Jeremy who was long gone, she told herself firmly. And the reason she’d built this new life for herself at Madame R. In the aftermath of Jeremy, she’d wanted something more stable. More permanent. Not so full of the crazy as theater life. Though some might question the choice of a burlesque club as the saner option, it was hers.
She tried to let the memory of Jeremy dissolve back into past regrets where it belonged. Easy enough to figure what had conjured him tonight, though. The appearance of another man with that bad-boy edge. That touch of danger that drew her despite her better judgment. Despite the lessons she’d learned.
Which only went to show that she still needed to be alone. To keep learning that lesson. So Malachi Coulter and his big bad self were to be firmly kept at arm’s length.
She took a bite of sandwich, chewed. She needed food and sleep. Not a man. But she wasn’t sleepy yet.
There was a folder of paperwork she’d brought home from the club with her. She could spend an hour checking accounts and doing all that administrative crap that never seemed to end. That might be boring enough to reverse the effects of the night and send her to sleep.
Or maybe not. She was buzzed, her foot tapping restlessly against the leg of the chair.
Which, lessons learned or not, she knew wasn’t entirely due to the usual performance rush. Nope. It was perfectly clear, when she let herself look squarely at the problem, that part of what had her body humming was the unexpected appearance of Malachi Coulter in her club.
Drinking her beer. Drinking her in with his eyes.
Making her want to eat him up.
Inconvenient was too mild a world for it. Inappropriate was closer.
Inadvisable closer still.
Or maybe just plain old insane. He was the wrong guy. She didn’t need another wrong guy.
Been there, done that. Twice even.
So all this energy surging through her was going to have to be channeled elsewhere. She could take it out on the Angels in their rehearsals or else fit a daily run into her spare seconds. Brady had an elliptical trainer down in the club’s basement. That would work. Or maybe even a dance class or two. She hadn’t made it down to Evie’s studio in far too long. She just had to work it off or wait it out. Eventually, it would wear off. Bad-boy buzz usually did.
But wearing off wouldn’t help her tonight, so she needed a distraction. A new routine for one of the girls at the club? Or herself? Or a new costume. New costumes were always fun. She stretched an arm out to grab her tablet. Then looked around for the stylus. It wasn’t in its usual place in the cup of pencils beside her monitor. Which meant that Wash had probably kidnapped it.
For reasons known only to his small feline brain, he had something of an obsession with her stylus. Maybe it was the shiny green color. Maybe it was the fact that he didn’t like it when she sat on the couch and worked on her tablet instead of letting him sit on her lap, so he blamed it on the stylus. Either way, two days out of three the stylus went missing from her desk. It didn’t matter if she hid it in a drawer—Wash could open drawers—and if she put it somewhere truly Maine Coon–proof, he would just steal something else. She’d resigned herself to playing hunt-the-stylus more regularly than she might have liked.
It looked like she would be playing tonight. She eased herself out of the seat, winced at the stiffness in her muscles setting in. Between the Angels and the club, she had been spending more time dancing than she had in a while. The return of the familiar aches and pains that had been her companions when she’d worked on Broadway, along with a few new friends they brought along for the ride, was reminding her exactly why she’d given up full time professional dancing.
She was thirty. Old for a dancer. And feeling it.
Perhaps she’d add a bath to the agenda. She’d showered at the club and rubbed herself down with her favorite stinky liniment but it hadn’t quite done the job. A bath. With the killer mineral salts and some lavender oil or something to relax her. And a book, perhaps. But first the stylus.
When she was halfway to Wash’s bed—his favored hiding spot for his prizes—her cell phone starting playing “Send Me An Angel.” Which meant one of the girls or Brady had been messing with her settings again. They were all pretty amused by her Saints gig, and angel-themed ringtones, screensavers, and tchotchkes were appearing in strange places with alarming regularity.
Raina reversed direction and headed back to her kitchen counter, grabbing the phone just before it went to voice mail. Sure enough it was Brady.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed with your new husband?” she said only half joking.
“Luis is doing something with the security cameras,” Brady said. “So we’re still at the club and I’m bored.”
“Sew a sequin on something.” Brady helped backstage with makeup, costumes, and whatever else the girls needed to keep the Madame R show ticking over like clockwork. He also designed a lot of the costumes and turned the ideas Raina had into glorious shining reality.
“I’m off the clock,” he retorted.
“You’re never off the clock. Neither am I.”
“Which is why I knew you’d be awake at this ungodly hour to talk me through my boredom.”
“First, tell me about the security cameras,” Raina said. The security system at the club was about as good as she could afford, but the setup she’d chosen had proven to have a number of quirks. Including cameras that seemed to decide at random to go on strike, the occasional spontaneous wiping of the hard drives they used to record the images, and other niggles that kept Luis busy on a regular basis.
He’d threatened more than once to go down and knock the heads of the guys who’d sold her the system, but Raina had restrained him. She didn’t want the trouble and suspected the reason she’d gotten a deal on the system in the first place was because it was perhaps not entirely from the original manufacturer. But it did the job for now. She’d replace it as soon as she could, but at the moment she was saving every possible penny.
“Luis says it’s nothing to worry about,” Brady said. “He’ll fix it.”