Stripped (13 page)

“No, when I worked in Las Vegas.”

“Rick told me you were there for a few years. What did you do in Vegas?” He could see her dealing cards at some casino, expression cool, fingers nimble. He’d have been the luckiest bastard ever, sitting at her table.
 

“Burlesque.”

His head jerked involuntarily, yanking away from the clip she was attempting to adjust in his hair. He ignored the light sting of strands being pulled out by the roots and looked up at her. “Sorry, what?”

A blush warmed her cheeks. “You know—burlesque.” Her voice dropped. “The thinking man’s stripper.”

The idea of this woman performing a striptease on stage, night after night in front of eager, panting crowds…. Hell. His arousal came roaring back to life, and he shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Wish I could’ve seen one of your shows.”

“I don’t know as you’d have enjoyed them.”

“Why? Am I not a thinking man?”

“No, I…I just don’t know how you would feel, watching me take my clothes off.”

“Fi—”

“In front of hundreds of people, I mean.” Her fingers tilted his head as she wanted. “Close your eyes.”

He closed them. “Hundreds?” he repeated.

“Full house every night.” A tug to his lids as she applied color at the base of his lashes.

“Just to see you?”

“Oh, no. I was one of eight girls. There were three routines we all did together, plus our solo numbers.”

“And what was
your
solo number?”
 

“I did a lot of flex work, stuff based off my ballet training—splits, extensions. My songs were always slower, because the physical part of the dance was more athletic and controlled than a lot of the others. I was less of a character on stage, and more of a visual.”

This woman…she fucking scalded him, with a word as much as a look or touch. “Yeah?”

“Huh. Maybe you
would
have liked it, after all.” She caressed his cheekbone, a covert brush of fingertips kissing his skin, and pulled away. “Eyes open.”

As he opened his eyes, he thought for a moment before telling her, honestly, “I think I would have felt jealous. Proud, of course, because you’re beautiful and talented, and damn right they should all be lookin’ at you and wantin’ you. But I’m not a selfless guy, darlin’. I don’t like to share. I don’t
intend
to share.”
 

She leaned in with yet another brush, dipped in one of the many pots and palettes on the counter behind her, and began paling the edges of his mouth. The scene they were shooting this morning involved him sitting in a prison cell, long deprived of food and water, which meant she had to make his character appear even more sinister than usual. “I don’t dance anymore, you know,” she murmured, just when he thought she wouldn’t answer him.

“But you miss it.”

Her breath caught, and her eyes glinted as if with tears. A trick of the light…or maybe something more. “I miss putting on my pointe shoes every morning and bandaging my bloody toes every night. I miss sweating at the barre and watching the mirror in order to correct my form. I miss the smell of the studios and the texture of the wooden floors. I miss feeling strong and driven, and I miss feeling like I was half a breath away from flying.” She paused, as if suddenly realizing she’d let the passion whose existence she denied escape its confines within her soul. “I miss ballet. I don’t miss burlesque.” Her thumb found his bottom lip, petted him there affectionately as she met his gaze with a sad smile.

Oh, hell. She was going to make him fall in love with her if she kept this up. “Then why do it? Why leave ballet behind?”

She shook her head. “Because you can be good at something but not be right for it.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I loved ballet. I wasn’t made to be a ballerina.” She silenced him with a look. “We need to talk about something else now.”

But he wasn’t ready to let it go. It felt important, somehow. “You said you’d dance for me, if I earned it. Tell me how.”

“How to…earn a dance from me?” Confusion lurked in her voice as she pulled a stool from under the counter and perched by the arm of his chair.
 

“Yeah.”

Taking his left hand in hers, she began darkening the nail beds with a smoky black color, another layer donned to transform him into his character, Count Vargas. “I don’t know why I said that.” Her skin heated against his, her grip gentle but firm as she moved from finger to finger. “I was…I don’t know.” Her voice lowered. “Trying to flirt with you, I guess.”

