Heaven's Ballroom

by Aiden Bates

  “Cute couple. Who are they?”

  “Ross and Patrick Erikson. They lived next door to me growing up. Always let me come over when Dad was gone on some shady job—or when he was too pissed off for me to be around.”

  “They look happy,” Noah said fondly as he handed the picture back to me. “In love. It’s sweet that you kept in touch with them.”

  “Not everyone has perfect parents.” I ran my thumb over the picture, brushing away a nonexistent smudge of dust before I put it back into my wallet. “But I figure everyone needs family. Got them out of the Bronx and into a nice townhouse just outside the city when I had enough money to. Never had any kids of their own, so I guess I’m the closest thing to a son they’ve got.”

  “Yeah…yeah, I love that.” There was a wistfulness in Noah’s eyes as he caught my gaze again, like I’d finally said something so genuine or so cute that he actually believed what I was saying for once. “That’s how I feel about the Ballroom, honestly. When I went through puberty and my parents figured out that I was an Omega instead of some charming Alpha, they stopped giving a fuck about me pretty fast. And then when I came back from Iraq…well, not everyone loves the idea of dealing with a fucked up, displaced Marine fresh from war.”

  “Your ACL,” I recalled.

  “No—that was after.” He pulled his shirt up, letting the red and blue of the club’s lights wash over his abs. “Another roadside bomb—Fallujah this time. My body recovered okay, but I was in pretty bad denial of my own damn PTSD in the aftermath. Tearing my ACL was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to me, honestly—or else I might’ve gone back for another tour.”

  “So you started dancing at the Ballroom instead,” I said softly, resisting the urge to reach out and run my fingers over the scars Iraq had left in Noah’s skin.

  “Foster made a lot of allowances for me,” Noah admitted, dropping his shirt back down over his abs again. “At first, I thought he just wanted the clout of having a veteran on his roster—but then I realized what a bad habit he has of taking in strays. Runaways, vets, former junkies…most of them don’t stick around for long, but the Ballroom is home for them while they try to figure out where they’re really meant to be.”

  “That’s…admirable.” Admirable didn’t really cut it—the Ballroom sounded like exactly the kind of place I wished I would’ve had when I turned eighteen and realized the whole world was going to be just as rough on me as my childhood had been. “Christ, look at us—two fucked up, battered assholes sharing stories of our scars.”

  Noah smirked. “Couldn’t be more cliché if we tried, huh?”

  “From Marine to exotic dancer…you’re less cliché than you’re giving yourself credit for.”

  “Almost as unlikely as a kid from the rough part of the Bronx growing up to work on Wall Street,” Noah countered. “Ross and Patrick must be so proud that you grew up to be a big fancy database manager like you did.”

  “Accountant,” I corrected him—and then, as soon as the word left my mouth, I clenched my big fat idiot jaw shut.

  “Accountant. Right.” Noah’s grin widened as he saw the way I was mentally kicking myself.

  Don’t trust Omegas, Dad had always said—especially when you were in too deep to keep your fucking story straight.

  10

  Noah

  I’d known from the start that playing Ace’s own game against him would be the most fun I’d had all year. At every twist and turn of it, the feeling had only amplified: I loved the feeling of competition between us, and I loved even more that he’d proven to be such a worthy opponent.

  But beating Ace at his own game?

  God, it was like everything else before him had been in black and white and now my world had finally bloomed into Technicolor. We walked hand in hand down Broadway, the clamor of New York traffic setting the soundtrack and the camera flashes of tourists lighting our way. Ace’s little slip-up should have soured the mood for the evening, but it hadn’t—maybe because it hadn’t felt like a slip-up at all.

  I’d never really believed that Ace Winston was a database manager at Hayward Financial. I’d never believed he lived in a penthouse overlooking Central Park. There’d never been a chance that he could have won out against me in his little contest of intrigue, because I’d been holding all the best pieces in the palm of my hand the whole time.

  Ace forgetting his story hadn’t been an accident—at least, not in my mind.

