Rogue Passion (The Rogue Series Book 5)

by Chelsea M. Cameron

  Can a passionate night help two strangers find answers to both their troubles?

  For the Three Bs

  The Suit and the Doll

  SOFIA

  TUESDAY 1:00 P.M.

  The Doll House is the kind of stripclub that can blend in.

  Tucked away in the narrow TriBeca streets it is close enough to Wall Street and the bits of manhattan still left to become gentrified, and hosts every kind of man. From the Halal vendor across the street from the Brooklyn Bridge to the banker who drunk his lunch and is now ready for a quick lap dance before returning to the office. Then there’s every guy in between.

  I’ve handled admissions to the club for five years running and at this point I pretty much have seen it all. Top Chefs, rock stars, rappers, A-D actors, fallen politicians, and the occasional former high school classmate. The last one is always the most awkward, as I was not voted most likely to work 12-hour shifts at the door of one of the city’s older T&A establishments. I was in fact voted most likely to Change the World.

  But you can’t change the world when your primary function is making sure a guy in a suit doesn’t throw up on you on the way out. Or maybe you can. I’ll ask the Whitehouse.

  Anyway, I’ve seen it all.

  Even got dance lessons from a Tony Winning actor whose tip payed for my rent that month. The whole month’s been slow and there’s always something to blame. The heat wave rolling across the Tri-State area in the middle of November, Thanksgiving because all the execs are with their families, or simply because it’s a Tuesday and we’ve been open for an hour and not a single soul has walked through that door.

  Chris, the day shift bouncer is playing on his phone. Mark, the doorman is petting every dog getting walked in front of the club. The champagne hostesses are yakking away in their Slavic tongues, and the bartenders are half-way to drunk. Me? On days like this I read books on my phone and wait.

  At one o’clock on the dot he walks in.

  He skews towards the banker side of the spectrum with a dark suit, but his tie is undone at knot, and his hair is mussed up, like he’s been running a hand through it non-stop.

  He squints already narrow eyes, adjusting to the nearly pitch black light of the Doll House, the neon and purple signs behind me that reads $20 admission.

  It takes a moment for my own eyes to adjust to him but for reasons I hate.

  He’s young, most likely 25 or 26 like me. Despite the suit, the easy carry of his broad shoulders, he appears to be nervous.

  “Welcome to The Doll House,” I say, five years of over-it steeped in my voice. “Where all your dreams come true for a $20 admission.”

  He stands in front of me, deer in the proverbial headlights. Up close the rugged break on his nose is more prominent, the square line of his jaw begs to the traced. A full pout of a mouth for a white guy. His hair would be curly is he let it grow out, but I can smell the bright scent of hair product he uses to tame it.

  “Even for me?” he asks.

  “Who are you?” I shoot back. By now I’ve perfected my responses. No one wants to pay admission to see women take their clothes off.

  I should rephrase that. Rich business types never think they should pay.

  The more money a customer makes the more my manager throws free things at them—champagne bottles, cocktails, dance money, even free lap dances.

  This guy chuckles, leans forward on my desk. Great. He’s already drunk or tipsy at best.

  He reaches for his pocket, but misses on the first shot. “Excuse me. I got it.”

  I take the crisp $20, and before he can walk in, I put my hand up. Chris the bouncer is off his phone and provides a blockade that can’t be penetrated.

  “I need your ID,” I say.

  Now, sometimes the boys from the high school nearby try their damnedest to come in here with the worst fake IDs in the land. I know this guy is over 21. But since he’s always drunk, I try hard to get him to leave. Sometimes when I make a guy jump through too many hoops, they give up and go away on their own.

  When he smiles, the blacklight above us makes his teeth whiter, but not terrifying like that FRIENDS episode with Ross and the white strips.

  “Sure, sure,” he says and pulls the card from his money clip.

  I hold the rectangle in my hands.

  A Kansas City ID. Rory Donovan III. I don’t think I’ve known many “the thirds” except for one of my cousins.

  His birthday confirms he’s a Capricorn about to be 26, one month older than me. It says he’s got green eyes but in this light they just look light brown. Blonde, but again, it’s too dark in here. He’s 5’11” and according to this, it’s expired. I tell him as much and he brandishes a shiny, new, New York State one. Same information with one huge difference. Now I know he lives one block away from me on the Upper East Side.

  “Do you need my fingerprint, too?” he asks.

  And because it’s my fifth double of the week, and I’m bored, I say, “Yes.”

  At that he looks surprised as I open the ink pad on my desk. It’s clear ink that stains the skin neon yellow and radiates under the blacklight.

  He jams his thumb on the ink pad. I grab an index card and he dutifully presses his thumb there.

  “Am I ready?” he asks, more like a kid asking if they can go on a roller coaster.

  And now, it’s my turn to laugh. Because this ridiculous tipsy suit coming into a stripclub during lunch is the most entertaining thing that’s happened all week. No fights. No having to call security.

  “You’re ready to go in, Rory,” I say.

  He holds his hand up in the air and I meet him half way for a high five.

  For a second, just a second, I glance back at him and watch his broad shoulders, his tight round ass in those pants. Then he goes behind the partition leading to the stage and I don’t think of him for the rest of the day.

