by Aiden Bates
I caught his wrist before he could go any further. “False,” I growled, suddenly all too aware that he’d touched a nerve. “You couldn’t be more wrong, Kieran.”
He paused, drawing back as I said his name. “Who told you to call me that?”
I shrugged, enjoying the brief upper hand I had on him. “Maybe I heard one of the other dancers call out to you across the room. Maybe I asked up at the bar. Either way…I did my research before I asked you back here with me tonight.”
“Research,” he repeated, snorting. “You don’t know anything about me, Mr. Rourke.”
“And I won’t pretend to,” I promised him. “But I know enough to know that I’d like to learn more.”
“Goodness.” A strange smile was playing on his lips—like I’d finally managed to shock him. “You’re nosier than I thought you’d be.”
“You’ve been thinking about me all wrong, then.” I turned his wrist beneath my grip, pulling his knuckles to my lips. The kiss I pressed against them was gentle, just slightly wet. I wanted him to feel that kiss—and then, in its absence, I wanted him to crave more kisses just like it until his molars ached. “Maybe you’d like to give me a chance to set the record straight?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Dinner, drinks. There’s a nice Italian place not far from here. And after that, who knows where the night might take us?”
His eyes narrowed again as he looked down at me. Basking in the room’s golden glow, he looked like a young god—Apollo staring down at an errant worshipper, still trying to decide whether to react with pleasure or scorn.
For a moment, I was sure he was going to take me up on it. He liked the look of me, even if he had everything else about me all wrong. We had chemistry—he must have felt it, just as much as I was feeling it as I waited beneath him. He was the kind of Omega who liked a good time—and there was nothing I liked more than a good time.
We would’ve been good together. Fucking glorious. Like fireworks exploding over the city skyline all night long.
“I don’t think so,” he said, a smug smile on his lips while he said it. “Your time’s up, Mr. Rourke. My fee?”
He held his hand out. I watched his fingertips while I withdrew my wallet, placing a thousand dollars in his hand.
Had I gotten what I wanted? No, not yet. But I wasn’t about to let Kieran walk away from our little encounter with the assumption that Duncan Rourke was anything close to cheap.
“Your paycheck will miss you, Mr. Rourke,” he breathed against my ear, picking himself up off my lap and walking out the door. “Enjoy the champagne.”
But as he left, it wasn’t the money I found myself missing.
It was him.
3
Kieran
When I caught Noah’s eyes as I slipped backstage after my shift, I could already tell what was coming.
I didn’t like it, but at least I knew I was walking into a minefield instead of going in blind.
“How’d it go?” Noah asked, casting me side-eyes as he cooed the question in the most obnoxious way possible.
“Like two clown cars colliding into each other at top speeds,” I groaned, grabbing a towel and working it over my chest. “It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been such a disaster.”
Noah cringed. “That bad, huh?”
“It wasn’t…ugh. Not bad. Just…not like I expected.” It was a fact that was even more annoying to me than Noah’s line of questioning: I hadn’t been entirely able to pin Duncan Rourke down. “He was more clever than I gave him credit for initially.”
“But he paid in cash, right?”
I nodded, flashing the stack of bills. “I just shouldn’t have mistaken his flashiness for a lack of intelligence, I guess. I went in there thinking I could beat his wit with a handful of quarters stuffed in a tube sock only to find that he had a fucking katana.”
“On him? Really?” Noah stroked his jawline. “I figured the bulge in his pants was his meat sword, not a real one.”
I stared at Noah for a moment, then threw my dirty towel at his face. “It was a metaphor, dumbass. I’m trying to say…I’m just not used to losing, I guess.”
Noah tossed the towel back at me with a laugh. “Kieran, sorry, what the fuck are you talking about? It was a lap dance. He gave you what you wanted—money—you gave him what he wanted—an up-close view of you shaking your ass. There aren’t winners and losers in a simple transaction like that.”
I furrowed my brow as I grabbed my robe off its hook, shrugging it on and slipping my G-string off beneath its fluffy navy fabric. By all accounts, Noah was right. There shouldn’t have been winners and losers—I should’ve just been another dancer to him, and he should’ve been just another client for me.
“With him, there are,” I finally said, blinking at the weight of that realization.
“And you lost?”
I nodded, just as confused by the whole of the encounter as Noah must have been. “I’m pretty sure I did, yeah. And I’m still not sure how the bastard managed it.”
“If you ask me, it sounds like you have a C-R-U-S-H.”
I scowled at him. “I do not.”
“Winners, losers…the little way you keep scoffing every time you talk about him…” Noah shrugged, his blue eyes sparkling with a cruel kind of delight. “I mean, if you ask me, buddy, it sounds a lot like you caught feelings. But that’s just my opinion—you’re the one with a psych degree.”
“I didn’t catch feelings,” I insisted. “I don’t do that.”
“And yet, we’re still talking about him.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingertips and blew out a frustrated breath. “I couldn’t have talked to him for more than ten minutes, Noah. I barely know the guy.”
Noah grinned. “That’s chemistry for you. You gonna see him again?”