  It had been a confirmation that I’d won.

  His fingers tightened around mine as he drew me away from a manhole cover, the foggy steam rising up from it swirling around us like something out of a dream. We pressed together, shoulder to shoulder as we moved through the crowd. Inseparable. So close to evenly matched that I couldn’t envision a more perfect man for me if I’d tried.

  For the first time since this all began, I actually felt at ease with it all. There was no more pretending to do, no more coyness or double-taking or needling each other for information.

  I knew that he knew what he’d been up to, and he knew that I knew that he knew. I had him, and for the night, at least, he had me as well.

  Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, neither of us was in Kansas anymore. We were in the thick of it now. Everything else had been stripped away. And neither of us had needed to say it—admitting defeat wasn’t Ace’s style, and I couldn’t gloat about it if he hadn’t brought a white flag to flash. It was a quiet kind of surrender, and I fucking reveled in it.

  Then the scent of a greasy New York pizza joint caught my nose, and I reveled in that too.

  “You hungry?” I asked, finding myself beaming as I looked up at him.

  He cracked a grin as well. A slower kind of grin, sure, but a smile all the same. “Always. What’re you in the mood for?”

  I dragged him into the pizza place, ordering us each a soda and a slice. I was craving Cherry Pepsi, which was strange for me—fizzy, sugary drinks didn’t usually factor into my fitness regimen. Grease and cholesterol didn’t exactly get you abs. But this night wasn’t like other nights, and being out with Ace didn’t feel like being out with other men. In my victory, I felt like every cell in my body was buzzing. Normally, I would have grabbed a salad for dinner—maybe a gin and tonic, if I was feeling especially triumphant. But tonight—no, I wanted calories and flavor and a whole different world of things that were bad for me. I was craving taste and sight and sound, and more than anything…God, I was craving him.

  “You smell so fucking good tonight,” I murmured, tucking myself beneath his arm as the spice and oil of pepperoni and melted cheese lit up on my tongue. “New cologne or something?”

  “Not that I can think of,” he said after a beat. “I don’t usually wear cologne at all, actually.”

  “Mm. So you’ve been wearing it just for me.”

  He moved his arm from my waist to my shoulder, draping his muscles around me like I was something he owned. “I’ve been wearing a lot of things for you, actually.”

  “The Rolex?” I asked, glancing down at his wrist by my neck.

  “Real,” he admitted. “Belonged to my Dad, before he died.”

  “And the Armani?”

  “Real,” he confirmed.

  “Mm. So only the backstory was fake.” I shouldn’t have said it—but damn, it was hard not to gloat.

  He chuckled, allowing me to enjoy the little jab. “Bits and pieces. Yours?”

  “Oh, completely real. Entirely.” I laughed at the audacity I would’ve needed to fabricate all the sob stories I’d spun him. “What kind of jackass pretends to be a wounded soldier?”

  “A worse kind of jackass than the kind pretending to be an accountant,” he agreed.

  “Database manager,” I reminded him. “Do you normally have such a hard time keeping your personas in line?”

  “Not at all. But no one ever throws me off quite the way that you do.”

  I turned, pressing my nose against his jawline and breathing him in again.
Christ, he smelled so good it should have been illegal—not just the cologne, but him. Beneath the amber and leather, there was a warmth to his skin that I just couldn’t place. Not sweat—although considering how artfully I’d caught him in his lie, it was a wonder that he hadn’t been sweating. It was just… Just Ace.

  Just him.

  “What do you really do for a living?” I asked, not bothering to keep up the illusion anymore.

  “Same thing that my dad did when he got out of the army.”

  “Drinking, whoring and being angry at the world?”

  “Nah.” He tugged me down a side street, leading us away from the tourists and the comedians handing out fliers to their shows. “Not that he didn’t do all of that as well, I mean, but getting trashed just because I knew I could has never sounded like very much fun to me. The hangovers are never worth it.”

  “And the whoring?”

  He laughed. “You’ve seen me naked, Noah. I might be a horny bastard, but I’ve never had to pay for it.”