The scar on his forehead tugged against his skin slightly as he raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you won’t dance for me?” Picturing her in his hotel room was too easy, the jazzy thump of some imaginary bass sending warm ripples of sound vibrating through his body as the Fiona in his head twirled. Twisted. Took her clothes off, piece by concealing piece, until she stood completely bared to him.
 

And then he would have her, the too-graceful seductress sprawled across his giant bed. Hard and fast the first time, to counteract all of her molasses movements that had made him shake with need. Then slow, so slow, until she lost her mind and screamed his name and shuddered around him and,
God
, tonight. That could be tonight.
 

His perverted daydream dissipated as she shifted the stool to his right side and mimicked the work done to his left hand. He was hard under the drape, under his jeans—painfully so—and it made him reckless, even though he was aware that other cast and crew had started trickling into the trailer, and they were less alone than ever. “What about tonight?”

She paused, but didn’t tear her gaze from her handiwork. “What about it?”
 

“Dance for me then.” When she started to protest, he leaned down, bringing his face close to hers to whisper, “All I wanna do is watch you move, darlin’. On me, under me. No Vegas spectacle. Just you.”

His breath skating across her cheek caused her to shiver, and he swallowed a triumphant grin as he settled back in the chair. Her fingers clutched his hand in a death grip, and she risked a peek up at him. “I can do that.” Surreptitiously, her free hand slid up the inside of his leg over his jeans, past his knee to disappear beneath the cloth draped across his upper body. She palmed his inner thigh, fingertips digging into muscle with delightful pressure, and he wriggled in his seat, air escaping him in a panting rush. “I could also do this.” And then she was cupping him, the slender strength of her fingers branding his throbbing erection through the placket of his jeans.
 

He’d lost the ability to speak, sheer lust incinerating all higher brain function. He watched, silent, jaw clenched, as she rose to bend over him, her hand never leaving his dick. A smug smile played at the corners of her mouth, and this time, it was his turn to shiver when the heat of her breath puffed against his ear. “You’re going to get us in trouble if you keep teasing me at work.” She released him, resettling herself on the stool to complete the work on his right hand.
 

He gasped for breath, face hot, body aching as it would after a day of fight choreography training. “
I’m
the tease?” he croaked.
 

If he hadn’t been watching the temptress at his feet, he might have missed the quirk of lips marring an otherwise serene expression. “You started it. Now shush.”

He shushed, knowing that they’d already risked too much in such a public setting, but he grumbled internally, nonetheless. She was right—he’d started it, all of it, from day one. But damn, he also planned on finishing it in a way that would leave them both smiling. Tonight.

TEN

The weatherman-predicted spring tempest was roiling outside the apartment when an insistent knock sounded on her door.
 

A tall, lanky figure gripped the frame in white-knuckled hands, face shadowed by the early evening storm clouds and the hood of his zipped sweatshirt. Wet jeans molded to lean thighs, clothes soaked from the downpour—as though he’d been caught unaware while out walking.

She stared at him, shielded from the rain by the second-story portico stretching from one end of the apartment complex to another, an overhang that generally provided scant protection from the elements.
 

Declan shoved back the damp hood, droplets glistening on the bridge of his nose as he speared her with a dangerous gaze. “I want things from you, Fiona O’Brien. I want so many fuckin’ things.”

She understood—he’d made her come twice, orgasms that had rocked her harder than any a guy had given her before. “I owe you.” She had no problem with reciprocity, not with him.
 

Not when she’d promised him
yes, yes
.

He shook his head, hands braced against the doorjamb as he inched closer. “No. That’s not how this works.” Rain pelted the parking lot at his back, violent gusts of wind blowing through the drenched fronds of the palm trees shielding her complex from the street. “Invite me in.” A command.
 

She rolled her eyes, even as happy shivers sprinted down her spine. “What are you, a vampire?”

His grin was positively lethal. “Invite me in, and find out.”

“If I let you in....” She reached up to twine an ebony curl around her fingertip, stroking his hair back off the cool, damp skin of his forehead. It didn’t matter that she touched his hair all the time at work, that the silky texture was nothing new, because
this moment
was new. “Things will change if I let you in.”

