Page 7 of Lucky or Knot
The coin gleamed a rich, pure yellow-gold even in the pink lighting, taking on no hue whatsoever. My fairy would-be john’s thumb partially obscured the side facing me, but an intricate raised design peeked out, maybe outspread wings.
“Well?” he said, and I tore my eyes away from the glittering thing and back to his face. “What do you think of my offer?”
His offer. Right.
At least now I knew I didn’t need to blame Dominic for this.
This little fairy asshole had been using magic to entice me so that I’d want to accept his “offer” of fucking for money. The fall on stage must’ve been an accidental side effect—whichmeant I’d still need to kill Cassidy for the body oil thing. But that hadn’t been malicious on his part, I didn’t think.
Besides, I was pretty sure he’d put on his apparent bravado like his clothes. The arm holding the coin upraised had the very slightest tremor. Had he used his magic in order to boost his own confidence? Could he be incredibly ugly underneath an illusion of beauty, and self-conscious about it? Unable to get laid any other way?
Maybe if I’d been new to my profession I’d have been surprised, shocked, or more pissed off. But aside from the fairy magic thing, which was a new one in the annals of club clients trying to pay for sex…yeah, I’d been here before. Many, many times.
So my tone was more resigned than anything as I said, “What do you think I think of your offer? I’m a stripper, not a prostitute, dude. I don’t do that.”
His lips tightened, and his chin jutted out stubbornly. “You sell your body every day. How is this different?”
“I’m looking at your face right now. If I rubbed my hand all over it, how would that be any different? Right? Come on. Don’t be an asshole. I’ll dance for you, or let you dance for me, or some other stuff you can probably think of, but that’s not in my repertoire.”
“Repertoire’s a fancy word for someone who tripped and fell on his behind while performing a Nine Inch Nails song,” he snapped, lifting that small chin another couple of degrees.
Oh, for—and here I’d been making excuses for him in my head, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt!
“Okay,” I snarled, stepping forward again, hands on my hips and totally done with the Mr. Nice Guy routine. “Yeah, maybe it is. Butbehind’s a pretty fucking prissy euphemism for someone who’s trying to trade shitty fairy trash for getting knotted by a glittery stripper!”
“Oh!” he gasped. “Shitty fairy—how dare you!”
“How dareI?” I demanded back. “You’re trying to pay me to knot you. One of us is being crass, and it isn’t me. You could at least offer actual cash, not whatever the fuck that is. I mean, that’s doubly insulting.”
“This,” he said with as much dignity as a fairy trying to pay a weretiger for sex in the seedy back room of a strip club could muster—surprisingly, more than zero, “is pure gold, worth thousands of human dollars. That means nothing to me, of course, as I can get as much gold as I like.” He shrugged. “I gather you’ve figured out what I am?”
“Yes, and I also know that your kind aren’t exactly honest when you make bargains, and your ‘gold’ tends to not stay that way.”
As the words left my lips, it dawned on me that what I’d said sounded a lot less like absolute refusal on any terms, and a lot more like negotiating.
Damn. It really did. His magic had gotten to me, because my body definitely liked the idea of his offer, even if my mind had more sense.
Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
He sighed heavily and shook his head. “There’s no need for rude stereotypes,” he said chidingly, “and I give you my word that this coin is truly made of gold. I don’t have access to any cash that’s not traceable in ways I don’t want it to be, and I’m assuming you don’t want to use any other method that’s traceable to you, either? Since we’re discussing price now, aren’t we?”
Well, double damn. He might be weird, but he didn’t seem to be stupid. And for a fairy, giving his word meant something. The coin was really gold, and even though I didn’t know a lot about precious metals, yeah, that had to be an ounce or two, and I’d lived in Vegas for long enough to have thecontacts to sell it for close to what it was actually worth. The workmanship and its fairy provenance might drive the price up, too.
Fairy provenance.
And the beautiful, tempting little fairy offering it to me. Tempting, because he’d made himself that way. I might not even want him naturally, and I had no idea how much of what I was seeing, smelling, and feeling was real.
Oh, this coin and its owner were bad news. Very, very bad news, that’d pay Louie off for the time being and buy me another couple of months of breathing room. During that couple of months of grace, I could work double shifts and shake my ass like I’d never shaken it before.
It didn’t really matter if I wanted him of my own free will, did it? As long as I knew it might not be real and made the conscious choice not to care?
Thousands of dollars. And the chance to satisfy this ache, this gnawing physical craving that had been building, naturally or not, since the moment I first scented him.
A good fuck. Paying off Louie. A turn in my luck, maybe, and all because of a weird fairy’s weird whim.
But that didn’t mean I had to be completely stupid about it.
“Yeah,” I admitted after a second. “Yeah, I guess we are. But it’s not just the price. I don’t trust you. Why me?”
