Maybe she should warn Reid, but he’d been watching the Madame Amour website so he knew she had to push the limits to compete. And anyway he was the one who’d encouraged her to own her occupation, and owning it on stage at Madame Amour meant the barest of coverage.
She used the cash Reid’d poked into her pocket to pay for the lingerie, throwing in the cat’s ears at the last moment. If she did her hair just right, all blown out and big, they’d look fantastic.
They spent the afternoon strolling down the Champs-Élysées, had lunch at one of those cafés with the red and white chairs under a shady awning, and ate ice cream and people watched in the sun in the Jardin des Tuileries.
Two hours after strolling hand in hand under plane tree shaded arcades, she was in the guest artist dressing room at Madame Amour, having warmed up and then vomited the steady confidence she’d been channeling all day in the sink.
She’d never barfed before a performance in her life. She sat on a chair in the dressing room, hands gripping her thighs. Maybe it was the cheese or the salted butter caramel or the fact that there was a famous DJ here tonight and he’d brought his equally famous popstar girlfriend who was currently on stage belting out her latest hit.
She was a long way from Lucky’s and this felt like a kind of bridge between one part of her life and the next, whatever that was meant to be.
She straightened her cat’s ears. Reid was in the audience. He loved her. It mattered that she was trying, not if she won. This wasn’t the goddamn Olympics. Except that was crap, not the part about Reid loving her, it was all over him and had been for longer than she cared to think about it. She hadn’t recognized it as far back as the altercation in the alley, but soon after. The way he’d looked at her could melt concrete it was so filled with heat, but the way he wanted to know her beyond their bodies was hotter still.
It was a lie she’d cope with not winning. She wanted to win to the bloody roots of her teeth. It wasn’t a gold medal, it wasn’t a job or a new place to live, it wasn’t a career. But succeeding was part of who she was and it’d been a long time since she’d had a win.
She reapplied her lipstick, watching the other two competitors she shared the dressing room with warm up. Both were going on stage before her. A German woman who did a striptease with big feather fans in a burlesque routine, and a Chinese contortionist who’d toured with a Spiegeltent show and was performing naked but for a flesh-colored thong, a fire-breathing dragon tattoo on her back and red lacquer chopsticks in her hair.
“Ladies, good evening.”
Madame Amour’s entertainment manager, known as the Stage Master, stood in the doorway. He wore an old-fashioned dinner suit with tails and a top hat, but with no shirt he showed off his gym-earned abs and a suntan. The Stage Master was pretty but his performance was all business.
“Welcome to Madame Amour. My friends call me Master,” he said with no hint of a laugh, which concertinaed Zarley’s into a stilted cough. “Heidetta, Biyu, Lux, we’re delighted you could be here.” He executed an elaborate bow. “If there is anything I can do to assist you tonight, please let me know.”
“Is Madame Amour here tonight?” Heidetta asked.
“Madame Amour is always here on contest night and sends her regards.”
“Where is she sitting?” The woman gestured with a fan. Excellent question. It was always a good idea to know where in the room your judges were.
Master tutted. He wasn’t answering that. Madame Amour’s real name was Eglantine Archambault. She’d qualified as a surgeon using her married name, Foss. She’d be in her late sixties now, and it would be difficult to pick out anyone under the stage lights, let alone a no doubt still beautiful older woman.
Master looked to Heidetta and Biyu. “Please take your places at the side of the stage.” Zarley had a half hour wait until her slot. The two women left the room, Heidetta taking her gorgeous pink ostrich-feather fans.
“Could I ask about my pole?”
“Indeed,” Master inclined his head. “The pole is titanium rose gold-plated chrome, forty-millimeter grip. It is fixed floor to ceiling. Do you wish for it to be spinning?”
She wouldn’t need beeswax grip with that pole. “Please.”
She got another polite head incline but it was followed by an obvious eye-fuck that made her skin goose-bump. “Your audition tape did not do you enough credit, Lux. Your skills, yes; your body, no. You are delectable.”
“Are you hitting on me?” He might as well have swung a bat.
He smiled, showing a dimple. “I hit on all beautiful women who affect me.”
“Since you’re surrounded by them, that must be very tiring.”
He laughed in a spider who catches the fly manner and left the room. Gymnastics judges were figures of fear and officials could be dragons, but the Stage Master was another species entirely. He was seductive. And she didn’t feel sick anymore. His appraisal had given her back her confidence.
And as she stood in the wings five minutes before her music cue, she felt it bubble in her veins. This wasn’t the Olympics, and while twenty-five thousand dollars would make her life easier, it wouldn’t change its course. It wouldn’t bring her fame or sponsor dollars or a permanent record of her achievement. She was still a student with debts who needed a job and somewhere to live. She was still estranged from her family. She was still a woman who danced for men for money.
But she was holy rolling good at it.
In the flare of the spotlight and the opening playful la, la, la of the song she strutted onto the stage and proved it.
If this had been a gymnastic competition she’d have ninety seconds and a twelve-meter sprung surface at her disposal. She’d have had up to five judges scoring her every move, deducting percentage points for an imperfect angle or the slightest wobble.
