What He Shields (What He Wants Book Seventeen) (18 page)

“Yeah,” I said, not able to resist
getting a little dig in.
 
“Colt told
me.”

“Don’t,” she said, pushing her hair back
from her face.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t act like you know Colt.”

“I wasn’t.”

She bit the inside of her cheek, almost
like she wanted to say something else, but then she let out a little sigh,
obviously deciding it wasn’t worth it.

“You can use anything you see here,” she
said, opening a drawer filled with makeup in all different shades –
lipsticks, blush,
eyeshadows
, liners, and
foundations.
 
All of it was still in
its packages, neatly arranged and separated.
 
“When you’re done, you can keep it.
 
Don’t put anything that’s been opened
back in the drawer.
 
No one wants
your nasty used shit.
 
Got it?”

I nodded.

“We pool our tips,” she said.
 
“So don’t even try to think about
pocketing anything.
 
They go in a
tip jar on the bar, and we split them up at the end of the night.”

“Fine.”

“And since you’re not going to make any
money looking like that, I guess I’m going to have to help you.”

She led me over to a dressing room mirror
and went to work on my face, smoothing foundation, layering eye shadow,
slicking
lip gloss
onto my lips.

“Better,” she said, when she was done,
her tone conveying that she still thought I was subpar.

I turned to look at myself.
 
I did look better.
 
She’d evened out my skin tone, made my
lips looked plump and pouty and my eyes smoky and sexy.
 

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it, even
though I knew she’d only done it because if I made more money, she was going to
make more money.

She shrugged, like she could care
less.
 
About
anything.
 
She leaned over
the vanity, studying her reflection in the mirror as she arranged her hair
around her shoulders.
 
I watched
her, wondering what it would be like to be so beautiful.
 
When you were beautiful, people wanted
to be near you.
 
They wanted to help
you, they thought you were good, worthy of something, whether it was attention
or love or money.
 
People wanted to
be near beauty, almost as if they thought it would rub off on them.

Of course, there was another side to
beauty.
 
It could bring so much
power that some people didn’t know how to handle it.

Jessa flicked her hair behind her ear.
“The job is easy.
 
You ask the guys
what they want.
 
You write it
down.
 
You bring it to me.
 
Then you bring the drinks back to the
customers.
 
Got it?”’

I nodded.

She pulled the bottom of her vest down a
tiny bit, adjusting it where it hit her stomach.
 
There was a dusting of something
shimmery on her skin, giving her a glittery glow.
 

I caught sight of something on her arms
– red marks.
 
I tried not to
stare, but I couldn’t help it.
 
There were tracks marks on her arms, faint, but there.
 
Was Jessa into drugs?
 
Or was she a cutter like me?
 
Colt had made it perfectly clear there
were no drugs allowed in the club, and yet this girl seemed like she was
advertising that might not be the case.

Jessa saw me looking, but instead of trying
to cover her arms or move them out of my line of sight like I would have, she
gave me a smirk, almost like she was enjoying the fact that I was staring at
her.

She reached over and grabbed a hair tie
out of the glass jar that was sitting on the counter, moving slowly, making
sure I got a good view of her arms.

I averted my eyes as she gathered her
long hair up into a ponytail and slid the tie around it.

A second later, the lights in the room
dimmed, and a slow, sexy song started, its beat pulsing through the club.
 
“Showtime,” Jessa said, and grinned.

***

Three hours later, I was so exhausted I
thought I was going to drop right there in the middle of the club.

I’d been running back and forth to the
bar, fetching drinks and filling orders all night.
 
Besides the fact that it was exhausting,
it actually hadn’t been that bad.
 
The men definitely didn’t try to hide the fact that they were ogling my
body, but with what was going on up the main stage, none of them spent too much
time looking at me.
 
Sure, their
eyes lingered on my tits and ass as I walked by in my short little skirt, but
it was only for a quick beat.
 
While
I might have been dressed provocatively, it was
all relative
.
 
And in this place, I was practically
wearing a snowsuit.

Up on stage, beautiful women, much more
beautiful than I, danced and gyrated, removing their tops and showing off their
gorgeous bodies.
 
They flipped around a pole, showing off
their toned legs and abs, their
asses
jiggling,
causing the men to go crazy with appreciation.

I was serving a round of beers to a group
of men in business suits when it happened.
 
One of them looked at me and said, “Nice ass, sweetheart.
 
How come you’re not up there, dancing?”

“Jesus, Neal,” one of the other guys at
the table said.
 
He shook his head
and looked at me.
 
“I’m sorry about
Neal.
 
He’s been drinking since
lunch, and he’s obviously not in his right mind.”

Neal shrugged, then turned his back to me
and started talking to the guy on the other side of him.

“No harm, no foul,” I said to his friend,
shrugging.
 
I’d made a pact with
myself that I wasn’t going to get worked up over every dumb comment some
drunk
guy made.
 
There were men drinking here, men celebrating, men getting horny and
worked up without any kind of release.
 
You could practically smell the testosterone pumping through the room.

“No, he’s…” The man motioned me closer,
like he wanted to tell me something in confidence.
 