I ran my fingers through my hair, hating that Noah even had reason to ask that question. Duncan had asked me out for dinner. Drinks. Maybe more. If it hadn’t been for whatever it was that I’d felt between us—I wasn’t going to call it chemistry, no matter how much Noah insisted on it—I probably would’ve taken Duncan up on it, too. Working at the Ballroom was a good way to meet the kind of men I liked to know. Brief encounters. One night only, then we never had to hear from each other again. Men like Duncan Rourke normally filled my need for physicality without worrying about developing some idiotic emotional connection that I didn’t even want.
But Duncan Rourke wasn’t the kind of man that I’d thought.
“Hopefully not,” I said, and meant it, too. “I don’t do chemistry. Sounds too messy. Complicated. I’m a soft sciences only kind of guy, remember?”
“Your science might be soft, but as for the rest of you…” Noah nodded to my crotch, where my cock was still impossibly stiff, pitching a sizable tent in the folds of my robe. “You can say what you want, man. You might not do chemistry, but chemistry sure as hell looks like it’s doing you.”
I scowled, throwing my towel over my shoulder and brushing past Noah on my way to the showers. “You know, if you were half as good with dancing as you are with your fucking words, you’d be making two grand per lap dance too.”
Noah only beamed. “Yeah, but then who’d be left to call you on your bullshit?”
“It’s not bullshit,” I grumbled under my breath as I stalked away—too quietly for Noah to hear me and develop some kind of snappy comeback for.
Duncan Rourke was an irregular blip on an otherwise normal pulse, as far as I was concerned. Had he gotten to me? The fact that I was still thinking about him after I’d taken his money and walked away told me that much. But come morning, would I still be thinking about him? The scruffy shadow on the underside of his jaw? The deep brown of his eyes as he rolled my name off his tongue?
I sure as hell didn’t intend to. As I turned on the shower, I let the steam and the searing hot water wash the night off of me—and Duncan Rourke’s heavy, focused gaze along with it.<
br />
That should have been the end of it.
But of course, that just wasn’t my luck.
The next day at the club, I swung in early to check on the line-up and ensure we’d have enough troops. Over the last year, we’d lost two of our best dancers—Riley to a brooding, blue-eyed finance man, and Damon to a green-eyed playboy in an Armani suit. Their Instagram feeds were all babies and brunch now.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t still tempted to call one of them in for the evening when I realized that Ben had missed dress rehearsal and was probably not coming back.
“Fuck,” I groaned, pouring myself into a barstool and waving Christian, our best bartender, over to fill up a glass for me.
He brightened as he saw me, holding up a finger for me to wait a moment before ducking beneath the counter. “Just the man I’ve been waiting to see. Looks like you’ve got a secret admirer, Kieran.”
I rolled my eyes as he produced a massive floral arrangement from beneath the bar. Greenery and yellow lilies—they smelled amazing, but I wasn’t buying Christian’s story for a minute.
“Those are for Anders,” I said with certainty. “That boy has more admirers than he knows what to do with.”
“More like stalkers, from the sounds of things.” He plucked a card from within the greenery and handed it to me. “But the card has your name on it. One of your regulars, maybe?”
I laughed. “My regulars know I prefer to be wooed with cash.”
But he was right—there was my name, spelled out in the florist’s cursive on the back of a little cream-colored envelope. The card inside wasn’t signed, but I knew who had sent them as soon as I read the message.
“The champagne was delicious, but not as delicious as you.” I tossed the card back onto the bar like it had done me a bad turn. “Christ. This is the last thing I want to deal with right now.”
And never mind the string of heat that ran across the back of my neck as I caught another whiff of the flowers’ scent. That was embarrassment, not attraction.
Who the hell did Duncan Rourke think he was?
“I’ve always wanted a secret admirer,” Christian mused. “You Omegas have all the luck.”
I rolled my eyes. “Then you haven’t seen the way Carlos looks at you while you’re filling his drink orders. Get me a seltzer with a twist of lime before I go throw these in the trash, okay?”
Christian shook his head, clucking mournfully as he filled up a glass with ice. “I think it’s nice. Alphas don’t send flowers for no reason. Shows that he likes you.”
“All it shows me,” I retorted, taking my drink and hefting the flowers up in the crook of my arm, “Is that he’s too dumb to know how to take no for an answer.”
Still, when I got backstage, I found that I couldn’t quite bring myself to dump the arrangement into the garbage where it belonged. They were pretty, in a way. Smelled nice.
Stupid, but I didn’t mind having them around.
“You can stay,” I told them, crossing my arms as I admired the way they looked in front of my mirror. “For now.”
“I can? You mean it?”
I glanced up in the mirror to see Ben rushing up behind me, struggling to disentangle himself from his own jacket without dropping his gym bag.
“You,” I said, wheeling around, “Missed dress rehearsal. What the hell, Ben?”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry!” He twisted his face up into an expression so melodramatic, it felt more like he was auditioning for a role in a tragedy than actually apologizing—but what the hell. At least it meant we wouldn’t have to rework the opening number.
“Fine,” I said, waving him away. “Get into costume. But so help me God, if you miss one step…”
“I won’t let you down, Kieran, I promise!” he gushed, his crocodile tears immediately evaporating as he ran off to get dressed.
