Page 20 of Beg, Borrow or Steal
‘You’re a stubborn bugger, that’s what you are,’ Tara put in as she adjusted her white bra in the mirror. ‘Get yourself a sponsor, for Christ’s sake.’
Libby smiled and suppressed a shudder. She knew exactly what Tara meant by ‘a sponsor’, but there was no way that was an option. Men could watch her, they could take that from her; she accepted that that was a sacrifice she had to make. But that small part of her soul was all they were getting.
*****
‘This place is insane,’ Jamie said in Pav’s ear after they had finally made it to the booth that had been reserved. Dan had organized this stag for their friend Jonty. Jonty was one of the few defectors over to the dark side. After finishing medical school and realizing quite how much the NHS was going to expect of him, he jacked it all in and went into the City, with Dan’s encouragement. Now he was a management consultant at Dan’s firm and earning an unspeakably high salary. The kind of industry he was in was work-hard-play-hard, so coming out to a place like this of an evening was in no way out of the ordinary (although Jamie knew for a fact that Dan’s wife Amy had put an all-out ban on strip clubs after some unfortunate lap-dance photos leaked their way onto Facebook. Jamie was under strict instructions not to breath a word to his sister-in-law).
Jamie’s salary and private practice income was nothing to be sniffed at, but he had nearly choked on his beer when he heard the cover charge to get into the club Dan had booked. On top of that, as soon as they sat down three scantily clad, incredibly beautiful women delivered three bottles of Cristal to the table. They were so perfect that it was almost unreal: shimmering gold and silver backless dresses, flawless make-up, smooth, tanned skin, incredible long legs; it was like stepping into another universe.
‘Bugger me,’ whispered Pav as he watched their retreating backs with his mouth hanging open.
Dan rubbed his hands together. ‘That’snothing,’ he told them all. ‘Just wait till the show. I swear your wank banks will be topped up for life after you see the main attraction. This place is fucking world famous. We come with clients all the time. Better than anything else in London. Isn’t that right, Pavlos?’
‘I’ve only been here once before,’ Pav said, for some reason shifting in his seat with discomfort and flicking Jamie a nervous look. ‘Dan made me come on a “recce” before the stag to make sure it was okay. I – ’
‘Oh come on!’ Dan shouted. ‘You bloody loved it! Right, who wants more champagne?’ As Dan started obnoxiously signalling the waitress, Pav leaned across to speak to Jamie.
‘Jamie, mate,’ he started, then chewed his lip for a moment. ‘I just want to say that … I mean, I – ’
‘Come on, you boring bastard.’ Dan shoved a shot of tequila into his hand. ‘This is supposed to be Jonty’s last night of freedom – no time for serious convos.’
As Jonty and Pav choked on the spirits, Jamie’s eyes moved over the lavishly decorated interior dotted with other booths and tables, all full to capacity, to the stage in the middle of the room. There were two huge guys in dark suits stationed next to it, wearing earpieces and intermittently making eye contact with the further twenty-or-so suit-clad men around the perimeter. It was like they were expecting some kind of riot.
Two raised walkways led from two sets of double doors and cut through the tables to the central stage. But the most obvious, glaring detail on the stage was of course the three poles. They could tart this place up as much as they liked, make it look like an up-market boutique hotel, charge an exorbitant admission fee, but as far as Jamie was concerned nothing could change the fact that it was still a strip club. The clients Dan brought here might be billionaires – but to Jamie they were still seedy little men in a seedy little titty bar. The whole set-up gave him a vague feeling of disgust.
A couple of tequila shots and a glass of champagne later he was leaning over to look at a picture of his five-year-old nephew, thinking to himself that he was nowhere near as cute as Rosie, and asking Dan if he liked woodlice – which earned him a confused stare. Just as he was about to explain, the lights went down and a hush fell over the audience. Pav chose that moment to try to get Jamie’s attention again but was silenced by the rest of the table.
Jamie looked up to see spotlights focus on the two sets of double doors. After a moment ‘Uptown Funk’ started blaring through the club and both sets of double doors burst open, revealing two women, one at each door. They were wearing white broad-rimmed fedora-style hats, white low cut, fitted suit jackets which ended high on their thighs, paired with toweringly high white stilettos. They strutted down the walkways in perfect unison. Halfway across they both reached up to their hats and snatched them off their heads with a flourish to reveal huge amounts of long, blonde, glossy hair, which cascaded over their shoulders and down their backs.
The hats were thrown into the cheering crowd and the blondes continued on to the poles at the centre of the stage. After a beat they swung up onto the two outer poles and spun round together, hair flying, low cut jackets opening to reveal the white lace underwear beneath … it was almost beautiful. Although it was not Jamie’s first rodeo in a strip club, he had never seenanythinglike this before. These women were so polished, so stunning; it was like they were on a Victoria’s Secret catwalk. Their shimmering make-up made them look almost ethereal, not like strippers.
As the initial shock of their entrance faded, the whistles and whoops started rumbling through the crowd and the atmosphere in the room turned electric. An obviously drunk man sitting next to the stage leaned forward as if to touch one of the women with a glazed expression on his face. But a huge, dark-suited bouncer was there in a flash, giving the man a hard shove in the middle of his chest so that he went flying back into his chair, clearly winded. The women did one final spin on the poles, fell to the ground and their spotlights cut off, plunging the club into darkness and silence.
