Private Dancer (2 page)

The collar of her linen blouse was lace-trimmed, but Bev flipped it up anyway and freed a couple of buttons. A quick glance in the rearview mirror told her it wasn’t enough. With a mother-of-pearl headband restraining her shoulder-length brunette hair, and her unembellished gray eyes, she still looked like the Bev Brewster who shopped at the neighborhood supermarket on Saturday afternoons and recycled aluminum cans.

What bothered her more—far more—was that there were still traces of the Bev Brewster whose husband had left her two years ago for another woman, one who was younger and more fertile. She yanked the headband from her hair and shook her head hard.

Bev entered the bar cautiously and stayed just inside the door, searching the gloom for the roughneck. The Red Monkey was dark, noisy, and crowded, exactly the sort of dive where mayhem loved company and felonies were committed in the alley while no one noticed or cared.

Bev’s rapid pulse told her what she already knew, that she was out of her depth. She’d been expecting a den of iniquity, but this was a den of thieves. A concealed-weapons crowd. Even the women loitering at the bar looked like the sort who lured men to the rooms upstairs and then had their boyfriends roll them.

The roughneck was nowhere in sight. Caution wrestled with curiosity and won by a landslide. The only thing that kept Bev in place was her own personal demon. She’d had her share of things to feel like a failure about in recent years, and she was determined not to do a repeat with the present situation. She’d gone to great lengths to reassure her father that she could handle a routine surveillance case like this one; the last thing she was going to do was to turn tail and run.

“You’re not very good at this, are you?” he said.

A cold chill shimmied down Bev’s spine. The sensation was familiar and so was the voice. She’d heard husky undercurrents before, but this guy’s voice could crawl up your arm and tap you on the shoulder. She turned and saw him leaning against a wooden post, not five feet away. “Not very good at what?” she asked.

“At following people.”

He strolled over to her, and his nearness forced Bev to admit something she’d been trying to ignore in her earlier preoccupation with his defects. He was a highly attractive hoodlum. Even dark glasses and a heavy five o’clock shadow couldn’t conceal the strong, slightly asymmetrical bones of his face. His right side was more angular, had more depth, and the effect was strangely sensual. Even his mouth conveyed sensuality. Then Bev noticed the scar that hooked down from the fullness of his lower lip and snaked along his jawline. Had he been knifed? she wondered. Or shot?

“That is what you’re doing, isn’t it?” he said. She guessed that behind his Ray Bans his gaze was drifting to her unbuttoned neckline. “Following me?”

Bev cocked her head and boldly returned his stare. He had the oddest effect on her. Her heart was racing, her common sense was shouting at her to back off, and yet there she was, sizing him up as though she faced down men in black leather jackets every day.

“My, aren’t we vain?” she responded, pleased at the ice-cold tone of her voice. “A woman walks into a bar, and you assume she’s following you. Some of us might have better things to do. Or didn’t that occur to you?”

“Better things?”

“Yes, as it so happens, I’m meeting someone here—later. I come here often.”

“A regular?”

She wondered if his eyes were making a leisurely pass over her body as he mulled over that possibility. Her nerves began to prickle with heat.

“There are two kinds of women who frequent this place,” he said, hooking a thumb in a zippered pocket of his jacket, “serious drinkers and private dancers.” His smile was as dry as the sawdust on the bar floor. “Which are you?”

There was no doubt what he meant by the latter reference. Bev had already had a look at the female patrons. She might have bluffed about the drinking, except that she had no tolerance whatsoever for alcohol. Two glasses of wine with dinner and she was on her ear. What would Harve Brewster’s daughter do now? she thought.

“I dance ... a little,” she finally said, wondering at her less-than-confident tone. The ice in her voice was melting.

His smile turned raffish. “Can I afford you?”

“I doubt it.”

He liked that. She could tell by the way he snapped back his head, flicking dark hair off his face. His sunglasses glowed, picking up the neon lights from the bar’s beer signs. “I’ll take up a collection,” he said. Then, pointing out the warped wooden dance floor with a silent jukebox to one side, he added, “Let’s do it.”

