Heaven's Ballroom

by Aiden Bates

  “Hey,” Noah greeted me, tossing a bottle of baby oil my way. “You seen Damon and Nathan’s baby pictures yet?”

  I groaned. “Does it look any different from any other baby in the universe?”

  He laughed. “Lighten up, buddy. You’re not allowed to be cynical about a baby.” He nodded to a Polaroid that someone had posted up on one of the mirrors, a candid shot of our former coworker Damon cradling a chubby, angry-looking pink thing with clenched fists. “Twelve pounds, nine ounces. Perfect little baby boy. He’s cute, right?”

  I blinked at the photo in horror. “Twelve pounds? Jesus. Little isn’t the word I’d use.”

  “Not surprised. Last time I saw Damon before he went into labor, he looked like he was about to pop.” Noah clapped me on the shoulder, leaving an oily handprint before he headed out to work the main room. “Try to be happy for him, okay, Grumpy?”

  “I’ll do my best.” It was no secret that having babies was the last thing on my mind right now. Ruining my six-pack with stretch marks? Yeah—no thanks.

  I glanced at the picture again, noticing the way Damon smiled as he held his newborn in his arms. He looked serene. Happy. Tired—but I’d heard he spent something like thirty-six hours in labor, so that was to be expected. Despite that, fatherhood suited him, I realized. Better than it would ever suit me.

  I was happy for him, of course. How could I not be? But that didn’t mean I was about to go getting a bun in my oven anytime soon, that was for sure. I’d already made that mistake once in life. I didn’t intend to make it twice.

  Clapping on a few handfuls of baby oil, I buffed up the hard ridges and valleys of my muscles until they shone. Between all the relationship drama and pregnancies that had befallen the other dancers at the club lately, I was more focused than ever on doing my job and staying the hell out of all the rest. Babies and boyfriends were fine for everyone else—but as far as I was concerned, my only goals were to pay off my student loans and enjoy being single for a good long while. Love, marriage, twelve-pound screaming bundles of joy—that was for other people.

  I liked kids. Really, I did. But when it came to kids of my own? No fucking way. I’d given that idea up long, long ago. I’d be happy to play uncle to Damon’s new baby, even babysit from time to time. But call me a loner—when it came to my own life, I preferred it the way it was: quiet, clean, and drama-free.

  And if I had anything to say about it, I’d keep it that way, too.

  I jogged up to the space behind the curtains of the main stage with my shoulders thrust back and my head held high. Checking the clock on the wall, I saw I had about five minutes of warming up to do before intermission ended.

  I dipped down into a stretch, feeling my hamstrings flex as I touched the toes of my boots and let out a breath. Friday nights at the Ballroom were always a thing of beauty—lots of horny, loaded Alphas seated at their tables, eager to spend their paychecks on a hot-ass Omega like me while I spun a lasso around and rolled my hips to the tune of “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.” Maybe if they were lucky, I might even take a liking to one of them and make good on the promise of my song choice.

  As long as they were out of my apartment the next morning before I woke up and didn’t bother texting, calling or sending flowers, the possibilities for the rest of my evening were endless.

  If they were lucky.

  The sound of wolf whistles and applause greeted me as I came onto the stage. I’d been at the Ballroom for long enough, I could’ve done my set backwards, blindfolded—hell, even hog-tied. Beneath the glare of the spotlights, I spotted my regulars in the crowd with ease. Older Alphas, mostly. Lots of silver foxes in suits and ties. Normally, I’d pick one of them to toss my cowboy hat at mid-set, then go down to collect it after and pick up a lap dance or two. Some of the younger dancers struggled with cash flow, but I knew how to work the gentlemen that came to see me dance by now.

  By the end of the night, I’d have enough money to pay rent for the next two months. Not a bad gig at all—especially considering that I fucking loved doing it. The music, the costumes—the roar of the crowd as I stepped through my twirling lasso and ripped off my pants.

  I was hot, twenty-seven and at the top of my game.

  And it all would’ve been perfect—if it had been any other night.

