Page 8 of Lucky or Knot
“Honestly?”
“No, please lie to me.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” he sniffed, and tossed his head, his glossy hair rippling like something out of a vaguely R-rated shampoo commercial.
It hit me all of a sudden that when—if, dammit, if—I took his offer, which I couldn’t really believe I’d basically committed to doing, I’d be able to wrap my hand in that smooth shinywaterfall of hair. Around and around. Tug his head back with it. Unbutton his collar.
Bite my way down his throat while I…
“Mmmph,” I said, biting back a real groan. Knot my pants. That’s what I would do.
Christ, I needed to fuck him and get this magic out of my system.
His brows furrowed. “Are you quite well? Did you hurt yourself when you fell down? You’re an alpha, aren’t you? Don’t you heal?”
The knee-jerk response came out before I could stop it. “I’ll show you how much of an alpha I am.”
“Good,” he said sweetly. “Then let’s get out of here.”
Get out of here. Go to…not my apartment, I knew better than to take a fairy home with me. Somehow I also knew he wouldn’t be taking me to wherever he called home, either. A hotel, maybe? He’d better be paying for it. The club was plenty staffed for the night, and it was getting late anyway. We could head out to wherever he had in mind once I had a quick word with Scott and let him know I wouldn’t be on stage anymore.
But I’d asked him…my head spun. A question. I blinked, and he faded in and out. Magic sucked so hard.
“Why me?” I dug my claws into my palms a bit, and the sting cleared my head. “Straight answer, or no deal.”
“I lost a bet with a friend,” he said after a noticeable hesitation, his eyes darting away again. Hopefully he never played poker, because he had more tells than a drunk frat boy on his first trip to Vegas. This one, in my limited experience, seemed to indicate discomfort and embarrassment. “I’m not sure if you know what happens to my kind when we fail to carry out an obligation, but it’s deeply unplea—anyway, that doesn’t matter to you. All that matters is that this seemed like a more or less safe place to find a suitable alpha. And you were thefirst one who caught my eye. It was difficult to overlook your performance.”
Right. He probably figured I’d be the most desperate, since I couldn’t even get through a dance without slipping on a banana peel—although that had been his fault in the first place, for having the most distracting scent on Earth.
Not that I’d be telling him that. He didn’t seem like a guy whose ego needed a whole lot of stroking, especially since he didn’t seem inclined to stroke mine in return.
Because rephrasing his fairy weaseling as bluntly as possible, he’d picked me to fuck him because he’d probably die horribly if he didn’t, and he thought I might be enough of a sad sack to take whatever he paid me.
How fucking flattering.
That said, however much it stung, he wasn’t completely wrong.
“Fine,” I said shortly. “Wait for me in the parking lot out back. You drive here?”
“We can walk to the hotel.” I suppressed a growl. The details of his transportation didn’t matter, particularly, but I’d started getting annoyed by the way he tended to answer a different question than the one I’d asked. “I booked a room at that place with the big palm trees around the corner. It didn’t look like we’d get lice from walking in the door, but otherwise, I can’t make any promises.”
Meh. I worked in a strip club with people like Dominic, so my standards were already a little iffy. His were guaranteed to be much higher.
Besides, he hadn’t made the obvious joke about fleas that most people did when talking about shifters and potential vermin in the same sentence, and I had to give him points for that.
“I’ll meet you out back in ten minutes,” I said, and headedout of the room without waiting for a reply, shutting the door behind me.
I gave it fifty-fifty that he’d actually follow through after ten minutes to think better of it, and he was probably giving me the same odds.
But when I emerged from the discreet employees-only door at the corner of the building, there he was, leaning against the low cinderblock wall that divided our parking lot from the strip mall next door. Moonlight glinted blue on his hair and snowy white on his face and seemed to be absorbed into his outfit like it would into a black hole. Another slight gleam picked out his painted toenails. The whole effect unsettled me, and I actually jumped a bit when he started moving, walking toward me like something out of a particularly surreal dream.
It had all my hackles up as he fell into step with me without a word, crossing through the strip mall’s parking lot and around the corner to the cheap hotel on the other side of the block.
Hopefully that was really where he meant to go, anyway. If he tried to lead me out of the mundane world, I’d be out of here, debts or no debts, painfully hard erection or not.
Past midnight in this far off-Strip area, only a few cars went by, and all the other businesses had closed. My footsteps echoed loud in the relative silence, and his high heels clicked on the pavement, a reassuringly normal sound. A chill desert wind brushed by us, and my breath came out in huge puffs of steam. Even more reassuringly, so did his.
That faint, nagging sensation of prickling wrongness didn’t vanish, though.
