by Aiden Bates
“So, what?” I crossed my arms over my chest, tilting my head back in a challenge. “Either come with you willingly, or you’re going to gag me and throw me into the back of your windowless van by force.”
He laughed, taking a step closer. Just one. “It’s a Tesla, actually. And, no—if I was going to gag you, I’d insist that it was a consensual kind of thing. I’ll tell you this, though…I’m not letting you try and walk home alone. Not looking like that.”
“Like what?” I raised the challenge again, my voice even harsher this time.
“Like the kind of Omega that some shithead Alpha with a darker agenda than mine might actually throw into a windowless van,” he pointed out. His hand dove into his pocket, fishing out a business card and offering it to me along with his jacket. “My name is Alton Palmer. I’m the CFO at Sterling Financial.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “And that’s supposed to make me feel any better? I’ve never even heard of you.”
“No,” he said with a laugh. “CFOs don’t get quite as much press these days, that’s true. But if you don’t believe me, we can call my secretary.”
“And then what? She’ll confirm that you’re not the kind of guy who goes around kidnapping shirtless Omegas?”
He shrugged. “We’ll call the CEO, then. You might not have heard of me, but you’ve heard of Don Sterling, I’m sure.”
My other eyebrow shot up, until I forced them both down back into a scowl. Of course I’d heard of Don Sterling. Playboy Alpha asshole. Owned half the city and then some.
Out of curiosity, I approached Alton and took his card. Heavy, creamy card stock. Legitimate-looking typeface. He seemed to be who he said he was—and from the scent of his cologne, faint and fresh instead of overpowering and musky, it struck me that he didn’t smell like the kidnapping type.
“Sorry,” I said lamely, offering his card back to him. “It’s just…New York Alphas. You’re not usually so generous unless you’re angling for something.”
“We usually are,” Alton agreed. “Guess you’ll just have to trust me. My fathers didn’t raise me to be a jackass…and it looks like you’ve had a shitty night.”
“You have no idea,” I confessed.
He laughed. “You’re hanging outside of the Backdoor without a shirt on. I have some idea. Keep the card. Take the jacket, too.”
He held it out to me again, and sighing, I took it. The liner was silk, smooth and cool against the bare skin of my back.
“Just a ride, though,” I warned him. “I’m not some kind of…hooker or escort or whatever.”
“I can tell.” He offered me his arm as I shrugged my arms through the jacket. Tentatively, I took it, feeling a hard, chiseled bicep beneath the linen of his shirt. “You’re safe with me, okay?”
“If you say so,” I grumbled—even though, despite my attitude, I felt it. The warmth of his body. The sense that maybe my luck had just turned—at least, until I got home and had to decide how to afford to keep the lights on.
“Come on,” he offered, leading me out of the alleyway. “My car’s over this way.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as I walked with him, keeping my eyes peeled for any sense of danger. But with Alton, I didn’t find any. No gags, no ropes, no masked assailants or windowless vans in sight.
He was handsome, honest, and helpful—and whether I liked it or not, I was in need of help that night. Feeling safe was exactly what I needed, and there he was, serving it up in an expensive car and a designer jacket.
After all, a Wall Street Alpha taking home a disgraced Omega stripper…how dangerous could it be?
Book 5
His Second Chance Angel
Heaven’s Ballroom: Book 5
Aiden Bates
© 2019
Disclaimer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.
This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18).
1
Alton
There was nothing more sinister for a single father than a dinner invitation—except for, maybe, finding a date for it.
“Are you sure this won’t be…awkward?” I shot an apologetic glance at Max, who only cracked an amused grin. “I meant to arrange something, but…”
“Riley did offer to set you up with one of his friends,” Max reminded me. “He knows a lot of nice young Omegas. Can’t imagine it would have been hard to convince at least one of them to hang off your arm and laugh at your jokes all night.”
“What jokes?” I deadpanned. My sense of humor wasn’t exactly my most stunning quality, after all. Drier than the Mojave on a Thursday, my late husband had called it. It had always been one of my favorite things about Patrick—he’d never been one for cheap, fake laughs. Only the real ones. When I made him laugh, it was because I’d earned it. “Besides. I don’t want Riley having to convince someone to spend time with me. I know I’m a pain in the ass to be around, but…”
“You’re not a pain in the ass,” Max reassured me. “Or at least, not for anyone other than Don Sterling.”
I tensed at the sound of my old business partner’s name—then relaxed my shoulders as I remembered what I’d promised myself. “Let’s not talk about Sterling tonight.”
Max did laugh at that. Sterling and I had gone to university together—along with my current boss, Malcolm Hayward. I’d had a hand in building both of their companies, but ultimately I’d chosen Sterling’s to sign on with after graduation. It had been a good idea at the time—but it had quickly become a worse one as I’d tried to settle down into the pace of happily married life while Sterling kept prowling around like a horny alley cat. The schism that had driven me away from Sterling Enterprises was still a sore spot and he knew it—especially considering that he still worked for Sterling to this day.
