Serving the Billionaire (6 page)

“But not
naked
naked,” Sophia said.

“Fine.
Half
-naked. It’s basically the same thing. And I’m not sure...” I realized that I had unconsciously raised my hands to hover in mid-air near my breasts, as if I were covering myself. I quickly curled them around my pint glass instead, and took another sip of my beer.

“You’re shy!” Sadie exclaimed, sounding delighted. “Haven’t you even let a man look at your tits?”

I hadn’t, but I didn’t want her to know that. “It’s different,” I said. “There are so many people, and the dancers, and I—they’ll all be
looking
at me. Whatever, stop laughing! Would
you
do it?”

“In a heartbeat,” Sadie said. “Are you kidding me? So what if you’re embarrassed? Do a few shots beforehand and you’ll quit caring. Regan. Babe. It’s
five thousand dollars
.”

And that was the bottom line, really. It was more money than I could justify walking away from. Everyone had a price, and I’d just learned mine.

I thought about it later that night, riding the subway home to Brooklyn: what, exactly, Mr. Sutton wanted from me, and how much he would be willing to pay to get it. Where would I draw the line? At what point would the money no longer be worth it to me?

I didn’t have an answer.

When I arrived at the club the next evening, Beth came over to me and said, “You’ve got a man looking for you.”

My heart leaped. “Do you know who?”

Beth shrugged. “Don’t know his name. He was here with Mr. Venkatesan the other evening—you remember. White guy, blue eyes. He said he wanted to
talk
to you.” She formed air quotes around the work “talk.”

God. It was definitely Mr. Sutton. “He’s still here?”

“Yeah. Room 4.” She gave me a narrow-eyed look. “You be careful. These rich men are trouble. Don’t let him push you into doing anything you don’t want to do.”

She walked off before I could respond. I took a deep breath and went to room 4, to see what Mr. Sutton wanted to say to me. Or do.

He was standing beside one of the sofas, reading something on his phone, but he looked up when I opened the door. I wondered if I would ever get used to him looking at me. Meeting his gaze felt like touching a live wire: devastating, electric. “Regan,” he said.

“Beth said you were looking for me,” I said. He looked incredible—he’d taken off his suit jacket, and his crisp white dress shirt was rolled up to his elbows, revealing his tanned forearms. With one layer stripped off, he looked more approachable, like someone I could actually talk to or get to know, instead of a mysterious business mogul.

“I was indeed,” he said. “You’ve considered my proposition?”

What a way to put it:
proposition
. It sounded oily. Like some sort of under-handed deal. “I thought about it, yeah.”

He raised his eyebrows. “And?”

“What is it that you want me to do?” I asked. “Walk around with my shirt off? There has to be something else.”

“I don’t get the impression that you would allow anything more,” he said. His mouth quirked in a way that was becoming familiar to me. He was amused, or—rueful? “I’ll try to explain. These are business gatherings, of a sort. Tedious. My companions are interested in things that don’t particularly interest me. So I’d like to have an aesthetically appealing distraction, to keep me somewhat entertained.”

“And that’s me,” I said. An aesthetic distraction. What kind of weird person had business meetings at a
strip club
? Was that something rich people did on a routine basis? Nothing about Carter Sutton made any sense to me. I could smell his cologne even from where I was standing, several feet away, and it made me feel light-headed. I hated that he had such an effect on me; it made me feel helpless, like I had no control over myself. Like I wouldn’t be able to tell him no.

“Yes,” he said. “My guests won’t touch you, or harass you in any way. You presence will be for my enjoyment alone.”

He was kidding himself if he thought those other dudes wouldn’t look at me at all, but I wasn’t about to say that to him. “You want to look at my breasts while I serve you drinks, and that’s it,” I said. I wanted to be absolutely sure that we were on the same page. No unexpected late-night gropings. Not that I would be opposed to it, necessarily. I just wanted to know that it was coming.

“That’s it,” he said. “And I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”

I looked at him. He was so good-looking, and so absurdly rich. He could have any woman he wanted, any socialite, any actress, anyone at all who appealed to him. He would just have to look in her direction and she would come running. I couldn’t figure out why he would
spend money
to have
me
, some working-class nobody, stroll around topless for a few hours. What did he get out of it that he couldn’t get elsewhere?

