Page 6 of Lucky or Knot
“I’m not flustered,” he protested unconvincingly. Hmm. Humans could lie, while some nonhumans could and others couldn’t. But this bit of untruth didn’t prove anything either way. As long as you believed what you said, technically you were telling the truth. Did he honestly think he was fooling himself, let alone me? His gaze snapped up to meet mine at last, eyes all wide. “I’m perfectly calm!”
He so wasn’t. Odd, because he’d seemed calm enough when I walked in. It was when we’d talked about him being a paying customer that he’d started to get ruffled, now that I thought about it.
Huh. Jesus. Maybe his credit card was going to decline and this would be a big fat waste of time.
I took that step forward again after all, because why not? And I wanted him to really lose his cool, if only because he seemed likelier to start stammering out some explanation for what the hell he’d been doing to me.
“Oh yeah? I can see your pulse in the side of your neck. Pounding away.” Another small step put me right in his personalspace, enough that he had to tip his head back to keep looking at me. “Maybe you want me to do some things to get you even more worked up, huh? Or maybe you want to get me worked up? I can sit down and let you do that audition. You want to show me how you can dance in those heels?” As an experiment, I added, “Put your money where your mouth is.”
His whole body tensed, and his eyes flitted away from mine again.
Bingo, and the satisfaction of being right gave me a momentary sense of smugness.
But figuring out his problem somehow revolved around money didn’t help me much. And anyway…like, join the club, dude.
Whatever, no matter how attractive this guy might be, and no matter how much magic he’d used on me to make himself appear that way, I had a loan shark to pay. If he hoped that seducing me would get me to give him perks for free, I had to shut that shit down.
Playing along stopped as soon as he didn’t pay. No exceptions.
“I can dance instead,” I suggested—reluctantly, because now that I had the image of him writhing in my lap, all covered up in his ridiculously modest clothes but wearing those even more ridiculous shoes, flushed and flustered, neither of my heads were letting go of it easily. “Since we’re back here where it’s nice and private, I can do a little more than I did on stage. Forty for the first song, but if you want to keep going, that can be thirty each for the next couple of dances.”
I gave him my smirkiest, most suggestive smile, and his eyes flicked up. His chest visibly rose and fell now, and his pulse had gone wild. Was he hard? If I stepped back and took a good look I’d be able to tell, but from this angle I couldn’t be sure.
His tongue flicked out to moisten his lower lip, and…no, Ihad to have imagined the slight fork at the tip, right?
Christ, what had I gotten myself into?
“Do you want a dance or not?” The words came out a lot more harshly than I’d intended, and definitely not in a customer-friendly tone. I should’ve taken the night off. Had a couple of beers. Watched some hockey. Simple, dammit. I liked my lifesimple.
Not infested with forked-tongued magic stripper-wannabes who made me fall down on my ass on stage and then got me all hot and bothered.
He pressed his lips together and cocked his head, and then nodded once, like a man—almost man-shaped being?—who’d made up his mind.
“No,” he said at last, and then, “No, I don’t,” more firmly. “I don’t want a dance. Not because you fell down!” he added hurriedly, in what appeared to be an attempt at tact, and then even more hurriedly, probably because I couldn’t help the low growl that curled out from between my teeth: “Not that it was, um, it was a great dance. Very seductive. That’s why I’m here, in this private room with you,” he finished triumphantly, and pasted on an obviously forced smile.
“Okay,” I said, with all the patience I could muster. Beer. Hockey. Or, failing that, a normal paying client. Fuck. Fine, forget patience. And forget customer service. “If you don’t want a dance, why are you back here? You wanna talk or something? Or just drink the overpriced champagne? I don’t have any drugs, but I don’t care if you want to do some, but I charge the same to watch you do lines as I do to dance, FYI. Double if you want to do it off my abs.”
That was a request I’d gotten surprisingly often. Or maybe not so surprisingly, considering that more than half the people who came in here, no matter what sex or species, had gotten all their ideas of what you did in a strip club fromwatching shitty movies.
He blinked at me, his mouth falling open. “Ugh! Seriously?” he asked, his voice going up a startled octave. “By the time you scraped it together, it’d be half glitter!”
That startled a laugh out of me, because…agreed, it would be, and it was indeed ugh. On my side of the equation, too.
But then my laugh turned into a choke as he reached in his pocket, whipped out a shimmering gold coin, and said, “I want you to give in to your instincts and knot me thoroughly, and I can offer you this in exchange.”
Chapter 3
“The fuck you do,” I wheezed, and then sucked in a deep breath, only to immediately double over coughing again as I got a whiff of the coin between his fingers.
It absolutely reeked of magic. Strong magic.
Fae magic, in fact, of the most wild and inhuman kind.
“Christ,” I tried again, and then hacked, sniffed, and pushed off my knees to stand upright again.
Blinking to clear my watering eyes, I examined him through this new lens. Yeah. Fairy absolutely fit. Short, slim, unearthly beauty, the too-wide eyes and the glossy black hair color that I’d assumed came from an expensive salon and instead had actually grown that way. Plus, super fucking weird. Fairies always were.
Like any shifter with a functioning nose, I could usually pick one out of a crowd, but his scent wasn’t like anything I’d ever encountered. At least this explained the tongue.