  RORY

  TUESDAY 10 A.M.

  When my boss lays the plans in front of me, I feel a shock wave through my body.

  Lyle Sanderson& Co has just bought a large block of real estate between Murray Street and Beach Street. Everything from restaurants to four story walk ups to mom and pop grocery stores. All going to be gone. And I’m the one who’s going to have to get each and everyone out and stay within our budget. I have to get the hold-outs to take the company’s offer—our offer.

  “Don’t let me down, K.C.,” Sanderson says, because he decided to call me Kansas City rather than my “girly name” as he put it on my first day. Getting a job at one of the most prestigious land developers in the country was my dream. A dream that comes with thousand dollar suits and more watches than there are actual hours in my life to wear.

  He slaps my back as if I’ve just started choking, promises me an extra couple of zeros to my paycheck, and leaves for his vacation to St. Barts with his girlfriend. His wife is in Connecticut preparing for the holidays.

  As phones ring all throughout the office floor, I feel a giant hole expand in my chest. Stare at the list of names and addresses. The people who refuse to leave the homes they’ve made, the stores and bars that make a neighborhood. Where I come from, there is one convenience store, one barbershop, one beauty salon, one diner, one nice restaurant, and two bars. I try to think of the landscape if they were gone, how close that is to happening.

  But it doesn’t matter.

  Shouldn’t matter.

  Because no matter what my feelings might be, I knew when I took the job that I’d have to get my hands dirty. I know that if I wanted to prove everyone who never believed me wrong, I’d have to stare into the face of an eighty-year-old woman and persuade her to vacate the only place she’s ever called home. Even if she doesn’t have somewhere else to go.

  So I gather everything I need, check my hair in the mirror and set out to do what needs to be done.

  TUESDAY 12:30 PM

  But when I get the fifth door slammed in my face, I wind up at the Raccoon Lodge, a tiny dive on Warren Street.
I loosen my tie and shoulder off my suit jacket. Everything about it feels too-tight, like I’m being choked by a weight I placed there myself. The bartender is a sixty-year-old man with the kind of New York accent I’ve only ever heard in Al Pacino movies. He’s talking to another customer, a construction worker digging up the sidewalk just outside, about the filthy corporation trying to run him out of his place.

  I don’t volunteer that I’m the filthy corporation and that I’m here to make him an offer he’s going to refuse. At least, for the first three times. But I order my third jack and ginger in the span of half an hour.

  “You okay, kid?” he asks me.

  I turn twenty-six next month, but I know that no matter how I dress or comb my hair back, there’s something about me that makes older men call me “kid.”

  “Rough morning,” I say, leave three times my bill and tip on the counter and drain the drink before I stumble out with my briefcase in hand.

  I know I’ve made the wrong turn to get to the subway when I get to a corner that isn’t familiar. There’s a pizzeria at the corner, and further up a black awning that fails to be discrete. A squat bald doorman is bent over petting a Labrador.

  I realize I’ve walked past the Doll House more times than I can count. My boss comes here sometimes during his lunch breaks because it’s the closest strip club to the office. When I was in high school my best friend Fritz drove us to Topeka for a strip club on the side of a highway. But I punked out for reasons I could never explain to him. I stayed in the car and he followed ten minutes later with cheeks burning red and his hands covering his boner. I drove us back.

  I walk into the Doll House and shield my eyes against the neon and strobe lights. I don’t want to be here. I hate these places. Not because I think I’m above them. People have to work. But because—well, it’s in the past now. The whole place has a strange smell. Perfumed in a way that tries to mask the soggy smell of old carpet, cigarette smoke coming from the stairwell leading to the second floor, and Chanel number five. The walls are a metallic black and gray in a diamond patterned. There’s a reception desk with a girl waiting behind it, and behind her a bar backlit in purple. Twin pole stations with mirrors that a short porter wipes down while a bored stripper is on her phone.

  When I get to the reception desk, the girl sitting here straightens in her seat. She’s beautiful in a way that makes my breath hitch. Her hair long, dark ribbons over her shoulder. She tugs on one strand, like she’s trying to spin it into some sort of black gold. Her eyes are lined in that pointy way girls have of doing to make them look more serious, cat-like. The lights around her give her a purple glow, and drown the color of her lips so they simply look like perfect, dark halves.

  When she asks me to pay, I find someone else’s voice in my head. I’ve had his voice in my head since I started working for him. “Even for me?”

  She sneers at me and I get it. I’m a dick. I’m a jerk. I’m beyond forgiveness. So instead, I do whatever she says even though I don’t think this whole finger-printing thing is legal. And when there’s a tiny uptick to the corner of her mouth, I know she’s fucking with me.

  She rings up my money, and then I do the only thing I can think of. I give her a high five. Its like I’m in fucking 5th grade again. But she doesn’t leave me hanging. When her hand meets mine, so small in comparison, I wish I could stay and talk to her.

  Instead, I’m bombarded by all the day shift dancers. Little did I realize I’m the only person here. I’ve jumped into a sea of hungry sharks with a cut in my leg. But I get a drink and sit at the front of the stage where a woman who is all legs bends in ways I never thought were possible.