  “And you’re not angry.” It wasn’t a question—despite his criminal record, Ace didn’t strike me as the kind of man who felt like he needed to fight the world and everyone in it.

  “I used to be,” he said softly. “But no. Not angry. Not anymore.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out.

  He reached up, ruffling my hair. “Figured as smart as you are, you must have already figured it out.”

  “I know you’re working for Harmon,” I finally said. “We caught you doing surveillance on the club long before I met you.”

  “Yeah, I figured you must have. Surveillance is part of it, sure.”

  “And seducing blue-eyed Omegas?”

  He nodded. “Another part. I guess you could call me a private investigator, but that’s not really all that accurate either.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t spend all your time taking pictures of cheating husbands in the park?”

  “Ha. Sometimes. Sometimes, it’s a little more insidious. Talking my way into boardrooms and backroom meetings. Finding out things that other people would rather no one knew about. I do crooked jobs for crooked men like Wesley Harmon. Jobs that only a man like me knows how to do.”

  “How much did he pay you to fuck me?” I asked, feeling momentarily cruel.

  Ace looked down at me, his dark eyes glimmering with the same cruelty. “Who said he was paying me to make you cum around my cock?”

  I shrugged. “You said seduction was part of it.”

  “Seduction, sure. Not necessarily sex, though. Harmon didn’t exactly pick you out of a line-up, hand me your picture and a fat stack of bills, tell me to take you to bed until you were so obsessed with me that you’d do anything I said. It wasn’t like that.”

  “No? What, then?”

  Abruptly, Ace stopped and turned to me, cupping my face in his hands. “You really think now that you’ve made me slip up, I’ll tell you all my secrets, huh?”

  I smiled, enjoying the roughness of his palms against my jawline. He had calluses on those hands of his, the kinds that ran deeper than something a Wall Street billionaire managed to work up pumping iron at the gym.

  “I warned you about how I feel about secrets,” I told him. “Nothing more satisfying than digging them up and cracking them open.”

  “You can stop being smug, then. You haven’t cracked me completely. Not yet.”

  “Yet.” I repeated the word, even more delicious than the bubbling sweetness of the Cherry Pepsi on my tongue. “Maybe not. But I’ll get there.”

  “I’ve never had any trouble getting you there,” Ace agreed, a certain filthiness in his tone that told me he was talking about a different kind of uncovering.

  It made me shiver, the way he talked to me like that. Combined with the deliciousness of his scent, his rough fucking hands and the stubble on his cheeks that I just couldn’t stop thinking about moving my lips against, it stirred up the perfect storm of need in me. My cock, perpetually at half-mast any time Ace and I were so much as in the same room together, was suddenly rock hard and aching for him. He even had my asshole throbbing, honey lubricating the tightness of the ring like my body had already decided exactly how bad it needed him inside of it.

  “You’re a bad man, Ace Winston,” I said, staring up at him with unveiled need and biting my lower lip. “If that is your real name.”

  “It is,” he revealed. “You didn’t give me a chance to give you a fake.”

  “And what I’m feeling between us now?” I asked—even though I shouldn’t have asked that either. Ace was the enemy. He had been from the start. It didn’t keep me from wanting him, but it had made it so much easier to hold myself back. Now, with everything else stripped away, though… “Fake or real?”

  He laughed. “Does it matter?”

  “Matters to me.”

  “Mm.” His voice was throaty and low as he hummed with pleasure, shifting one hand around to cradle the back of my head while he moved his thumb to my lower lip. “Real, Noah. Very real. Commandingly, all-consumingly…Christ, so fucking real I don’t know whether I ought to hit you for making me feel it or kiss you out of sheer gratefulness for it.”

  “I know which I’d prefer,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he admitted, a flash of teeth before he lowered his lips to mine. “Yeah—so do I.”