“He’s not my friend.
 
I just work with him.”
 
He smiled at me.
 
“Sorry, is it weird that I felt the need
to point that out?
 
I just didn’t
want you to think I’d hang out with a guy like that.”
  

“No problem,” I said.
 
“If we were all assumed to be friends
with our co-workers, we’d all have a lot of explaining to do.”
 
The words had just come out of me, my
default whenever someone said something to me about friends or family.
 
I tended to just agree with them, mostly
because I had no friends or family, and so going along with whatever people
said made me feel less awkward.
 

He held out a twenty-dollar bill to
me.
 
“Here,” he said, looking kind
of sheepish.
 
“You know, to make up
for it.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I
said.
 
“I mean
,
it’s not your fault.”
 
It wasn’t
necessary, but I was hoping he was going to insist.
 
I wasn’t doing this job for the money
– if Colt was going to help me find Declan, if he did find
Declan, that
would be worth more than all the money in the
world.
 
But the thought of making
twenty dollars just for walking some beers over from the bar was kind of
blowing my mind, especially when I currently had eight dollars to my name.

“Go ahead, take it,” the guy said,
pushing the bill into my hand.
 
“It’ll make me feel better.”

“Thanks.”
 
I took the money and slid it into the
tip cup that was sitting on my tray.
 

“What’s your name?” the guy asked.

“Olivia,” I replied, before realizing it
probably wasn’t a good idea to use your real name when you worked at a strip
club.
 
Wasn’t that why all the girls
here used names like Diamond and Kat?

“Olivia,” the guy said.
 
“That’s my sister’s name.”
 
He gave me a smile, and suddenly, the
hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my internal radar started going
off.
 
It wasn’t anything his tone or
anything he’d done -- he sounded genuine and his smile didn’t seem fake.
 
He was dressed in an expensive suit and
had the semi-uninterested look of a guy who’d been dragged along on a work trip
and didn’t necessarily even want to be spending his night in a strip club.
 
I had no reason to think he was lying.
 
His sister’s name probably was
Olivia.
  

But I’d had enough experience with
predators to know how this was one of their tactics.
 
If a man wanted you to trust him, he’d
find a way to connect with you.
 
Something unassuming and innocent, something that would make you
think
he wasn’t a threat.
 
It was how abusers were able to keep
their victims close.
 
They gave you
a reason to connect with them and make you think you could trust them before
exploiting that trust and confusing you about whether or not what they were
doing was wrong.

“That’s nice,” I said vaguely.

“I’m Caleb,” he said, holding his hand
out.

I took it and shook it.
 
His grip was strong, his hand warm.
 
Nothing about him on the surface seemed
off – but my instinct was still telling me there was something more going
on.
 
It wasn’t even necessarily
something nefarious.
 
It wasn’t like
I thought he was going to try to pay me to sleep with him or anything.
 
It was just… I felt like there was more
to him what I was seeing.

“Thanks for the drinks,” he said, holding
up his beer and taking a swig.
 
“And
for putting up with my friends.”
 
He
rolled his eyes and I smiled.

“Have a good night,” I said.

“Yeah, you too.”

My heart was pounding as I walked away
from him.

Relax,
Olivia,
I told
myself.
 
You’re being crazy.
 
Just
because you have the same
name
as some guy’s sister
doesn’t mean something shady is going on.
 
Stop acting like a victim.
 
Stop being so suspicious of every single person you meet.

I got back to work and was just about to
put in a special order for a bunch of frat guys when Jessa called me over to the
bar.
 
“Olivia,” she said.
 
“You need to bring this to the
VIP.”
 
She pushed a bottle of
champagne across the bar.
 
“There’s
a bachelor party back there, and they want bottle service.”

“Okay,” I said.
 
“Um, where’s the VIP?”

“Straight through there,” she said,
pointing to a red crushed velvet curtain with a textured square pattern
imprinted into the fabric.
 
“It’s
the second door on the left.
 
They’re waiting for you.”

I grabbed the bottle of champagne and
slipped through the curtain.
 
At the
end of the hall was a full-length wall-sized mirror, and I almost didn’t
recognize myself as I walked.
 
My
breasts were pushed up, my hair loose around my shoulders.
 
My skin looked luminous from the makeup
Jessa had put on me, and my cheeks were flushed from running around the club
all night.
 
My lips were pouty with
lip gloss
.

I looked pretty.
 
Or at least, as close to pretty as I
could get.

When I got to the second door on the
left, I stopped, wondering if I was supposed to knock or just walk in.

Finally, I knocked.

I heard a bunch of hooting and hollering
coming from the room, which I guess meant the men were ready for their
drinks.
 
I turned the knob and
pushed open the door.

When I got inside, I frowned.
 

It didn’t look like a bachelor party.

At least, they didn’t look like
bachelors.

There were four men, all of them
middle-aged, all of them dressed in jeans and flannel shirts.
 
There was another bachelor party going
on out in the main area of the club, and those guys were a lot younger, and they
were slightly dressed up, like they were going out for a night on the town.