Page 6 of Hidden Agendas (Tempting SEALs 4)

No. She hadn’t. But she admitted, her education was lacking.

“Interesting,” she murmured, wondering if she had managed to hide the fact that she didn’t have a clue what the stripper was talking about.

“Now, some of the highbrow types like to pretend they don’t want it.” Cherry shrugged. “Men like that come here. They have their little madonnas they married, and they have their hot little tarts on the side. But some men, men who know how to treat a woman, now, they understand it.”

And she was supposed to find one of those where?

“Here, try it on.” Cherry handed her the outfit.

It wasn’t exactly a costume; rather it looked more like a simple business skirt and white cotton blouse. But it would work.

“Did you get the sexy undies I told you to pick up?” Cherry asked as she laid the skirt and blouse on the chair beside Emily.

“Wearing them now.” Emily grinned at the thought of the sexy, lacy underwear she was wearing. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“Perfectly.” Cherry waved a manicured hand negligently at Emily’s question. The owner was supposed to arrange for one of the bouncers to be available for her lap dance. “Timbo doesn’t cheat his customers. He’ll have someone out there and you’ll knock them dead.”

What was the point in going to the trouble to learn the exotic dance steps and, specifically, the lap dance if she couldn’t try it out on someone? The research she needed was specific. And if she didn’t find a way to convinc

e her agent that her characters could and would get nasty, then her writing career was over before it ever even truly began.

“Get hot!” Cicily had told her. “Get nasty. Show the editors that your women know how to be women and your men know how to love them, or you’re not going to sell.”

She rolled her eyes at the thought of it as she dressed in the short skirt and blouse. Get hot. Get nasty. She needed to get sex before she dried up and turned into an old prune.

Her bad-boy heroes weren’t bad enough and the women they loved were cardboard characters. Perhaps she was the problem. The cardboard writer. How did one write hot when one never had a man desirable enough to get hot over?

Biting her lip, she stared back at the woman in the makeup mirror. Herself. She could do this. Her friend Kira said dancing for a man would make her feel hot. That tempting him, seducing him, was a major turn-on. Unfortunately, so far, it had just been work.

“Ready?” Cherry tilted her head to the side, her long red hair falling over her shoulder, as she gave Emily an encouraging look.

As ready as she would ever be after nearly a week of instruction by the drill sergeant Cherry had turned out to be.

“Ready.” Yes. She could do this.

Emily slid her feet into the ridiculously high black heels Cherry had placed on the floor in front of her then pressed her hand to her stomach before following the other woman from the dressing room.

“I’ll be watching you,” Cherry assured her. “And remember, the guy Timbo got to practice the lap dance is not allowed to touch you. I’ll be watching and so will David. If he tries, he’s hamburger meat. Okay?”

David was the ridiculously large bouncer who adored Cherry. They were the oddest couple, but Emily had to admit, they seemed to match.

She paused at the side of the dance stage as Cherry moved across it, her long legs eating the short distance until she stepped into the sound cubicle. Seconds later, the music began.

Emily sauntered onto the stage, moving in time to the music, hips swaying, counting beats to movements, wondering where the pumping adrenaline was that Cherry talked about. The need to feel sexy. The need to . . .

Oh. My. God.

She stopped in the center of the stage.

There came the blood. It rushed to her head, raced through her system, and sent her senses into overload. She had seen the men that came to the establishment over the past two months, several of them, and none of them looked like this.

This was male chocolate. A smorgasbord of it. It was bad boy extreme and wicked temptation. Leaning back in a chair, muscular arms crossed over a broad chest, a dark gray T-shirt tucked into jeans that were covered with snug leather chaps. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and his expression was frankly sensual.

Black hair fell just a little long over his collar, shaggy and windblown, and framed a face that had her mouth at first drying, then watering with the need to taste those starkly male lips. To taste, to touch. He was tall, hard, muscular, and bad.

If the dictionary had a description of a bad boy, it would be this man. This was lust incarnate. It was pure erotic heat and sexual hunger.

He was a panty creamer.

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