  My regulars were all in their regular seats, sure—but as I neared the end of my performance, I spotted an unfamiliar face staring up at me from the crowd. Dark, thick hair with streak of silver running through it. A heavy brow, arched with interest as he watched my every move. I turned, grinning as I raised my muscled arms over my head and flexed my ass. When I turned back around, I caught sight of the man’s tongue flicking across his lips.

  Hot, hungry, and wearing what looked like a very expensive suit. I couldn’t have picked a more delicious mark for the night if I’d gone to the Wilhelmina Models headquarters and ordered one up for myself. Best of all, he wanted me. It was written all over his chiseled, handsome face.

  I tossed my hat in his direction as the song came to an end, enjoying the way it skidded across his table and landed in his lap. A little wink sealed the deal just before the curtains closed, and then I was jogging backstage to grab water and towel off before I went to collect my hat and learn the man’s name.

  To my surprise, though, it seemed he’d beaten me to the punch.

  “Looks like you made a friend,” Noah joked, coming up behind me and planting the hat back atop my head. “The gentleman at table twelve just caught my elbow and asked me to deliver this to you.”

  I laughed, straightening the hat out as I admired myself in the mirror. “Yeah, I bet he did. Shame he didn’t wait for me. I would’ve come and gotten it myself if he’d given me a chance. Could’ve been a lap dance in it for him.”

  “Incidentally—he wants one. Specifically asked me to ask you if you’d be interested.”

  “How high school of him. Did he pass you a note?”

  “You could say that. Several notes, in fact.” Noah raised a wad of hundreds, shaking them before pressing them into my hand. “He’d like you to meet him in the champagne room. Thousand dollars now, thousand dollars when you’re done.”

  “Did you tell him that’s twice my going rate?”

  Noah winked. “Didn’t seem necessary. He’s showing off—figured I might as well let him.”

  I thumbed through the bills and tucked them into the locked drawer where I kept my tips for the night. “Who am I to disappoint him, then. Table twelve?”

  “Table twelve.”

  I brushed past Noah on my way back out to the main room, feeling cockier than ever. This was what I’d first auditioned at the Ballroom for: the thrill, the excitement, the heat that bubbled up in my chest washed over my entire body as I put on my best strut. Knowing that a man like the one at table twelve wanted me so bad, he’d drop two grand just to feel my skin against his.

  “Howdy, partner,” I said with a sly grin, placing myself on the edge of table twelve and plucking at my not-so-secret admirer’s wine-colored neck-tie. “Much obliged to you for returning my hat.”

  “Much obliged?” He laughed, a short, sharp thing that shook his broad shoulders as it rumbled out. “How much of that cowboy accent of yours is an act?”

  My grin widened. “Texas, born and raised. How much of this fancy suit of yours is an act?”

  He nodded appreciatively. “Oh, all of it. But the money I bought it with is real.”

  “I’m fascinated,” I deadpanned. “Why don’t we take this to the champagne room, then? You can tell me more about all of this real money you seem to have.” I tugged a little on his tie, urging him to his feet.

  He rose slowly, fingers uncurling from the stem of his drink. “You’re to the point, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Guess you could say I’ve got a big personality.”

  He laughed. “Suppose what they say is true then—everything really is bigger in Texas.”

  “Oh, honey,” I cooed, le
ading him down the hall to the champagne room by his tie like a leash. “You have no idea.”

  But he was about to find out.

  2

  Duncan

  It was no secret that I liked my men the same way I liked my coffee: piping hot and plenty. I’d made a reputation for myself on Wall Street within my first two months out of Yale: ruthless, self-made, and the best time between the sheets to be had north of Midtown. The boys at Sterling Enterprises liked me because growing up in the Bronx, I knew how to put in a hard day’s work. My clients liked me because the returns I scored them on their investments were so good, if they were any better it was because I’d somehow learned to print money. And Omegas?

  Well, Omegas mostly liked me for my cock, but I couldn’t really blame them for that.