Here she had a titanium rose gold-plated chrome pole, two minutes forty-five and an audience of rich men whose appreciation would go a long way to defining her ranking.
She made that pole and the small stage it was on her kingdom and every man in the audience her subject.
And when the applause met her ears she wasn’t looking for anyone’s judgment because she’d already won. She had a man who loved her, who’d complicate things in the most wonderful way, and if her parents didn’t want to see she was making a new life the best way she knew how, if they couldn’t see the Madame Amour in her, then she didn’t need to miss them.
When she stepped off stage, Master was waiting. “Exquisite. Allow me to buy you a drink to celebrate your experience.”
She gestured at the bar where she’d left Reid. “My—”
“Will wait. This is business.”
There was no sign or Heidetta or Biyu. What kind of business was this? She looked down at herself. “Like this?”
“But of course. Madame Amour wishes to meet you.”
Well, all right.
The bar Master took her to, easing their way through the crowded main floor of the club with an arm at her back, was roped off. The drink he put in front of her was champagne. She looked for Reid and found him across the room, before a crowd of people passed between them and she lost sight of him. He’d understand.
Master stayed close, touching her, never inappropriately except with his eyes, but it made her uncomfortable. “How long are you staying in Paris, my lovely one?”
“I’m not sure.” They’d not set an end date on the trip, but she had to be home for the start of semester. She looked for Reid again. The bar he sat at was busy. A stunning woman in a dress split to her waist stood next to him. Zarley got a flash of plump fake boob.
“How long did you train as a gymnast?”
The woman had her hand on Reid’s arm. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” The woman whispered in Reid’s ear.
“Your training. Rigorous, no?”
Zarley switched her vision to the Stage Master. “Yes.” And back to Reid. He was laughing at something the woman said. She was so close to him she was alm
ost in his lap. Bitch. He didn’t push her away. Bastard. “No.”
Master tapped her shoulder. “Contrary. Perhaps when Madame asks these questions you will more forthcoming.”
Her stomach rolled. She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. A little distracted.”
“Easy to do here. So many glorious sights to see.”
The sight she saw was that half-naked bitch rub herself against Reid.
“So many.” She took a mouthful of champagne, it burned going down.
“You see something you do not like, luscious Lux.”
She saw Reid’s woman put a finger to his chin, turn his head and kiss him on the lips. She saw Reid’s hands and they weren’t pushing the woman away.
Master snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Tell me and I’ll make it all go away.”
She took another mouthful of champagne, that’s what she needed, something to make her feel numb. Otherwise she was going to blow this for a man who didn’t know what saying I love you meant. She hadn’t thought she’d needed to give Reid a rule for not touching other women. Her own fault. She’d trusted him. But he was a boundary pusher and a rule breaker and a maverick and she’d known that.
She should’ve been more explicit.
She’d be more explicit when she told him to fuck off.
She turned her attention back to Master and told him about her training and didn’t look at Reid again. When Madame Amour arrived wearing a tailored man’s evening suit that looked sensational, Zarley repeated the story of her training. She told Madame how she’d planned on receiving gold for her floor routine, how her team were game favorites, and how she’d wrecked her chances for love.
She’d never make that mistake again, but she’d come very close.
Madame sipped champagne. Her makeup was delicate and not at pains to camouflage her age, only enhance her features. She wore large diamonds at her ears and on her fingers, and seven-inch heels like the ones Zarley wore on stage, only a hundred times more expensive. She was slender and still wore her hair long, but in an elegant twist. It was hard to imagine that her daily surgeon’s uniform would be scrubs.
Zarley told Madame about her studies, about Lucky’s and how she wished there was a place like Madame Amour back home.
“You should make the place. It’s what I did,” Madame said.
“That can’t have been easy to do? I’m in awe of you.”
“You are a champion. You know about struggle. What is easy is often worth very little in the end, don’t you find?”
Zarley had never done easy. But loving Reid had been easy, so easy it had slipped under her skin without her noticing.
“My coach used to say easy is for lazy and lazy is for going home a loser.” Costin had said it to gymnasts whose heads got too big, who stopped pushing themselves.
Madame laughed. “I like the sound of your coach. You could dance here professionally. We provide a salary and housing, but I don’t think that is what you want.”
For a second it was everything. She looked up at the dancer on the stage now, another talented performer. To live in Paris, to work here. But dancing was never what she’d wanted, it was simply the only way she’d been able to hold on to the definition of herself as a gymnast.
“How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a surgeon?”
“La.” Madame laughed. “I was not so smart as you think. My family was very poor. I simply wanted to be rich.”
“But—”
“It is no shame to be uncertain. The shame is in never making your own chances.”
Madame Amour was a smart woman and Zarley knew good advice when she heard it and some chances simply weren’t worth the shame.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Zarley had been naked. Reid had trouble looking at her. Not naked, but that thing she wore, there was nothing of it, a swirl of black pattern on her skin like ink to emphasize her gorgeous little body and muscle-packed legs.
Desire and anxiety went to war in his head. The woman on stage was impossibly hot. She was a blur of scorching sex, dangerous and untouchable, but achingly beautiful and all the more threatening because of it.