It had to be some sort of kinky sex thing. Maybe he was in a long-distance relationship and could only get his jollies vicariously. Maybe he’d had his heart broken, and was too deeply wounded to let another women close. That sounded like the plot of a bad romance novel, though; not like real life.

Maybe he just liked feeling powerful.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

He smiled. “Good. Tomorrow night, then.”

I went back out into the main room, feeling a little like I’d been bulldozed. Mr. Sutton had such a forceful personality that even being in the same room with him was exhausting. I’d never experienced that kind of personal charisma before. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with wealth or power, because none of the other clients made me feel like that. Only Carter.

Not Carter. Mr. Sutton. I had to maintain some sort of distance.

Otherwise I was going to lose myself completely.

I waited tables in a daze, but managed not to completely screw up anyone’s order. Beth was still limiting me to two, and keeping a close eye on my every move, but at the end of the night, she said, “You’re getting there. I’ll move you up to three tables, next time. Don’t turn away so quick after you take their orders. You want to linger a bit, like it’s hard for you to tear yourself away.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. Beth was a nit-picking micro-manager, and I was more grateful for her advice than I knew how to convey. I listened carefully to everything she told me and took detailed mental notes. By now I was sure that she was the best waitress in the club, and I was determined to learn everything from her that I could.

I made close to a thousand dollars in tips that night. Every night at the club was like Christmas, and I was like a kid with so many presents I didn’t know what to play with first. I stuffed the money under my mattress, where it would stay safe until I had a chance to deposit it, and slept soundly and without dreaming for ten hours.

When I arrived at the club the next afternoon, Mr. Sutton was waiting for me in room 4, just as he’d done the first time I served for him. He was wearing gray wool slacks and—a change from his usual shirt and suit jacket—a navy blue shawl-collar cardigan. I wanted to touch it to see if it felt as soft as it looked. Groping Mr. Sutton’s chest would be a side benefit.

He looked up from his phone when I came in, and said, “Bring five bottles of the usual whiskey. I doubt we’ll need that much, but I don’t want you leaving this room once my guests have arrived.”

He certainly knew how to cut to the chase, and that answered a question I’d been afraid to ask. If he’d expected me to go out to the bar half-naked, I would have done it, but I wouldn’t have been happy about it. “What time do you expect your guests?” I asked.

He glanced at his phone. “I told them 5:00, which means that Johansson will be half an hour early, and the rest of them will be half an hour late. You have time.”

I went out to the bar and brought in the bottles of Scotch that Mr. Sutton had asked for, along with several pitchers of water and enough glasses to go around. When I came in for the last time, to set out drinking glasses and napkins, Mr. Sutton set his phone aside and beckoned to me.

Suddenly nervous, I went to the couch he was sitting on and stopped just short of his bent knees. “Is there anything else you’d like me to bring?” I asked.

“No, you’ve taken care of everything,” he said. He gazed up at me, unspeaking, and I got even more nervous. His eyes seemed to stare straight through me. I wanted to drop my gaze before he searched out all of my embarrassing secrets, everything I’d tried to hard to conceal from other people or simply to forget.

Desperate to break the charged silence, I said, “I could bring some more water, or—”

“No,” he said, cutting me off. He looked at me for a few more long moments, while I did my best not to fidget. Then he said, “Unbutton your shirt.”

I swallowed. I knew, intellectually, that at some point I would have to undress, but I hadn’t expected it to happen like this, with me standing in front of him, exposed, and him staring up at me so calmly, like he told girls to take off their shirts every day of the week.

Maybe he did, for all I knew.

I raised my shaking hands and undid the first button on my shirt. The soft lapels fell aside to expose my collarbone. I glanced up, shy and embarrassed, and met Mr. Sutton’s gaze. He was still staring at me intently.