  The cowboy, though—I could tell right away that he didn’t like me in the least. The first thing I’d learned about him was that I wanted him. The second thing I’d learned was his name. Kieran—one of Heaven’s Angels, and according to my sources, completely ice cold. I’d been watching him at the club for nearly a month now, trying to figure him out and getting nowhere. It wasn’t like me at all to spend this much time with my eyes on just one prize, but there was something enchanting about him that made it hard for me to focus on anything else.

  From the moment I first saw him, dancing drunkenly on a table at my coworker Nathan’s Omega’s going-away party there on the Ballroom floor, I’d seen something in his smile. The way he moved his hips, like they were chained to the beat of the music washing over him. There’d been a familiar ecstasy in the way he bit his lower lip, closing his eyes and throwing his head back, like dancing was just as sexual and sensual for him as feeling a hot mouth wrapped around his cock beneath the sheets.

  He knew how to enjoy himself. To give himself over completely to a moment, experience it without hesitation, and anyone who had a problem with it could go get fucked. It was a rare thing to find in anyone—Alpha, Omega or otherwise—and I found that I couldn’t get him off my mind until I learned more.

  Unfortunately, whatever he saw in me, it wasn’t a kindred spirit. From the first moment his thick, eager fingers hand curled around my necktie, the green in his eyes had been glimmering the same color as cold, hard cash. I couldn’t say I was surprised—after all, I’d come in wallet open and bank account blazing—but it was a disappointment to realize whatever I’d been feeling about him all this time, he hadn’t gotten that same feeling when he met me.

  I grinned as he led me down the dark hallway to a private room, watching the way his ass rippled and flexed with every step. With those broad, sculpted shoulders of his, the perfect V his back made as it descended toward his hips, the way he moved through a room like he owned it and the way he looked in only his golden G-string, a cowboy hat and a pair of boots, he was just as enchanting as ever. His feelings toward me were just another challenge—something I’d have to change if this was going to play out the way I wanted it to.

  Lucky for me, rearranging things in my favor was a particular specialty of mine.

  “Welcome to the champagne room, handsome,” he purred, yanking me inside by my necktie and shutting the door behind us.

  “Handsome, huh?” I chuckled. “That what you call all your clients, sweetheart?”

  He raised an eyebrow, a sudden glimmer of interest in his eyes. “Means I don’t have to remember their names,” he admitted, unabashed. “Kind of like how you call all your boyfriends sweetheart.”

  “You’re assuming I have multiple boyfriends.”

  He rolled his eyes, lashes fluttering as he placed his hand on my chest and pushed me backward into a plush leather armchair.

  “Men like you always have multiple boyfriends,” he breathed, dipping his lips down to my earlobe so I could feel the heat of his breath. “You can drop the act. I’ve seen your type in here before.”

  The champagne room, as it turned out, was named that way for its color just as much as it was for the bottle of Dom Perignon chilling in a bucket to my left. The lights were all golden, turning Kieran’s skin warm and delicious-looking, the color of honey dripping down a hot, chiseled chest. The room was small, intimate—but not so small, I decided, that I couldn’t have taken him in it. Pressed him up against the wall, his legs winding around my waist and my teeth snarling at his neck.

  “What’s my type, then?” I asked him, swallowing as I realized how hard that short little fantasy had made me. My cock was straining against my slacks, trapped between the fine wool fabric and the muscle of my thigh. If I’d been smart, I would’ve adjusted it before getting anywhere near an Omega so desirable as him—but then, I would’ve missed the way his lips shifted against each other when he glanced down and saw the bulge of it.

  It was undeniable. A kind of hunger that he could pretend he hadn’t felt in the moments after, but not the kind he could avoid betraying with the look on his face. My personality might not have interested him as much as my wallet did—but my cock, hot and stiff and so big that it was making the seams of my slacks creak, caught his attention in a way that went beyond the lure of cold, hard cash.

  “Horny,” he said, a sharp laugh coming out on his breath as he stared down at it. When his eyes raised to mine again, I knew he could tell that I’d seen him gawking at it. “Insatiably horny.”