  I’d kissed plenty of Alphas in my life. A stolen peck beneath the bleachers in high school, our football pads clashing against each other before we put on our helmets to kick off the homecoming game. Passionate ones in the shade of the MRAP, ears still ringing from the rifle fire and guns tossed to the dirt as we celebrated the fact that we were somehow still alive. I’d kissed Alphas in clubs, in alleyways, in taxis on the way back to their penthouses and up against the jukeboxes of shitty pool hall bars—

  But that kiss, it blew all of them out of existence. Knocked every memory of every other Alpha I’d ever been with right out of my head and onto the cracked sidewalk beneath our feet. The taste on his tongue, orange Fanta and New York thin-crust, replaced every other taste I could conjure. The heat of him, his firmness, his roughness and need, plucked every other Alpha out of every other space in my mind. Suddenly, it was Ace that I’d been kissing beneath those bleachers; Ace’s fingers scrambling with desperation against the zipper of my flak jacket.

  As Ace kissed me, every other Alpha I’d ever been with bubbled away like the effervescence in a bottle of Cherry Pepsi, and in their absence, it was only him. It had only ever been him.

  “I don’t live far from here,” he rumbled against my lips, letting the suggestion mingle with the heat of our breaths.

  “Good,” I told him, my gaze capturing his. “Then take me there.”

  He hailed a cab one-handed with a whistle and a wave. The other hand was busy, clasped tight in mine, not letting me go.

  11

  Ace

  It was a shitty apartment, not the penthouse that Noah might have imagined. Immaculately clean, sure, but not fancy. Not luxe. There was no fireplace to lay him down in front of, just the radiator by the window. No bearskin rug to make love to him on, only the area rug that the Eriksons had left me when they’d moved out to the suburbs would have to do.

  I’d meant to take Noah to bed with me. My bed: plush, king-sized—not a billionaire’s bed, no, but a damn fine bed just the same. But as it turned out, we couldn’t make it that far. The cab ride over had left me so hard, the sound of my zipper as he tugged it down was a chorus of angels crooning in my ear. The feel of hands on my hips as he tugged me to the floor with him, the closest thing to salvation I’d ever known.

  He knew. Of course he knew. Noah might not have known all the details of the work I’d been doing for Wesley Harmon, but he’d known enough that it would have been an insult to Noah’s cunning to keep up the lies. He’d known that I’d never been out to seduce him because he was a hot piece of ass, even though he was. That I wasn’t interested in him for his charms, ample
as they were, or his dance skills, impressive as they were, or the way he made my cock so hard I thought my tip might fucking explode if I didn’t get it into his mouth as quickly as possible, even though that was true as well.

  He knew that I’d chased after him as part of my job description, and yet there he was, straddling me and raining kisses across the tattoos and scars of my chest, one fist wrapped around my cock, the other curling against my throat.

  “You like it rough,” I said, laughing darkly as he held me down by my neck.

  “Rough sex for a rough man,” Noah countered. “Now that I know you’re not some spoiled billionaire, I won’t hold back.”

  “Yeah? You going to give me another scar or two to tell the next poor boy I’m with about?”

  He smiled darkly as he worked his hips against mine, his fist sliding up my shaft in a way that made my eyes roll back. A moan escaped my throat, soft and low. Noah caught it in a kiss before he dipped his lips to my ear, his voice a rough rasp.

  “There won’t be a next boy and you know it. As for scars… No, your body is perfect the way it is.”

  He reared back, straightening as he unzipped his own jeans. Noah Layton with his clothes on was a wet dream for a sinner like me. With his clothes off, he was pure fucking heaven. But Noah Layton straddling my lap with his hard, stiff cock standing at attention, the thickness of his tip pearled with precum as he pulled it from the opening of his jeans?

  Perfect didn’t even begin to describe Noah in that state. Something beyond heaven—divine and holy, sure, but something told me that if I did the things I wanted to do to him, I’d go straight to hell and I’d thank him for it, too.

  He looked down at me, perching on my lap like it was some kind of throne, and for a moment, I couldn’t help but feel like he really was some kind of young god. When he reclaimed my cock in his fingers, I could only close my eyes and let a gasp leave my throat like some kind of silent prayer.