our bodies had bound us together just as much as the sex had. Men like Noah and me, we didn’t share battle stories unless we were asked to—and men like Noah and me knew better than to ask.

  “Poor thing,” he breathed anyway, taking my palm and raising it up to his lips. His tongue slicked against the burn, soothingly wet. Hot and cold all at once. I found myself hissing for a different reason then. Had to take a deep breath just to stop from getting a hard-on there in the street—and even then, I found myself walking with a semi when he pulled his lips away.

  I slipped behind him, giving him my other hand to hold as we headed to the subway. And all the while—even if I was just using this walk to work as an excuse to get a little behind-the-scenes look into what the Ballroom had planned for the weekend—I kept my promise to him. My eyes scanned the face of every man we passed, meeting their eyes to make sure they didn’t mean Noah any harm. I didn’t doubt that he could protect himself from whatever stalker was out wandering the streets around the Ballroom, but…

  He’d already taken care of my battle wound for the morning. After that, I didn’t think I’d be able to live with myself if I let him come to any harm.

  My first peek into the Ballroom outside of opening hours was a shocking one. To my credit, I’d done my duty. Noah and I both arrived safe and sound, any potential creeps having been quickly scared the hell away from us by one of my stern looks and a barely audible growl. That was the nice thing about having been to prison: either you quickly learned how to broadcast the message, Don’t fucking fuck with me, or you wound up in even more trouble than whatever you’d done to get thrown into the joint to begin with.

  Prison had adequately prepared me for making potential perverts, stalkers and dirtbags tremble in fear at the thought of what I’d do to them if they so much as looked at Noah Layton in the wrong way—but it sure as hell hadn’t prepared me for what I saw when I walked Noah into his place of work.

  The main floor was sheer fucking chaos. The chairs and tables had been done away with in favor of bales of hay and red-checkered blankets. In the pit, the orchestra had traded out their dark, sultry jazz for something that sounded a lot more like square dance music. From the lights, to the sound, to the red Solo cups and cases of Bud Light sitting on the bar top, the entire room looked ripe for a hoedown.

  I raised an eyebrow as I watched two shirtless dancers chase a loose rooster around the room, stress and desperation lining their faces as it easily outran them. A third dancer, clad in a set of pig’s ears, a fake snout and a curly little tail pinned to his G-string, was having a stern argument with a stubborn billy goat that he couldn’t seem to coax backstage.

  “Is this…normal?” I asked, stifling a laugh. Normal didn’t seem to cut it—I was having a hard time believing that this was even real.

  “Oh, yeah,” Noah reassured me with a strange amount of calm for someone whose place of work was currently overrun with barnyard animals. “Don’t worry about the mess—it’s always like this when we do theme nights.”

  “Theme nights?” I choked out, watching the pig-costumed dancer burst into tears as he realized his goat friend wasn’t planning on budging anytime soon.

  “Yeah, you know how it is. We have all these high-end billionaires that come here for something a little different—so of course, we’ve gotta give it to them.”

  “And…sexy barnyard is their idea of a good kind of different?”

  “Of course,” Noah said, glancing up at me like he couldn’t believe I wasn’t getting it. “I mean, you’re a Wall Street guy, aren’t you? You spend all your time in boring meetings, all suits and ties and firm handshakes. You guys don’t get out of the city much—so it’s refreshing, you know, when we’re able to bring a little slice of the country here to you.”

  Finally, I couldn’t help but crack a grin. “So does that mean you’re wearing a little pig costume tonight too?”

  “Oh, this is just a dress rehearsal. We won’t perform on this set for another two weeks still—but we have to set things up so we can figure how many people we can seat per hay bale and everything.” His eyes sparkled again, narrowing delightfully. “And I’m not a pig. I’ve got a cow costume in the back. Cute little ears, a little bell around my neck and everything.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers, still soaking it all in. I couldn’t fucking wait to tell Harmon about this.

  “What?” Noah asked, lowering his brows. “Not your thing?”