  He placed his knee on the triangle of the chair’s seat between my spread thighs, pressing it up against my hardness with a firm certainty. I could feel my cock throb as it felt the pressure of Kieran’s leg against it. Fuck—horny didn’t even begin to describe it. Just feeling him there, that one small point of contact, sent my desires raging even stronger.

  “You’re not wrong,” I admitted. “But that must be true of more than half the Alphas in this place tonight. We don’t exactly come here because we’re virginal priests.”

  “Loaded,” he suggested, bringing his other knee onto the chair to straddle my thigh. “You’ve got plenty of cash and you want everyone to know it.”

  I gritted my teeth as he lowered himself onto my thigh, grinding the bulge of his own cock beneath the thin metallic fabric of his thong up the length of my leg. We were two thin layers of fabric away from being skin on burning hot skin. It made my heart pound. Made my jaw ache.

  “Cheap shot,” I teased. “I flashed cash to get your attention—and it worked. Says more about you than it does about me.”

  “Mm. Well then. Looks like I’m not the only mind-reader in the room tonight.” He moved his shoulder sensually toward my face, and I tilted my head back to breathe him in.

  Christ. I’d expected him to smell good, but not that good. His scent was a golden wheat field on a hot summer morning. Like backwoods and pine, the cool, clear trickling water of a crick after a gentle rain. Kieran smelled like things I’d only seen on the television, in landscape shots used by marketing departments to make the viewer feel things they’d never experience for real—but as I breathed him in, it all felt more real than I could’ve dreamed of. Like I’d been yanked out of the club and dropped into the Texan countryside that Kieran called home.

  “You didn’t tell me you were a mind-reader,” I finally said, closing my eyes as I exhaled my breath.

  “All dancers are.”

  “Interesting.” It wasn’t—he was teasing me, and I was letting him. It bought me time—time to keep feeling his body against me. Time to keep breathing in his scent. “What am I thinking about right now then?”

  “Hmm. That’s a tricky one.” When I opened my eyes again, he was grinning. “Judging by the hard-on you’re sporting right now, I’d say you’re thinking about pinning me up against that wall over there and having your wicked way with me.”

  I raised an eyebrow. His ESP had about a six-minute delay.

  “It’s hardly mind-reading if you’re making your judgments based on physical cues,” I pointed out.

  His gaze sharpened as he leaned into me again, his breath hot on my neck this time. “Considering that you strike me
as the type who does most of your thinking with your dick anyway—”

  Abruptly, he pressed himself against me, grinding the stiffening length of his cock against my own through my slacks. I let out a moan that betrayed me immediately—I’d called him unoriginal when he called me horny, but I hadn’t called him wrong.

  “I’m just reading the head that gets the most blood flow, handsome,” he finished, a special kind of delight tinging his Southern purr.

  “Duncan,” I corrected him. If I was going to get what I wanted from him, he was going to have to start thinking of me as something more than just handsome, rich and horny. “Duncan Rourke.”

  “Well, Duncan Rourke. If you’re so unimpressed by my abilities to read you…why don’t you try this on for size?” He reared back, looking me over as his tongue flicked out over his lips. “Let’s see—you’re a New York boy. Born and raised.”

  “True,” I admitted, giving him a little nod.

  “Manhattan,” he said with confidence, his shoulders shifting back as his chest puffed out. “The only time you cross the bridges is if you’re headed to the airport.”

  “False,” I told him, enjoying the way his face fell as he realized he’d been wrong.

  “You went to an Ivy league school,” he started again, narrowing his eyes as he shifted gears.

  “True.”

  “On Daddy’s dime, of course.”

  “False.” I smirked. “You’re only really half a psychic, at this rate. Maybe I should only pay your half your fee.”

  “Oh, I earn my fees, Mr. Rourke.” He shifted on top of me, straddling both my thighs now as he wrapped his arms around my neck. “You work on Wall Street. Big business. Dollars in, dollars out, all day long.”

  “True.” I arched against him as his fingertips brushed against the back of my neck, tracing my hairline.

  “Taking money from poor, hardworking people and using it to line the pockets of your rich, over-fed shareholders,” he said, smug as he raised his knuckles to my cheek and brushed them down toward my jawline.