I undid the second button, and the silk draped out of the way to reveal the black lace of my bra. It was a new purchase, one that I’d made with Mr. Sutton in mind. I’d stood in the changing room and decided that he seemed like the type of man who liked lacy lingerie. The color, too, had been a conscious choice: he wouldn’t like red, I thought. Too obvious.

Judging from the way his pupils dilated slightly when he saw my bra, I’d made the right decision.

I realized that I was aroused. At first, the discovery was almost academic, as I noted my quickened breathing, hard nipples, and throbbing pussy. That lasted for only a second, though, before I was overwhelmed both by lust and by what it meant. I liked having Mr. Sutton look at me. I liked the implicit humiliation of the situation: him cool and in control, sitting down, fully dressed; and me exposed, subservient, taking off my clothes for a man I knew almost nothing about.

And I
wanted
it. I wanted him to humiliate me. I wanted to beg.

Learning new things about yourself is always unpleasant, mainly because you don’t learn
good
things. Nobody suddenly figures out that they’re beautiful or witty or awesome at giving compliments. If you’re beautiful, people
tell
you. It’s not a surprise. But if you’re ugly, people are so careful to never mention your appearance at all that you might go years before you’re struck with the sudden knowledge that something’s wrong with your face.

I felt like that: like some passer-by on the street called me a nasty word, and I went home and stared at myself in the mirror and realized that it was true, that I was hideous. It wasn’t
normal
to think about the things that I was thinking about. Sex was supposed to be white sheets and rose petals, long kisses, sweet caresses. Not this, broken open inside a high-class strip club.

All of this passed through my mind in the few seconds it took me to lower my hands to the third button of my shirt.

Mr. Sutton reached out and touched my hip, carefully, with just the tips of his fingers. “Slow down,” he said. “There’s no rush. I want to look at you.”

That was the problem: I wanted him to look at me, and I didn’t
want
to want it. Maybe if I hurried to get my shirt off, I wouldn’t have to time to focus on how much I was enjoying the whole situation

But it wasn’t up to me. Mr. Sutton was paying me. I had to do whatever he wanted.

I shivered, thinking about all of the things he could make me do. I would do them. Anything, whatever he wanted, or close enough.

I slowed down. I’d seen one of the dancers giving a customer a striptease, just the night before, and I tried to imitate the things that she had done. I slid the third button halfway out of the hole, and then looked at him from beneath lowered eyelids, my hair falling over my face like a curtain. I bit my lip.

It seemed to work. Mr. Sutton exhaled through his nose and let his thighs spread apart slightly. I glanced down at his lap and noticed a bulge in his trousers. It occurred to me, for the first time, that I wasn’t the only one aroused by my performance. Mr. Sutton was turned on, too—maybe just as turned on as I was.

Well,
obviously
, I told myself. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. He was paying me to take my clothes off for him. He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t find me appealing.

But knowing that, rationally, was wholly different from seeing the undeniable proof of his desire for me. Mr. Sutton
wanted
me.

My skin felt hot, like the chandelier overhead was the mid-summer sun. My pussy throbbed steadily, and I could feel my panties growing damp. He hadn’t even touched me, and I was already slicking myself wanting him.

I exhaled and undid another button.

With the final button, the two halves of my shirt parted fully, hanging loosely at my sides and exposing my bra and my flat, brown stomach. I fought the urge to cover myself with my hands, and instead pulled my shoulders back, shook my hair out of my face, and stood as tall and proud as I could. Inside, I was terrified and confused, but outside I was Sadie, and Mr. Sutton could look all he wanted.

My nipples were rock-hard, and I was sure they were protruding through the thin lace of my bra. I watched Mr. Sutton’s face as his gaze raked over my exposed body. His blue eyes were dark with arousal, the pupils blown huge. Nobody had ever wanted me like this.

It was a good feeling.

“Take off your bra,” Mr. Sutton said. His voice was deeper than usual, and had a ragged edge to it that sent a shiver up my spine.

I reached behind myself to unhook the clasp of my bra, and slowly drew the straps down my shoulders, taking care to keep the cups in place, covering my breasts. Then, finally, I let the bra slide away down my body. I caught one strap in my fingers and tossed the bra onto the back of the couch, beside Mr. Sutton.