Page 2 of Lucky or Knot
As I hesitated by the hallway door, trying to work up the willpower to go up the stairs and do my job, Dominic pushed past me and took the steps two at a time, muttering something about easy money and how he’d show me.
Jesus Christ, what a douchebag. The bouncer stationed on the landing pulled a face at me as Dominic passed him, and I shook my head in answer.
As I watched Dominic saunter over to their table, the three young guys went from wide-eyed to bug-eyed. Fair enough. Dominic might be nothing like my type, but I could see the objective appeal, at least before he opened his mouth and started talking: he was over six feet of tanned alpha muscle, and the silver really stood out against his skin. I tended to stick to darker colors, myself. My natural tone glowed in the dark, unless you counted the freckles, and the one time I’d tried the fake tanning thing…well, red hair, golden-orange eyes, and orangey-bronze skin didn’t go together.
To say the least.
When I’d come into the club the day after the spray tan, the bartender had screamed like a little girl when he saw me. That seemed like a hint to take the week off and buy some exfoliant.
The song playing ended with a final flurry of drumbeats, quickly drowned out by hooting and applause. I glanced over at the stage. Cassidy had been performing, and he grinned and bowed and scooped up money and the discarded bits of his firefighter costume, his bare buttocks glistening.
Dammit. We’d told him so many freaking times not to use that much oil on the stage. The next guy was going to slip and fall down on his own shiny ass one of these days. Since we were all alpha shifters, none of us would get seriously hurt, but no one wanted to look like a fucking idiot in the middle of a dance.
A bit of motion in my peripheral vision caught my eye: Scott beckoning me over to his DJ booth against the wall. I headed his way, pausing only to flex my arm muscles and smile flirtatiously at a couple of women at a nearby table. One of the other guys was already hanging out, but hey, two of them, two of us, maybe? And they had a bottle of the expensive bubbly in an ice bucket. They might be good tippers.
Louie’s remembered laughter rang in my ears. Fucker enjoyed twisting the knife, maybe even more than he enjoyed getting his money back with interest.
I should’ve gone upstairs and milked it with those pretty little probably-college boys, damn it all. They were probably going to get sucked in by Dominic’s smarmy charm and lured back to a VIP room.
Hopefully no one would get suckedoffin the process, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Dominic claimed to prefer women, but he had a few regulars who sucked his cock and paid generously for the privilege, and he was always open for new opportunities.
And while I liked blowjobs—in both directions, in fact—as much as the next sexually omnivorous alpha, and had been told more than once that the raspy texture of my tongue could send a sensitive recipient into the stratosphere, I never got thatphysical with customers. Just not a line I was willing to cross.
Whatever. Dominic wasn’t my problem, thank every deity above and below, because I had enough of my own—and I wouldn’t have wanted to be responsible for him even if I was bored.
The booth didn’t have a ton of space in it, but I managed to wedge myself inside and push the door closed behind me, shutting out a lot of the noise with it.
Scott looked up from adjusting some kind of switch on the board in front of him, and a club favorite with a catchy beat started playing out on the floor. He had his headphones on one ear and off the other, and his sweaty black hair stood up in spiky tufts. One of the only humans in the place, and he looked more like a hedgehog than anything else.
“I know you just got off stage less than an hour ago,” he said, “but Morgan’s supposed to go on, and he’s in the back. Actually, peek into room three if you walk by. Kind of an odd couple. Married, I think? I’m not sure which one of them wanted to come here, they both seemed weird about it. Whatever, they were tipping a lot.”
Scott’s gossip washed over me, but I nodded, actually kind of relieved. Going around and making nice with people at tables, or trying to get them to do a private session, sounded exhausting. Dominic’s irritating conversation had been the cherry on top of my stressed-out sundae.
“I don’t mind dancing again,” I said. “I’ll be ready in like two minutes.”
“You gonna change?” he asked, looking me up and down. In addition to the pleather pants, which still showed the thick bulge between my legs just fine, I had heavy boots, and also a sparkly black G-string under the pants, although he couldn’t see that. My chest was bare, except for the glitter. “Or you want to just do Closer?”
My usual persona was a lot goofier and more fun than that, and people loved it. My Nicki Minaj routine got a lot of cheers, especially the getting on the floor—and sometimes I even got everyone to do the hands up to touch the sky part, if I really worked the crowd. Once they waved their money in the air, they felt stupid not tossing it on the stage afterward.
But yeah. Tonight, Closer would fit my mood a lot better. Besides, I really didn’t feel like getting dressed up in anything fun. For this song, I could rip the pants off during the song’s first chorus, right on “closer to God”—they had Velcro down the inseams, because I liked the quick, hard reveal—and then use my boots, G-string, and my very own claws, fangs, and glowing eyes for the rest of the “costume.” After all, that was why people came to Lucky or Knot in the first place. We were the only all-alpha strip club in the world, as far as I knew. And people went pretty nuts for it. When Vegas wasn’t in a slump like it was now, we always packed the house.
Declan MacKenna, who owned the Morrigan casino on the Strip and this place and who knew what else, was a fucking visionary. If I had half his intellect and acumen, I wouldn’t have been about to lose my parents’ house because of a college loan I’d wasted by not graduating and a 28 percent APR on a pair of fake tits for a girl who’d cheated on me.
Fuck. Deep breaths.
“Tony? You okay?” Scott said, and I shook my head to clear it a bit and forced another smile. “I can have Dom go on if you’re not. It’s cool, dude. You look out of it.”
“I’m good. No, really.” I punched him on the shoulder—lightly, because human. “Seriously. Thank you. Closer’s perfect. Give me a minute, okay?”
I slipped out of the booth before he could keep questioning me and headed for the same door I’d come out of a few minutes ago, on my way to the locker room and thenbackstage.
It only took me the promised minute to get myself ready: a little more glitter, silver and black this time to fit the song’s darker fantasy, and some leather armbands, because why the fuck not.
Scott announced me as I jogged up the short flight of backstage stairs, and then I was under the lights and center stage, the distinctive staticky opening beat of the song accompanying me.
Fluid movements, getting them enticed, prowling…I’d started stripping simply because it paid the best out of the jobs that depended mostly on my having muscles for days.
But when the audience stopped their conversations mid-sentence, their drinks held poised in the air as they forgot to take a sip, their eyes fixed on me with complete focus…well, that gave me a certain amount of satisfaction. Not an erotic type of satisfaction—luckily, because Nevada law wouldn’t let me take everything off on the stage in a club that served alcohol, and some genius in a bureaucratic hellhole somewhere had decided that erections, even clothed, counted as nudity.