  I don’t really want to be here. But I don’t want to be out there either.

  SOFIA

  WEDNESDAY 1:00 PM

  He’s back. He’s back and the moment I see him my insides do that thing I hate. That thing that is so easily recognized as nerves and hormones and adrenaline because my stupid eyes are sending messages to the rest of my body that what I’m looking at is nice.

  More than nice. Delicious. Hot. Brooding.

  Rory Donovan. I remember his name and everything else I saw on his ID. He’s tipsy once again, and I still ask him for twenty dollars cover charge and his identification.

  “You don’t remember me,” he says, more like a question really.

  I don’t say anything, just place the money in my drawer and wait for him to keep walking by.

  When he doesn’t, I say, “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Yeah, I’m trying to do the same,” he says, and there’s something strangled in the way he phrases his words. It’s strange but I recognize the feeling there. A weight of carrying more than you’re able to hold so you break beneath it.

  I want to say something more, but he keeps walking.

  I glance back to get a final look at him because my eyes are traitors who want to drink in the sleek fit of his suit.

  Only this time, he looks back.

  RORY

  THURSDAY 1:00 PM

  Once again those doors close in my face and once again I’m back at the Raccoon lodge. I’m going to wear a hold in my liver before i’m thirty but I was warned that would be my trajectory if I took a job in Wall Street. The same old bartender complains and I leave more money than is necessary because that’s what everyone I know does. They throw money at problems and hope they’ll go away.

  My boss comes back next week and I know I’m going to have to have some answers for him. “I’m getting shit-faced at a bar and spending four hours a day giving money to strippers” is not going to be a good enough answer, even if it’s in line with what people think of me.

  When I leave the Raccoon Lodge I make the same wrong turn. Though I suppose a third time of doing something isn’t really wrong. It’s a choice. Because even if I only get to talk to her for a handful of minutes, I want to see that front door girl again. With her cat-lined brown eyes and that purple glow that makes her the star of my last two wet dreams. She has five minutes for me before she cuts the conversation with her sharp, assertive tongue and I’m pulled into the Doll House by one of the dolls themselves where she stands over me and dances and I become her own personal vending machine.

  This time, I have a goal with the front door girl.

  I give her the twenty and my ID and dip my finger in that neon yellow ink pad that stained my eight hundred dollar pants. Before she can tell me to have a good time I ask, “What’s your name?”

  She tilts her head to the side. It’s a careful movement. I could trace the outline of her body when she does that. Curious. Nearly probing in the way she sees right through me.

  “Sofia,” she says.

  I can’t be sure if that’s her real name or not. Everyone here has a fake name so why should Sofia be any different? When I say her name, I want to believe it’s hers.

  “I’m Rory,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “Why don’t you remember me when I come in?”

  She blinks a slow, beautiful blink. Eyelashes so long they’re like the curling caps of waves. “Who says that I don’t?”

  “Well, you always ask for my ID and fingerprint.”

  Her lips widen into a smile. “I only asked the first two times. You volunteered the third.”

  “So you did remember me yesterday.”

  “Like I said, I’m just doing my job.”

  “Are you allowed to have a drink?” I ask her. I want to know her. Everything about her.

  She gives a shake of her head. I can’t be sure if that’s true either. But I nod my understanding. I might imagine it, but her eyes flick down to my lips. Either that or there’s something my teeth. I lick them self-consciously. I don’t know what else to ask her that will allow me to stay here. She must have every guy walking through that door proposition her or worse. I don’t want to add to that list, but there’s something about her that makes me want to stay. Be near her inquisitive stare. Be close to her scent of lemons and flo
wers. She is everything that my job is not. And somehow, she is everything this club is not, too. Apart from the world around her despite being right in the middle of everything. A sunflower growing in a garden of black irises.

  “I’ll see you later, Sofia,” I say, and leave her alone.

  And I know, that when I look back to savor one last glance of her, she’s staring at me.

  SOFIA

  THURSDAY 9:00 P.M.

  The new girl they hired to cover the night shift is one hour late and so I’m leaving the Doll House one hour later than I need to me. I’m not even supposed to be working and tomorrow is my only day off.

  I grab my purse, my jacket, and put on my headphones before walking up the block where a familiar guy in a suit is trying to hail a cab. Rory Donovan the third left the club two hours ago but there he is still standing there. Maybe he took a detour at the bar next door.

  A man in gray bumps into him. I see it happen faster than I can act. The man in gray’s hand pats Rory’s side, and the guy is so stupid, so drunk he doesn’t realize he’s been pick-pocketed until the man in gray is running across the street.

  “Hey!” Rory shouts, and I know he’s about to start giving chase.

  “That’s not a good idea,” I say, standing in front of him.

  Rory’s cheeks are slightly pink in the cold snap of November wind. A couple of days ago there was a heat wave and now there’s a snow forecast. An angry flash knits his brows together and makes his nostrils flare. He rakes his fingers through his hair. I watch as his anger becomes frustration and he realizes that he’s been robbed, that he’ll never see his money clip ever again.