Jamie felt the atmosphere in the room change again; this time, instead of just the electricity crackling through the crowd there was an almost explosive anticipation. A third spotlight shifted to a set of double doors he hadn’t noticed before at the back of the room. These doors led out onto a short raised platform. As the opening chords to David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’ sounded a single chair shot out into the light. After a moment another woman walked out to the chair and leapt up onto the seat. In contrast to the blondes this woman was all in black: black hat with the brim set low over her eyes, black jacket, and black stilettos.
One of her stiletto-clad feet came up to the back of the chair and she tipped it back so that it was balancing on just two of the wooden legs. She then lifted her other foot so that for a moment she was suspended above the chair but jumped off just as it was about to fall, landing behind it and catching it before it hit the ground. The crowd went wild as she spun the chair to face her and sat down. One hand went to the top of her hat and the other gripped the chair at the side. She flicked both her feet up one after the other and her stilettos went flying back through the double doors, then she flipped over in a sudden movement to stand facing the chair, before launching herself forward to spring over the back of it into a front flip which took her to the edge of the platform.
Jamie frowned, noticing that there was no raised walkway for her to get to the central stage, but then his mouth dropped open as she went up on her toes before soaring through the air in a graceful flip, springing off her hands on one of the benches to land on her feet on the table in front of her.
The men sitting around the table she’d landed on were gaping up at her with awestruck expressions. She smiled and took a couple of steps across the wooden surface, gracefully avoiding various drinks and other detritus before springing again, this time using the back of one of the men’s chairs as leverage, and landing dead centre in the middle of the table right next to the booth Jamie and the rest of the stag party were sitting in.
She leapt from the table to the back of the bench that curved around their booth, and then flipped twice along the narrow surface until she landed in the middle oftheirtable. Once there, she stopped and fell to a squat in front of Jonty, held two fingers against her perfect lips and kissed them before pressing them gently to his. Then she stood tall on the table, her hand flashed to her hat and a cascade of glorious dark hair fell from its confines. Her perfect features were highlighted with smoky make-up, and the jacket she wore revealed glimpses of a black lace adorned, truly stunning figure. She was the most strikingly, outrageously gorgeous thing Jamie’d ever seen in his life. Suddenly the cover charge started to make sense. The crowd cheered as she squatted again and planted the hat on Jonty’s head.
Then she smiled.
One side of her mouth hitched up slightly further than the other, and Jamie felt a jolt of recognition. In that same moment he noticed a flash of panic cross her face as she looked at Pav sitting next to Jonty.
Then, as if sensing his presence at the table, her big blue eyes locked with Jamie’s and went wide with shock. Before he could react she had leapt to her feet. Her arms went straight up in the air and she started falling backwards. On instinct he reached for her as she fell, shoving the other guys out of the way and spilling several drinks as he jumped up from his chair. But instead of crashing to the ground she sprang off the edge of the table with her hands, and landed on her feet at the bottom of a set of steps to the stage.
‘What the fuck are you doing, you nutter?’ Dan shouted, grabbing hold of Jamie’s arm and trying to force him back to his seat. Jamie shook him off violently to watch Libby’s back as she ascended the steps to the centre of the stage. The two white angels flanked her as she swung her leg round the pole and flew through the air, so fast she was almost a blur. Jamie stood fully upright, jolting the table so that several more drinks went flying. Pav had taken hold of his other arm, and both he and Dan were trying to drag him back to sitting. He could feel his face flushing with rage and there was a faint buzzing in his ears that blocked out the swearing of his friends around him.
Without thinking, and with his eyes fixed on the stage, he pushed Pav out of his way and stepped out of the booth. His nostrils flared as he saw her spin up to the top of the pole and hang upside-down, before ripping off both the other girls’ white jackets by the collars and throwing them to the side amid cheers and whoops from the crowd. She then curled up to grip the pole at the top, and swung out to land on her feet between the now underwear-clad blondes. Jamie’s fists bunched at his sides and he jerked forward towards the stage in a sudden movement that caught Libby’s eye. She faltered for a moment in her routine. Both the blondes looked at her in shock and he saw her give a small shake of her head before she stepped forward to the front of the stage and lifted both her arms from her sides.
The blondes leaned forward in unison and grabbed an arm of her jacket each. After they ripped it off the crowd had a few moments to appreciate her perfect figure in the black lace underwear before a cascade of water fell from the ceiling, soaking all three of the women completely, followed by what appeared to be heavy rain, just on the stage where they were dancing. They all fell to their knees and slapped the ground in perfect synchrony, spraying the men directly around the stage and ratcheting up the cheering levels significantly.
In that moment Jamie lost his mind and pushed the man in front of him out of his way to get to the stage. Libby’s shocked gaze met his furious one again and she froze. She was soaking wet, practically naked, every man in the room had his greedy eyes on her – he’d never seen anything more achingly vulnerable, and a surge of fierce possessiveness went through him. He reached for her and that was it. Two bouncers yanked him back so hard it felt like his arms would be pulled out of their sockets.
‘Listen, fella,’ one of the bouncers shouted into his ear, ‘nobody touches the girls. You need to calm the fuck down.’ Jamie watched as all three women sprang to their feet. With superhuman strength he wrenched free of both the bouncers and made another lunge for the stage, but felt a fist collide with the side of his face, then another into his stomach, and everything went black.