She put his central nervous system on the defensive, pins of heat attacked his body and formed up across his chest, but it didn’t make him ready for the assault of her. There wasn’t a man in the room who didn’t want to touch her, feel her silk heat in his hands. Own her. But that woman on the stage flew higher than the sun, and she could conquer anything.
She’d conquered him.
He’d been holding her hand two hours ago. How did he get to be the man who got that privilege? He’d licked ice cream off her chin and kissed caramel off her lips when they’d played tourist in the park, but on stage she made his heart crawl out of his chest cavity and lodge in his throat.
How would he ever hold on to her?
This wasn’t the kind of club where lust drunk men threw money at the stage, or tucked a bill into a thong. Here they paid a significant membership fee and flew in from all over the world, and the dancers were paid a professional salary. Didn’t make the men who watched Zarley any more civilized. He had to uncurl his fists when his hand cramped.
Much as he loved her on that stage, the two minutes forty-five couldn’t pass quickly enough. He wanted her back by his side where he didn’t have to worry she’d be lured away by someone more put together than he was, who hadn’t loused up his career and had a better fix on the future.
It was a relief when she left the stage. He relaxed enough to drink his bourbon, enough not to be sure he didn’t bump the woman beside him with his elbow.
“Excuse me.” He held up a hand. “I’m sorry.”
“You are not so sorry, I think.” She was tall, blonde and very curvy.
“I bumped you. It was an accident.” He moved his stool to give her more room at the bar and she took it, turning her body to face him. The tits had to be fake. The thing she wore didn’t have any structure, two pieces of fabric falling over her boobs. When she picked up her drink, it gaped and he got an eyeful of raised coffee-colored nipple. Jesus.
“No accident. Fate.” She had a heavy accent. He couldn’t pick it. She put her hand on his forearm. He wanted to rip it away.
“Can I help you with something?”
“You are tourist. Americano. Businessman?”
“Yes.” He extracted his arm. Not so much the businessman part anymore.
“My name is Marja. I am from Poland.”
“Owen Reid.” That’d do. Her name probably wasn’t Marja. How long would it be before Zarley was back?
“You looking for some fun in Paris?”
He smiled. “I’ve found it, thanks.”
“But you are all alone, Owen.”
“Not anymore.”
Marja did a pantomime of looking around. “I don’t see girlfriend.”
“She danced on stage tonight.”
“Ah. She is skinny stripper?”
“She’s a dancer.” But closer to a stripper than he’d ever seen her and the shock of that loitered inside his body. He wanted out of here, he wanted the Zarley he knew naked in his arms.
Marja waggled her fingers over her head. “She is with the ears, no? I see you watch her special. But she is no better than me. She is only baby girl.”
Reid finished his drink, made a deliberate move of putting the empty glass back on the bar. “Look Marja, I’m waiting for my girlfriend, okay.”
“Okay, I am very sorry for your trouble.”
Whatever. And finally Zarley was here with some guy in a suit, make that half a suit. Oh God, she was so naked, it felt ruder than when she was on the stage, this walking around where other people were fully dressed, mostly. Why didn’t she change first? Where was she going?
“I only wish to make you happy, Owen.”
“What?”
Marja was all up in his space, warm breath in his ear. “You are darling man, here alone. I only think to make you not sad.”
Zarl
ey stood with that man in a private closed-off section of another bar. This place was set up like a circus with three main stages and three main bars, plus table seating and balconies and who knows what else. Reid got up to go to Zarley and the woman pulled on his arm. He turned to shake her off. Her whole breast was exposed.
“You like me, I know this.”
He turned back to look for Zarley, too many people, she was too far away and the lighting was low. The woman still had his arm. “I’m going to my girlfriend.”
“I think she is not wanting you. That man, he is the Master. He seduces everyone.”
What the ever-loving . . . “That man she’s with?”
“Yes, darling. She will go fuck with him if she wants prize.”
The crowd shifted and he could see Zarley with a champagne glass in her hand. He laughed. “No. She’s mine.” Then he lost her again.
The woman rubbed herself against his side and he turned to extract himself from her grip. She pushed her body, bared breasts into his chest, her arm around his back. “All contest girls they do this, fuck with Master. You could have me. She does not need to know.”
All the contest girls . . . Pain in his chest. “What’s going on here?”
“Your girlfriend has forgotten you. I would be good to you.”
Boxed in by people around them and the bar, he couldn’t easily step away. He found Zarley again, the Master fucker had his arm over her shoulders. There were other people in the private section now and she looked like she was having a good time at a party he wasn’t invited to. He felt forgotten and yet she wouldn’t be here without him, and he had a woman he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, all up in his face offering him everything.
“Look—” Marja’s finger on his chin. This was getting old.
“Darling, I will kiss you and then you will know.”
“Know what?”
“What it is to be with a real woman, not skinny baby girl with flat chest.”
He lifted a hand to hold her off. She caught it and placed it on her boob. Warm and firm and so much of it, not like Zarley, more than fit in the palm of his hand, in the span of his fingers, soft, warm. His thumb brushed her nipple and Marja moaned as she pressed her mouth to his.
Offensive Behavior (Sidelined #1) Page 27