Page 18 of Lawless in Leather

“Someone is calling you a whore?”

“Well, maybe not me specifically. Some people don’t get burlesque. They think we’re a strip club.” She tilted her head back, jaw set. “It’s just a word.”

“Well, to some people, naked women are naked women,” he said.

That earned him a flat look. “Are you one of those people?”

“Do I think you’re a stripper? No, I don’t.”

“Good. No lap dances here. Not all the girls take their clothes off, and we do comedy and songs and other things anyway, and?—”

“You don’t need to explain to me. I don’t have a problem with what you do.” Madame R wasn’t a strip club and he knew that Raina herself didn’t tend to take her clothes off there. Or not that the background check they’d done on her could discover. Her face cleared a little and he nodded at the door. “Is this the first time that’s happened?”

“This is a big city, Mr. Coulter. Buildings get vandalized all the time.”

“So people tell me,” Mal said. “But not on my watch.”

“I wasn’t aware that I was on your watch,” Raina said.

“You work for me.”

“When I’m at the Saints, yes. Here, not so much.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t make any difference.”

She looked amused for a moment. “Well, you certainly chose the right career path, didn’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Picking something to channel all those protective instincts into.”

“It’s a job,” he said. “Did you see anybody on your security footage?” He scanned for the cameras that should, if she had any sense at all, be covering the front door. He spotted the mount, but the camera was gone. The back of his neck prickled. “Did they take your camera?”

“No,” she said.

“Then where is it?”

“Being replaced.”

“They cut the feed?”

She looked at him for a long moment. “They spray-painted the lens.”

“So that’s a no to there being any footage. And a no to it just being kids.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Your average teenage vandal doesn’t think about killing the security feeds,” Mal said. “Have there been any other incidents?”

“Someone tried to jimmy the back door two weeks ago. They didn’t succeed.”

“I think I need to talk to your security guy,” Mal said.

She blinked then pursed her lips. “You’re not going to take no for an answer about this, are you?”

“Not likely, no.”

That earned him an eye-roll. “I’m a big girl, Mr. Coulter. I can take care of my business. I’ve been taking care of my business for years now, in fact.”

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