  “Not quite,” I admitted. “But I guess I’m not your usual kind of customer.”

  “Mm. Well, if you change your mind…I could always borrow Anders’ pig costume if you decide you’d like to see me hog-tied.”

  A flash of fantasy crashed through my mind—not Noah in a pig costume, no, but Noah with his ankles tied to his wrists on my bed, moaning for me as I spread his thighs.

  Christ.

  “Maybe you’ll have to do a little more convincing,” I said with a laugh. “But I could get there.”

  “Oh, I don’t think getting you there will ever be a problem for me.”

  “You busy this week?” I asked, taking the opportunity to set up another meeting. “Let me take you out for dinner or something. We’ll see how persuasive you can really be.”

  “I’m busy until Monday,” he admitted. “But after that…Yeah, I think I could squeeze you in.”

  Double Christ. Even the way he said those words—squeeze you in—had my cock aching for another go at him.

  “I’d like that,” I choked, my voice betraying exactly how much I liked the sound of that. I fished my wallet out of my pocket with a pen and scrawled my number on the back of that Barney’s receipt I’d been saving for him. “Give me a call. We’ll set something up.”

  “I’d like that,” Noah agreed, winding his arms around my neck.

  The kiss he gave me in parting was so soft, it only made the situation that had been tenting my slacks the whole way to the club even worse. My mouth was fucking aching for him. My whole body was, in fact. I normally kissed hard, unrelenting. I kissed like I had every intention of leaving bruises on my partner’s lips. By contrast, a kiss that soft left me so wanting, it took every ounce of my willpower to stop myself from grabbing him for another, harder kiss when he pulled away.

  Somehow, though, I managed it. Barely.

  And my cock would never forgive me for it, either.

  “See you next week, handsome,” Noah whispered as he slipped away. “Thanks for getting me here safe.”

  “Any time,” I called after him.

  It was a small consolation prize, but at least I got to stare at his ass as I watched him disappear backstage.

  Outside, I pushed down a third wave of guilt as I rang Harmon up. No matter how bad I wanted Noah, a job was still a job. There was no future for us after this, of course—he wouldn�
�t want me if he found out that I wasn’t the fancy Wall Street man I told him I was, and he’d want me even less when he found out that I lied. With that in mind, I reset my conscience and prepared to tell Harmon what I’d seen inside the Ballroom’s doors.

  I still didn’t understand the barnyard thing, sure. But if it was what the billionaire clientele wanted…somehow, I knew that Harmon would be very interested in what I had to report.

  8

  Noah

  “To Wesley Harmon and the boys at the Backdoor.” Foster raised his glass high, champagne bubbles whirling in a maelstrom as they rose toward the surface. “May they enjoy stealing all our bad ideas as much as that goat enjoyed pissing on the mayor’s shoes last night.”

  “To the Backdoor!” we echoed, roaring with laughter and clinking our glasses together in triumph.

  I wasn’t going to pretend that I wasn’t enjoying how well our little plan had gone—or how gloriously it had backfired on Ace and his employers, for that matter. Ace Winston might have fucked like an animal, but Wesley Harmon should have known better than bringing actual animals into his club. Foster and I had watched all the other clubs in the city carefully all week to see if anyone had taken the bait, and the Backdoor had pulled out all the stops in response. Hay bales, Busch Light—hell, they’d even tried to bring an actual cow into their slimy little club, which had earned them a notice from their local health inspector as well as the mayor’s ire after the goat incident.

  Now we knew exactly who Ace was working for—and exactly what his game was. The Backdoor had always been the Ballroom’s most vicious competitor. Now, they’d have to spend months cleaning up the mess they’d made in trying to steal our client base—all thanks to a little clever maneuvering on our part and all of Ace’s diligent reconnaissance work.

  “God, what I wouldn’t have given to see those poor dancers in their animal costumes,” Anders sighed, tipping back his champagne. “Maybe your friend Ace can take down my stalker next—I’m going to be so relieved when I can finally start going out and enjoying myself again.”