She turned to look, unaware that he was checking her out. He knew she would have blushed if she could have heard his two-word summation of her backside.

Nice butt, he allowed, his eyes following the tailored lines of her slacks as they curved over her hips. Her legs weren’t half bad either. Made a man wonder if she knew how to use them. She didn’t look as though she’d had a whole lot of practice, he concluded, easing back to survey the whole woman. In fact, if he had to tell the truth, she wasn’t his type. He didn’t go for fresh-scrubbed complexions and lace collars on grown women. He had noticed her eyes, though, even in the bar’s gloom. They were dove gray and soft enough to crawl into.
Soft enough to ease a man’s pain
, he thought.

A muscle flexed in his jaw as he let his eyes drift back over her. She might even be a knockout with the right clothes, some makeup, or whatever it was that women did to turn themselves into babes. But who the hell was she?

In the restaurant he’d had her figured for a bored housewife, but bored housewives didn’t follow men for ten miles to a bar in one of the roughest parts of town. No, she hadn’t come to The Red Monkey for an afternoon of unbridled passion. The moment’s regret he felt at that realization didn’t make him any less determined to find out what her real motives were. In his business it was dangerous to take anyone for granted, even Ivory soap types with lace collars.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She turned back to him and his breathing held for a split second. The liquid softness of her gaze hit him again, as though it reflected something soft in him, some need. He rejected the idea as insane. There wasn’t anything soft in him. Not anymore. And as for needs, they got a guy burned. A woman had taught him that.

“Do private dancers have to have names?” she asked.

The anger flickering inside him had little if anything to do with her. It was old business, but its heat had aroused him nonetheless. He couldn’t tell if her voice had gone raspy from fear or excitement, but it was clear she intended to play out the game. He resisted the desire to shake his head and laugh. She wasn’t a pro, not unless the church-lady look was selling on the streets these days. Whoever she was, it shouldn’t take much to call her bluff, especially since he’d been playing this kind of game all his life.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s better without names.”

Say when, lady
, he thought, reaching out and capturing a dark tendril of her hair, testing its silkiness with his fingers.

Bev went very still as his skin brushed the delicate flesh just behind her ear. A moment later he was drawing those same fingers along the curve of her throat as lightly as he’d touched Elayne Greenaway.

She was afraid to move as his hand descended, afraid that any sudden gesture would unlock the anticipation trembling inside her. What was he going to do? Actually, she had a fairly good idea, but she hoped fervently that she was wrong. It would be easy enough to stop him, but she knew this was a test of her mettle.

Her heart leaped at the intimacy of his touch, but she willed herself to stay still, unflinchingly still ... even as his fingers drifted over the rise of her collarbone and down toward the opening of her blouse.

He hesitated a moment, just at the top of her breast, where the skin was exquisitely sensitive. She sensed he was giving her a chance to call it off, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her pride was involved. The game had turned into a battle of wills, and she needed to win. If anyone stopped, it would have to be him.

A gasp burned in her throat as he dipped lower, into the warmth between her breasts, into her cleavage. You bastard, she thought. This was outrageous! Her heart raced wildly, and her breasts strained against her bra. And yet she didn’t move a muscle. Or try to stop him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said, barely getting the words out.

She could feel the heat of his stare even through his dark glasses. His nostrils flared slightly as he slipped his hand inside her blouse and cupped her breast.

“This,” he said. “How do you like it?”

Her skin flamed with shock and embarrassment. How did she like it? She wanted to break every one of his miserable fingers! She averted her eyes, unwilling to let him see her rising fury. He wanted her to react to him. If she moved or even blinked, he would win.

He wasn’t going to win, by God! She was. That had become her mission in the past ten seconds. No man was going to make her feel like a whimpering failure again.

Her concentration was so intensely focused on his hand that she could feel him searing her flesh through the silk of her bra. Her nipples became painfully engorged, her skin hypersensitive. She could feel every detail of his hand, the roughened texture of his palm, the heartbeat in his fingertips. It was throbbing everywhere, in her breasts, in her throat, in the uncontrollable quiver of her lower lip.