“Okay, okay,” Max relented. “Just, don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve just been out of the dating game for too long, you know? Ever since…”
He let the sentence fall off without finishing it. We both knew he didn’t have to. I hadn’t dated since Patrick’s death, an event that had, unfortunately, coincided with the birth of our daughter together. It had never sat right with me that Lizzie was growing up with only one father when she deserved two, but raising a baby on my own had been complicated enough without adding a revolving door of potential replacement daddies to the mix. It would have sat even worse with me to put her through every argument, breakup, and knife twist of heartache that came with the Almega dating scene. Kids needed stability, and thankfully, that was one thing I’d always been able to provide.
“Thanks again for sharing your babysitter with me tonight.” I changed the subject handily—it was one of the most valuable talents Wall Streeters like Max and I were privileged enough to have. Knowing how to shift the conversation from an unpleasant subject to a nicer one saved business deals just as easily as it saved casual evenings with friends. No one wanted to spend an entire night with me talking about my dead husband, after all. “It would’ve been a mess, trying to find a sitter on a Saturday night like this otherwise.”
“Please—Riley and I ought to be thanking you.” Max clapped me on the shoulder sympathetically, but let the conversation drift to more pleasant tides. “Ava and Vivien have been begging for a chance to play with Lizzie again for months now. If anything, you’re the one doing us a favor here.”
I smiled softly as we stared across my living room to the place in the corner where Max’s twin
girls had set up camp, Lizzie settled between them with a book in her lap. Max and Riley had raised Ava and Vivien well—they were smart kids, and Lizzie got along well with them. In Max and Riley’s kitchen, I could already hear the babysitter sizzling something delicious away for dinner—mac and cheese, from the smell of things.
“They’ve got their wish, then,” I said, smiling as the girls helped Lizzie turn a page. “Look—they’ve already got her completely under their spell.”
“Not like it’s hard to win her over,” Max pointed out. “Put a book in front of that girl and she’s set. What’s that they’re reading, anyway?”
“Where the Wild Things Are.” I smiled as I watched Lizzie mouth the words along with them. She was only five—too young, maybe, to be reading so effortlessly, but I suspected that I’d read the book to her so many times that she knew every line by heart. “Just hope they don’t mind reading that exclusively for the rest of the night. It’s all she ever wants to read.”
“At least she has better hobbies than video games,” Riley said, emerging from the bedroom and giving his bow tie a final straightening. He rose up on his tiptoes to kiss Max’s cheek, and I watched the way Max’s arm wound instinctively around Riley’s waist in response. Still in love after all these years—it was cute to know that at least some people got happy endings, even if they weren’t me. “Then let’s head out, okay? I don’t want to miss the opening act.”
“You girls need anything else?” I called out across the room.
Vivien grinned up at me. “We’re good, Mr. Palmer! We’ll tell Kate to call if we need anything.”
“Go easy on Kate. She’ll have her hands full with the three of you tonight,” I warned them, and Ava looked up at me with a brace-toothed grin of her own.
“We promise we will,” she said with a little flash of mischief in her eyes that told me that wasn’t exactly the truth.
I raised my eyebrows at Max and Riley as we crossed through the door.
“Those girls are going to be troublemakers someday,” I said affectionately.
Max only chuckled, squeezing Riley a little tighter. “They sure as hell don’t get it from me.”
“I don’t know, honey,” Riley disagreed with a grin. “They might. They just might.”
A dirty, grooving bass line crawled up from the orchestra pit, joined by a jungle beat on a drum kit and the sharp wail of a guitar. Up on stage, a gorgeous—and strangely familiar-looking—blond Omega with a six-pack hard enough to break a two-by-four on danced a slow, sultry striptease as he did an impeccably cocky Robert Plant impersonation to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”. When he threw the scarf around his neck into the crowd, it landed over my face, smelling deliciously of leather and amber.
I pulled it away, amused that he’d chosen me to christen with his prop. When I removed the silk from my eyes, his gaze caught mine—intensely green and completely captivating. The wave of recognition hit me again, though I couldn’t quite place why. He looked like the lovechild of James Dean and a young Clint Eastwood—pretty, but only in the kind of way that implied that he knew his way around a fist fight.
Just as quickly as his gaze fell over me, it was gone, and so was the feeling that I’d met him before. A face like that, a body like that…I’d been intentionally single for a while, sure, but looking like that, there was no way I would have forgotten him. The blond disappeared to a roar of applause, swaggering offstage all well-oiled muscles and half-unbuttoned jeans, and in his place, I was reminded of exactly how much Heaven’s Ballroom had changed since I’d first walked through its doors.
Once upon a time, half the Alphas at Sterling Enterprises had roamed the main room of this place. Scoping out dancers, buying lap dances in the champagne room, hoping to God they’d meet someone half as charming and handsome as Max had when he first met Riley there. But sometime in the past year, something had shifted at the Ballroom. Once upon a time, the Ballroom was known for being the most high-end strip club in Manhattan. Now, it was the face of the previously non-existent Almega burlesque scene, complete with singing, dancing and not a lap dance to be found on site. Despite all the naysayers who’d insisted that the club would never survive without all the bumping and grinding that had been its bread and butter all these years, it was actually working. The house was packed, the drinks were perfect, and the dancers were better than ever.