He leaned into her hand, gaze firing with undeniable heat. “You afraid of change?”

Of course she was afraid, but the easy lie fell from her lips anyway. “No.” She pulled away, stepping back to let him come inside and away from the storm mirroring her emotions.
 

Toeing off his sneakers and shrugging out of his sweatshirt in her front entry, he grumbled, “You didn’t wait for me, after work.”

“I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I’d remember what you said last night on the phone? Or this morning in the trailer? Because I remember, Fi. And so do you.”

She nodded, unable to deny the truth of his words, but there was more to it than that. “I didn’t think you’d want to, after the scenes we shot today.”
 

It had been a brutal day on set, both for those in front of the camera and behind it. They’d worked in reverse order, starting with Declan trapped in a rotting dungeon, imprisoned in what was meant to be the sewers of Venice before the start of the twentieth century but was really the magnificent work of their set designers on a Los Angeles soundstage. As the hours passed, shot after shot recorded in quick execution, Fiona had changed Declan’s appearance from a haggard, broken man to a man in the throes of acute torture. She added blood and bruising, and faux grime to his hair and exposed skin.
 

The last frame of the day had left the cast and crew standing in chilled silence. Logically, she knew what had happened wasn’t real. She knew it was all some hideous form of movie magic, but watching Declan strung up in chains, pummeled and whipped as he laughed in his torturer’s face, witnessing his character’s sanity fall away beneath the imposed pain….
 

She flung herself at him now, pushing her glasses atop her head before wrapping her arms around his torso and burying her face in his shoulder as she hugged him. Immediately, his arms came around her, solid and warm, and his lips brushed her temple. “Hey, hey. What’s up?”

Shaking her head, she squeezed him tight. She’d been around movie sets all her life, thanks to her dad. It was nothing like the stage, or live theatre, where the crystallized moments of perfect acting—of perfect art—happened organically or not at all. Oftentimes in film, post-production was where the beauty was added. Moviegoers walked out of the theatre talking about a pregnant pause that never happened on set, or a spear of light made sparkling via digital editing, or an orchestral strain that brought tears to one’s eye.
 

What Declan had done today was beautiful. Terrible and beautiful, and she was suddenly, starkly aware of just how good he was at his craft. He had taken all of the technical elements of filmmaking, elements that could have left the scene feeling flat, and turned those last moments in front of the camera this afternoon into living art. The choreography of the stunts, the built-in supports of the fake chains, the dead space above and in front of him that the camera frame hid from the audience—those things should have made what he did less powerful.
 

Yet Fiona’s heart had pounded as she stood off to the side, behind the director and much of the crew. No watching the monitors for her; she’d found a pocket of space through the heads and shoulders of her coworkers and stared at the rather intimidating man she now held in her arms. A man who, if she didn’t know better, she’d believe had been beaten to within an inch of his life only a few hours earlier.
 

So she clung to him, nuzzling the base of his throat and drawing in the scents of freshly showered skin, spring rain, and Declan. Intoxicating yet undeniably comforting, and she needed to stand there for just a minute more and remind herself that it was pretend. It was all pretend.
 

“Fiona.” A soft kiss to her hair. “Fiona, look at me.”
 

Reluctantly, she leaned back, enjoying the weight of his arms as they crossed over her shoulder blades. One hand slid to rest at the base of her spine, deliciously hot through the thin layer of her white tank top.
 

Those rich brown eyes met hers, the fire from when he’d knocked on her door tempered with something that looked suspiciously like tenderness. “Today wasn’t the worst I’ve been through, promise.” His gaze skated over her face, and he smiled as he tucked behind her ear an escaped lock of hair frizzy from the humidity. “It was fun.”

Of course it was, to him. He got to dress up in a costume, toss insults at his costars, and spew fake blood everywhere. Nothing more than a day of play, when all was said and done. “It wasn’t fun to watch.”