He ran his thumb over the tautness of her nipple. “For a private dancer,” he said softly, “you’re quick to arouse.”

Excitement clenched painfully in Bev’s stomach and streamed down her thighs, weakening her legs until she could hardly stand. Her whole body was a quivering mass of nerves. Look at what he was doing to her! Damn him to hell, she thought, anger flaring. She ought to bring up her knee and make a choirboy out of him.

The emotions colliding inside Bev made her act on a dangerous impulse. She didn’t bring up her knee, but she did do something that matched him move for move. She lifted the hand that was frozen at her side and placed it squarely on the button fly of his jeans.

His breath caught, and the sound gave Bev intense satisfaction. She pressed harder, and a thrill rolled up her arm that was as hot as hellfire.

“You’re pretty quick to arouse yourself,” she said.

He hissed one raw word through his teeth and grimaced in disbelief. “Wh-what the hell are you doing?”

Her fingers curved over the shape of him. “This,” she answered. Her heart pounded like crazy as she stared him straight in the Ray Bans. “How do you like it?”

“Lady, if you don’t get your hand off my pants, you’re going to find out how much I like it in about ten seconds.”

He wasn’t bluffing. All hell was breaking loose beneath the brass buttons of his jeans. But even if he’d been built like a bull elephant and buck naked, Bev wouldn’t have removed her hand at that moment.

“Lady, hands off!”

“I will if you will,” she countered breathlessly.

The released each other simultaneously and stepped back.

Bev was panting like a winded sprinter. He was breathing hard too, but he had a faint smile on his face that was as intrigued as it was bemused.

“Let’s dance,” he ordered under his breath.

“No thanks.”

He gripped her arm firmly and drew her with him onto the dance floor. “That wasn’t an invitation,” he said, stopping just long enough to pump some quarters into the jukebox before he took her into his arms. “I don’t want the whole damn bar to see the condition I’m in.”

Bev wanted nothing more to do with his condition, but she was as limp as a newborn kitten at that moment, and much too weak to object. She was exhausted just thinking about the way she’d groped a man she didn’t know.

The music started, a country-western song about cheatin’ husbands and cheatin’ hearts, and Bev fully expected to be dragged into a hammerlock of an embrace and to be plastered up against his body. He’d given her no reason to think he wasn’t the kind of man who danced with his hands all over a woman.

Instead, he held her at a respectable distance, just close enough for camouflage. At first Bev was more confused than relieved. Adrenaline was still coursing through her, and her imagination was conjuring up enough steamy images for an adult video. She was wildly overstimulated, and prepared for just about anything but a display of good manners.

They weren’t really dancing, just swaying slowly in time to the music, and she found herself wanting to look up at him, to search his scarred, darkly handsome face and ask him a million questions. Why was a man who terrorized headwaiters, a man who groped strange women and behaved as if life’s rules had been written for him to break, suddenly treating her as though this were their first date?

She didn’t ask the questions, however. She didn’t even look at him. Her head was still swimming with excitement, and she was afraid of what he might see in her eyes.

“I’m curious,” he said, his voice made even huskier by the faintest suggestion of masculine laughter. “Do you like it? Dancing, I mean.”

She started to nod, then realized he meant
private
dancing. “That depends ...”

“On what?”

“On who I’m dancing with.”

She heard his slow intake of air and wondered if she had her answer to his change in attitude. Was he still aroused too? And maybe a little shaken by the force of it? The thought sparked a shower of sensations that strained Bev’s already overworked nerves.

“I like this song,” she commented, unable to clear the telltale throatiness from her voice. The ice had long ago melted into a warm slush on the barroom floor.

“I like dancing to this song,” he said. “With you.”

His leg brushed hers and the accidental contact sent a shock wave of expectation through Bev’s entire body.

Suddenly she was aware of his hand at the slope of her spine, of its heat and subtle guiding pressure. Her senses heightened with every brush of their bodies. She inhaled deeply, trying to clear her head, and breathed in his scent, rich with aged leather and the tangy, yeasty fragrance of beer.