All it had taken was some good publicity, a love story or two in the Times and a fancy new dinner menu to transform the place forever. Now, Max had an additional piece of bragging rights when it came to his husband: Riley Griffin was one of the original Angels of Heaven’s Ballroom, which meant we found ourselves drinking at a VIP table after all the other socialites and billionaire patrons had long since been kicked out, the Led Zeppelin dancer’s scarf slung around my neck like a war prize.
“It’s all Foster and Noah,” Riley professed, blowing a kiss to a thin-mustached waiter as he delivered a final round of drinks. “Those two are absolute geniuses—and then, when you put them together…”
“Are they dating?” I asked, indulging myself in my curiosity. I never turned down a chance to hear a good love story—even if it was only a special kind of personal torture. “Sounds like they’d be quite a power couple.”
Riley laughed. “God, no. Both Omegas, anyway—and even if they weren’t, I’m pretty sure they’d wind up killing each other if their relationship was anything beyond professional. Noah’s married now.” He fished his phone out of his pocket, opening Instagram and flashing a picture of a golden-haired Omega and a surly looking Alpha holding little boy who couldn’t have been much older than Lizzie. “There was that will-they-won’t-they piece in the Times about them several years back—the poor Omega stripper and the scoundrel of an Alpha who supposedly knocked him up then disappeared?”
“I remember the photo,” I said with a smile. The look of contrition on the Alpha’s face when he showed up outside the Ballroom to make amends—he’d had every Alpha in the city walking on eggshells for a month as we attempted to meet the new standard of manhood he’d set for us. “Cute couple.”
“Speaking of will-they-won’t-they…Foster still with that mysterious billionaire?” Max asked.
“Oh, who even knows.” Riley rolled his eyes. “Foster Collins is the cagiest Omega I’ve ever met. That relationship has been going on for, what? Nearly a decade now, at least.”
“And you still only know him as that mysterious billionaire?” I asked.
“Christ,” Max swore, shaking his head. “At this rate, he’s nearly as bad as Don Sterling.”
Max reached for his water, dodging his Tom Collins. It was funny—back when Max had worked for my boss, Hayward had him out every night knocking back at least three drinks an hour. Now that Max worked for Don Sterling and I worked for Hayward, I’d had to live in the shadow of his drinking prowess ever since. Unfortunately for Hayward, fatherhood changed everyone—usually for the better of our respective livers.
“How is Don these days?” I asked, broaching the topic gently.
Max cringed slightly anyway, just as aware of my falling out with Don as I was. “He’s not bad. Still slipping away from the boardroom and after-hours meetings to spent time with whatever Omega floozy he’s seeing in any particular week, of course.”
“Hey!” Riley yelped, swatting Max’s arm indignantly. “Careful—you married an Omega floozy, I’ll have you recall.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Riley,” I assuaged. “You and the kind of Omegas that Sterling runs around with—you’re nothing alike in the slightest.”
Knowing that Sterling hadn’t changed in the least left a grumble in my throat, though. His playboy ways were what had driven us apart in the first place. Didn’t make me happy to learn that he hadn’t learned his lesson when I’d finally quit. If anything, it sounded like he was doubling down on chasing tail—and considering that we were both past forty at this point, it disappointed me as his former friend as much as it did as his form
er business partner.
You only got one chance at being with your soul mate, after all. I’d already had mine in Patrick—had mine, and lost him, too. Seeing Max and Riley together warmed my heart, but knowing that Don was squandering his chance at happiness just so he could follow wherever his dick led him only turned my stomach.
“You could always come back, you know,” Max said gingerly, pushing my own drink a little closer to me.
I only shook my head, staring at anything other than the alcohol he was plying me with. When I looked at the black velvet curtains pulled shut across the stage, I could only remember the blinds of Don’s office, perpetually closed while he’d skipped across town to seduce whatever handsome model or actor was in the city for the day. When I glanced at the bar, I could only recall how many last calls I’d had to entertain our wealthy clients through alone while Don humped his way across Manhattan and my pregnant husband had sat at home alone.
And when I saw the gleaming blond hair of the Omega dancer we’d watched earlier, dressed in an all-too-familiar suit jacket as he waved goodbye to the bartender before heading home for the night…
“Sorry,” I apologized, quickly rising. “I’ll be right back, I just…”
“Aw, Alton—come on, I didn’t mean to hit a nerve—”
But it wasn’t my nerves that were the issue in that moment. At least, not the kind that Max was talking about. I did know that Omega, as fate would have it. The memories came rushing back to me in waves—a seedy strip club, a dimly lit alleyway. A bad night for both of us. One that I’d come to regret.
Eliot Ashton. He’d gotten away from me once already…
I’d be damned if he got away from me again.