Sighing, I tugged my own t-shirt off and stripped down out of my jeans. I’d left my angel wings in the locker room, massive befeathered things that weighed a ton and looked like they’d been stolen from backstage at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show then refitted to accommodate a broad, muscular chest. I was just finishing strapping them on when Carlos, the club’s head waiter came in, his pencil-thin mustache twitching with delight.
“Big crowd tonight?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You could say that.” His voice was coy—too coy for my liking.
“Ugh. Whatever you’ve got to say, just say it.”
“Well…” Carlos hummed, tucking his hands into his pockets and looking pleased with himself. “I just talked to the gentleman at table twelve…”
“Ughhh,” I groaned again. Duncan Rourke’s table from last night. Somehow, I knew where this was going.
“Mmhmm. Ugh indeed. He had a particular interest in what set you’re performing. Wants to know if you’re doing the cowboy thing tonight, or if you’ll be wearing your firefighter costume tonight instead.”
“Why the fuck does he need to know about my firefighter costume?” I blinked, realizing that I was asking the wrong question. “How does he know about my firefighter costume?”
Carlos shrugged. “He’s been coming in here every night for the last month. Suppose he just wants to know what act his favorite dancer is performing.” He cocked his head back to the mirrors outside the locker room, barely fighting back a self-satisfied smile. “Those flowers out there from him?”
“He’s been coming here for a month?” Suddenly, the fact that he’d known my name last night was vastly overshadowed by the knowledge that I’d been watched.
“A month or so, yeah. Is that weird or something?”
It seemed like such a stupid thing to get hung up on—of course I’d been watched. I spent four nights a week parading around on stage wearing barely anything at all. Watching was exactly what the Ballroom’s audience paid for.
“No,” I finally said, shaking my head. “It’s just…Guess I’m just wondering what took him so long.”
“Maybe he’s shy.”
I laughed. “Shy is something that man has never felt in his life.”
“So? What should I tell him?”
I shifted my shoulders beneath my wings, testing their weight. They felt heavier tonight somehow—but it wasn’t a burden I was unable to bear.
“Tell him it’s the firefighter routine,” I instructed Carlos, a little smile forming on my lips. “And let him know that I’ll be making an appearance at table twelve after. He can buy me a drink.”
Carlos grinned, giving me a little salute. “I’ll let him know.”
If Duncan Rourke wanted to play ball, then who was I to deny him?
Only this time, I intended to win.
4
Duncan
The cowboy get-up suited Kieran, but I had to hand it to him—his firefighter routine was even better. There was something about the way he handled his prop fire hose to Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” that had my mind roaming to something else I’d like to see clenched between his fists—
Which was the point, of course, but God. He did it with style.
I swirled the ice around in my glass as the audience applauded. Kieran left the stage like a star, with a wink and a blown kiss that he tossed to the audience with reckless abandon. My teeth ground against each other at even that—the idea of some other Alpha catching a kiss from Kieran tossed to the wind.
I couldn’t have felt more possessive of him if I’d tried. To my surprise, our time together in the champagne room the night before only exacerbated that fact. I had expected him to be as enchanting in person as he was up on stage, but I hadn’t fathomed what a mouth he had on him. He was clever, patient and restrained. He knew how flirtation worked, the back and forth of power, and he played the game well. Nearly as well as I did. It only doubled how badly I wanted to claim him. Get him on his knees for me. Stoke his cheek, massage his scalp and call him mine.
How much I wanted to put that mouth of his to better use.
Most of
all, talking to Kieran had made me realize what a joke my other conquests had been of late. Sure, I enjoyed watching Omega models ride me in the back seats of limousines. I liked winding my hands around their firm hips at clubs and feeling their toes trace up my calf beneath the table at fancy restaurants as much as the next Alpha. But something had been missing in all of those fleeting encounters. I needed someone with brains. Someone who could give as good as they got.
In Kieran, I’d found that. Wouldn’t have sent him flowers otherwise—I didn’t believe in leading an Omega on.
As another dancer took the stage, I found myself checking my watch and counting the seconds. The waiter had told me to expect Kieran at my table after his dance, but at this rate, there was a good chance I’d grow old first. I had to close my eyes and remind myself to be patient for once in my life as I waited for Kieran to appear. I’d spent so much of my career jumping on opportunity like a lion on a wounded gazelle, patience wasn’t exactly a virtue to which I could lay claim.
But Kieran. Kieran was worth a little wait.
When I finally spotted him moving through the crowd toward me in that delectable little golden G-string, I felt my inner lion purr with satisfaction.
For a man who looked so fucking good wearing so fucking little like that, I could wait a very long time.
“I enjoyed you up there,” I told him as soon as he came into earshot, nodding toward the stage. “You move pretty well.”
“You just like watching me handle my hose,” he joked, positioning himself in front of the table then leaning over it toward me. He leaned so close, for a moment I was so sure he was going to kiss me—which, I realized when I saw his smile as he pulled away, was exactly what he’d wanted me to think. “Sounds like you’ve been enjoying me up there for some time now, Mr. Rourke.”